Thick Space: Approaches to Metropolitanism [1. Aufl.] 9783839420430

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Thick Space: Approaches to Metropolitanism
SECTION 1: CONFLICTING CONCEPTS
Metropolises: History, Concepts, Methodologies
Deconstructing “Metropolis:” Critical Reflections on a European Concept
Explanans vs. Explanandum, Freedom vs. Cohesion: The Conceptual Structure of Urban Sociology
The Significance of the Metropolis
Metropolitan Research from a Transatlantic Perspective: Differences, Similarities, and Conceptual Diffusion
SECTION 2: ENVIRONMENTS AND IMAGINATIONS
History, Theory, and the Metropolis
An Endless Flow of Machines to Serve the City: Infrastructural Assemblages and the Quest for the Metropolis
Planning Modernism: Growing the Organic City in the 20th Century
Layered Landscapes: Parks and Gardens in the Metropolis
SECTION 3: SOCIAL SPACES OF METROPOLITAN CULTURE
Berlin Street Life: Scenes and Scenarios
Metropolis in Transformation: Cinematic Topologies of Urban Space
Women and the Modern Metropolis
The Street-Prison Symbiosis: Urban Segregation and Popular Black Fiction in 21st Century America
Urban Ethnicity, World City, and the Hookah: The Potential of Thick-Thin Descriptions in Urban Anthropology
The Global, Imperial Metropolis: Ideas from 1873 Berlin
Contributors

Citation preview

Dorothee Brantz, Sasha Disko, Georg Wagner-Kyora (eds.) Thick Space

Dorothee Brantz, Sasha Disko, Georg Wagner-Kyora (eds.)

Thick Space Approaches to Metropolitanism

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de

© 2012 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover concept: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Typeset by Sasha Disko Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar ISBN 978-3-8376-2043-6

Global distribution outside Germany, Austria and Switzerland:

Transaction Publishers Rutgers University 35 Berrue Circle Piscataway, NJ 08854

Tel.: (732) 445-2280 Fax: (732) 445-3138 for orders (U.S. only): toll free 888-999-6778

Contents

Acknowledgements | 7 Thick Space: Approaches to Metropolitanism

Dorothee Brantz, Sasha Disko, and Georg Wagner-Kyora | 9

S ECTION 1: CONFLICTING CONCEPTS Metropolises: History, Concepts, Methodologies Heinz Reif | 31 Deconstructing “Metropolis:” Critical Reflections on a European Concept Ignacio Farías and Susanne Stemmler | 49 Explanans vs. Explanandum, Freedom vs. Cohesion: The Conceptual Structure of Urban Sociology Jan Kemper | 67 The Significance of the Metropolis Richard Rodger | 85 Metropolitan Research from a Transatlantic Perspective: Differences, Similarities, and Conceptual Diffusion

Margit Mayer | 105

S ECTION 2: E NVIRONMENTS AND IMAGINATIONS History, Theory, and the Metropolis Thomas Bender | 125 An Endless Flow of Machines to Serve the City: Infrastructural Assemblages and the Quest for the Metropolis

Stefan Höhne | 141 Planning Modernism: th Growing the Organic City in the 20 Century

Harold L. Platt | 165

Layered Landscapes: Parks and Gardens in the Metropolis

Sonja Dümpelmann | 213

S ECTION 3: S OCIAL SPACES OF METROPOLITAN CULTURE Berlin Street Life: Scenes and Scenarios Wolfgang Kaschuba | 239 Metropolis in Transformation: Cinematic Topologies of Urban Space

Laura Frahm | 257 Women and the Modern Metropolis

Despina Stratigakos | 279 The Street-Prison Symbiosis: Urban Segregation and Popular Black Fiction in 21 st Century America Kristina Graaff | 307 Urban Ethnicity, World City, and the Hookah: The Potential of Thick-Thin Descriptions in Urban Anthropology Alexa Färber | 333 The Global, Imperial Metropolis: Ideas from 1873 Berlin Tim Opitz | 357 Contributors | 379

Acknowledgements

This volume originated with a series of working papers developed during the first round of the DFG-funded Transatlantic Graduate Research Program (TGK) “Berlin – New York: History and Culture of the Metropolis in the 20th Century” from 2005-2007, located at the Center for Metropolitan Studies, Berlin.1 During the second round of TGK, from 2008-2011, the idea for this edited volume emerged and we greatly found new members of the TGK, both fellows and members of the advisory board, who were willing to submit original essays for this volume. Furthermore, we were fortunate to be able to win a number of other scholars to provide essays from the perspective of their distinct field of expertise. We would thus like to thank all the members and affiliated scholars for their helpful comments, as well as our colleagues and students at the Center for Metropolitan Studies for their input. Our particular thanks belong to Eyke Vonderau and Lisa Vollmer, whose research and formatting assistance was indispensable at many stages during this long process of bringing the volume to publication. We would also like to thank Pamela Selwyn and Sandra Lustig for their translations of several essays that appear in this volume. Our special gratitude also goes to Elisabeth Asche for her excellent help with the logistics and financial aspects of this project and to our copy-editors, Jessica Dorrance and Ray Daniels, who did tremendous job whipping this volume into shape. We would also like to thank Birgit Klöpfer from Transcript Verlag for her help in preparing the manuscript. Finally, we would of course like to thank all of the authors for the time and effort they took in providing their contributions to this volume.

  1

Earlier versions of the essays by Heinz Reif, Ignacio Farías and Susanne Stemmler, Margit Mayer and Thomas Bender in this volume were originally published in a Working Paper Series, which is available at www.metropolitanstudies.de (CMS Working Paper Series)





Thick Space: Approaches to Metropolitanism D OROTHEE B RANTZ , S ASHA D ISKO , AND G EORG W AGNER -K YORA

I.

A “M ETROPOLITAN T URN ”?

It is hard these days to ignore the growing buzz about metropoles. Urban marketing agencies from Berlin to Shanghai, and countless others in between, proclaim cities as spaces where diversity is celebrated, global mindedness is a prerequisite, and where opportunity and innovation supposedly reign supreme.1 Designated as “metropolitan,” these cities are no longer regarded as clearly identifiable geographical places, but rather as boundless spaces positioned in ever more complex networks of urban relations. Such networks link cities not only to their hinterlands but also to sites all over the globe, both virtual and real. As might be expected, marketing campaigns invoke the terms “metropolis” and “metropolitan” to convey positive images of urban living.2 Such marketing campaigns, however, generate idealized images that aim to promote the city as a profitable product to urban consumers—investors, managers, tourists, and, to some extent, its inhabitants. Thus, these images, for the most part, have little to do with the actuality of everyday urban life. Most notably, the inherent frictions

  1

Miriam Greenberg, Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World (New York: 2008); Claire Colomb, Staging the New Berlin: Place Marketing and the Politics of Urban Reinvention Post-1989 (London: 2011); Stephen V. Ward, Selling Places: The Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities 1850–2000 (London: 1998); Thomas Biskup and Marc Schalenberg, eds., Selling Berlin. Imagebildung und Stadtmarketing von der preußischen Residenzstadt bis zur Bundeshauptstadt (Stuttgart: 2008).

2

See, for example, the “Be Berlin” campaign at “be Berlin – Die Hauptstadtkampagne,” 2011, www.sei-berlin.de.

10 | D OROTHEE B RANTZ / S ASHA D ISKO / G EORG W AGNER -K YORA

generated by the diversity of urban life styles and inequalities in life standards are played down, if not purposefully ignored in the glossy brochures produced by such marketing agencies. On the flipside of the buzz, academics have also been adding their voices to discourses surrounding the metropolis and metropolitanism. In recent years, several research centers devoted explicitly to metropolitan studies have emerged in different parts of the world.3 These centers conduct interdisciplinary research on all aspects of metropolitan existence.4 In contrast to urban marketing campaigns, their work focuses primarily on the contradictions and conflicts arising out of such multilayered and diversified urban constellations. Moreover, their studies tend to operate on a number of temporal and geographical levels, bringing together historical, contemporary, and future-oriented perspectives that grapple with metropolitan questions from the local to the global scale. Pursuing much broader and more nuanced research agendas, these centers for metropolitan studies provide a necessary counter-tenor to the celebratory tone generated by urban marketing campaigns. Situated somewhere in between academic institutes and marketing agencies, urban think tanks produce specific know-how often in the form of strategy-oriented planning for metropolitan policymakers and their corporate equivalents. Curiously, though, despite the widespread use of “metropolis” and “metropolitan,” these concepts continue to defy easy definition. Take, for example, Georg Simmel’s pioneering work from 1903, translated into English as The Metropolis and Mental Life, which has become of the foundational texts of metropolitan studies on both sides of the Atlantic. In the original German version, Simmel actually never employed the term “metropolis,” instead he simply referred to the Großstadt, or big city.5 Perhaps this questionable rendering of

  3

Examples for such research centers and programs in the United States are the Metropolitan Studies Program at New York University, the Program in Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California at Berkeley; in Canada, the City Institute at York University in Toronto; in Germany, the Center for Metropolitan Studies and the Georg Simmel Zentrum für Metropolenforschung in Berlin; and in Brazil, the Center for Metropolitan Studies in São Paulo.

4

This interdisciplinarity covers a broad spectrum of disciplines ranging from applied fields such as architecture and urban planning to the social sciences (geography, sociology, anthropology) and the humanities (history, cultural studies, literature).

5

Georg Simmel, “Die Großstadt und das Geistesleben,” in Die Großstadt. Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung, ed. Theodore Petermann (Dresden: 1903), 185–

T HICK S PACE

| 11

Großstadt as “metropolis” in English translations is symptomatic of the lack of clarity regarding the modern concept of “metropolis,” a problem that the authors in the first part of this volume address. In looking for other texts that could provide a conceptual basis of what constitutes a “metropolis,” the lacuna between critical analyses of the concept and the non-reflexive use of the word “metropolis” looms ever larger. Some urban scholars, who recognize this difficulty, have even stopped using the term.6 Such refusals, however, do nothing to stem the flood of the use of the term. The word “metropolis” continues to be both evocative and broadly invoked, both in urban marketing strategies and popular parlance as well as in academic discourse. Reflecting on the growing dominance of the word “metropolis,” Susanne Stemmler and Ignacio Farías ask in their contribution to our collection if “we are witnessing a metropolitan turn in our understanding of the city and the urban and what this could mean.” 7 A “metropolis”—at least within the German academic context—is often understood as a space that allegedly produces, sui generis, a sort of “surplus value,” especially when viewed in comparison to other types of cities.8 At the same time, the term “metropolis” is also persistently employed in ways that suggest that it is interchangeable with “city” or “urban;” as if all three words carried the same meaning. Or put differently, the characteristic qualities of urbanism—“density,” “population size,” and “heterogeneity,” to cite Louis Wirth’s classic criteria—could all, without much hesitation, be the defining aspects applied to each of the three terms.9 The question, however, remains that if a metropolis is both a city and urban, is it indeed something more? And, if so, how and why? The essays collected in this volume seek to address these questions and many more. As the field of metropolitan studies developed in the exchange between

    206. It was first translated into English in 1950 as “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. Kurt Wolff (New York: 1950): 409–24. 6

See for example Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cam-

7

See their essay in this volume, 51.

8

Dirk Bronger, Metropolen, Megastädte, Global Cities. Die Metropolisierung der Erde

bridge: 2002).

(Darmstadt: 2004); Alex Rühle, ed., Megacitys. Über die Zukunft der Städte (Munich: 2008); Wolfgang Schwentker, ed., Megastädte im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: 2006); Theo Barker and Anthony Sutcliffe, eds., Megalopolis: The Giant City in History (New York: 1993). 9

Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” The American Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (1938): 1–24.

12 | D OROTHEE B RANTZ / S ASHA D ISKO / G EORG W AGNER -K YORA

disciplines and has been a privileged site for advancing interdisciplinary approaches, the essays gathered in this volume reflect the heterogeneous composition of metropolitan studies, including scholars anchored in the disciplines of history, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and urban planning. Each of the authors, some more explicitly than others, offer their individual insights into debates about the conceptual salience and value of the terms “metropolis” and “metropolitan.” They ask questions such as: What have these terms meant in different disciplinary and cross-disciplinary contexts and how have their usages changed over time? Which other concepts have been used and can be used to understand metropolitan phenomena and in what ways do they depart from conventional analyses of urban space and urban society? Moreover, how did these ideas differ according to the historical and geographical contexts in which they emerged? Margit Mayer’s essay on transatlantic approaches to the concept of “metropolitan space” presents a good example of this type of probing by exploring how and why the term “metropolitan” is utilized quite differently in German and North American discourses. Thus, providing critical reflections on the concept of the “metropolis” is the central intention of this volume, which can be read as a debate between the authors about the heuristic value of the concept. While, ultimately, it will be up to the reader to decide whether or not it makes sense to consider a metropolis as a distinct urban manifestation, taken together and read against each other, we hope that the essays will open up new venues for thinking about the concept of the “metropolis” and its myriad relations to urban phenomena. Through their exploration of the conceptual parameters, environmental embeddedness, and sociocultural manifestations of urban spaces designated as “metropoles,” we believe these essays here offer insights into many of the fields of inquiry that make up metropolitan studies today. In turning now to the still evolving concepts of “metropolitanism” and “thick space,” we hope to provide the reader a better understanding of our reasoning behind this volume and to support the calls for an analytically driven use of the term “metropolis.”

II. T OWARD “M ETROPOLITANISM ”? The lack of precision in the use of “metropolis” and “metropolitan” is clearly compounded by its tangled and complicated relationship to other terms such as

T HICK S PACE

| 13

“urban” and “city.”10 “Cosmopolitanism,” another term that attained a prominent status in recent decades, is often implicitly associated with the metropolis and used synonymously with “metropolitanism.”11 David Harvey recently remarked that: “[Cosmopolitanism] has acquired so many nuances and meanings as to make it impossible to identify any central current of thinking and theorizing, apart from a generalized opposition to the supposed parochialisms that derive from extreme alliances to nation, race, ethnicity, and religious identity.”12 This resistance toward the parochialisms of nation, race, ethnicity, or any other purportedly irredeemable category sounds very close to characteristics attributed to the inhabitants of the modern metropolis. Particularly pernicious, however, is that behind such cosmopolitan or metropolitan penchants for diversity lies the assumption that both would be either immune to or simply beyond communitarian politics, which again undermines the very real conflicts at the core of urban societies. Recently, a group of urban scholars introduced the term “metropolitanism” as a way of expanding existing approaches to understanding the category of the urban.13 In their introduction to Toward a New Metropolitanism (2006), Günter Lenz, Friedrich Ulfers, and Antje Dallmann propose “metropolitanism” as a new concept for analyzing urban agency in relation to the material, cultural, social, and political processes that constitute daily practices in a metropolis. They no longer conceive of metropoles as unified entities but rather as distinct spaces to live out “urban cultures of difference.”14 However, they regard this culture of difference as a primarily contemporary phenomenon and as an expression of a

  10 In fact, our own attempts at conceptual stringency were undermined by the lack of consensus around these terms. For example, both “metropoles” and “metropolises” are accepted plurals for the term “metropolis.” Although a case can be made for using only the one or the other, we have decided to allow both accepted plurals to stand in this volume. In this introduction, we have consistently used “metropoles” as we see it as more adequately describing the characteristic relationality of the “metropolis.” 11 See, for example, Günter H. Lenz, Friedrich Ulfers, and Antje Dallmann, eds., Toward a New Metropolitanism: Reconstituting Public Culture, Urban Citizenship, and the Multicultural Imaginary in New York and Berlin (Heidelberg: 2006). 12 David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: 2009), 78. A general critique of the term “cosmopolitan” can be found in Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: 2005). 13 Lenz et al., Toward a New Metropolitanism. 14 Ibid., 19. See also Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: 1990).

14 | D OROTHEE B RANTZ / S ASHA D ISKO / G EORG W AGNER -K YORA

postmodern, post-Fordist urbanism driven by cosmopolitan ideals, global market relations, and multicultural imaginaries. While they acknowledge the historical nature of these developments, they tend to draw a sharp divide between the history of the modern metropolis and the “new metropolitanism” of present-day world cities. Central to their concept of such a “new metropolitanism” is a concern for the reconstitution of urban spaces, both private and public, as locales of multiethnic and multicultural political participation in an era when the nationstate and notions of national citizenship are increasingly postulated as being challenged by global economic and social transformations.15 If, however, the still-evolving concept of “metropolitanism” is extended and viewed not so much as a postmodern phenomenon but rather as a modern affect, then it must be shot through with the manifold contradictions inherent in the condition of modernity. Thus, by invoking a more historically driven perspective of the concept of metropolitanism, we can hopefully avoid falling into the trap of a postmodern rhetoric of a progressive trajectory of emancipation through evergreater levels of hybridity and cosmopolitan difference/indifference. Metropolitanism—following the definition proposed by Lenz, Ulfers, and Dallmann—can well be the expression of both the atmosphere of proximate anonymity and “elective affinities,” as well as of the enmeshed infrastructural and social webs clustered in urban areas that are so constitutive of their topography and sociography.16 In our view, however, metropolitanism must also emphasize the constitutive centrality of the production and reproduction of contradictions and inequalities when analyzing historical continuities and moments of rupture within metropolitan formations. Thus conceived, metropolitanism can serve as a way of analyzing the historical and the present-day metropolis both as the locus of dreams and desires for associational freedom and as a site where the exploitative unfreedom of the wage-labor market and the exclusion of the private property market structure determine the social and spatial organization of the metropolis. In other words, metropolitanism simultaneously produces spaces of liberation through indifference and spaces of oppression through metropolitan differentiation. Anthropologist Robert Rotenberg, in his 2001 essay “Metropolitanism and the Transformation of Urban Space in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Metropoles,” provides a historically grounded definition of “metropolitanism” in terms of the production of urban space and society in nineteenth-century London,

  15 Lenz et al., Toward a New Metropolitanism, 11–37; especially 11–23. 16 Ibid., see in particular the essays by Richard Sennett, “Capitalism and the City” and Thomas Bender, “The New Metropolitanism and a Pluralized Public.”

T HICK S PACE

| 15

Paris, and Vienna.17 His definition of metropolitanism is close to our own concerns: “Metropolitanism was dependent on capital from a colonial economy and transformed urban space by pushing back the jural boundaries while at the same time creating new social boundaries within it.”18 Pointing out that “the present efforts at reshaping urban social organization and urban institutions through transnational processes are not new,” Rotenberg makes a strong case that nineteenth-century metropolitanism was a predominantly white, bourgeois, as well as male project.19 Following Henri Lefebvre’s tripartite analysis of the production of space, he thus frames metropolitanism as the expression of bourgeois claimmaking over “representational spaces.”20 Citing factors such as colonialism, schooling, and the literacy and consumer revolutions that fueled the nineteenthcentury remaking of London, Paris, and Vienna, Rotenberg argues that metropolitanism “reshaped the city to fit the imagined possibilities of the bourgeoisie.”21 His framework, however, plays down conflict. As the middle class remakes the metropole in its image, the rest of the inhabitants are portrayed as passive “coresidents and provincials [who] could merely look and desire.”22 While we have a great deal of sympathy for Rotenberg’s framing of metropolitanism, we deviate from his perspective in the emphasis we place on conflict and struggle as coconstitutive of metropolitanism, historically and in the present day. Both sides— the freedoms and the coercions—are integral to our conception of metropolitanism, as are the contradictions, conflicts, and struggles that underlay and continue to underlie them.

III. “T HICK S PACE ”? Perhaps in thinking through metropolitanism as “thick space,” as we have titled this volume, we can achieve more insight into the production and reproduction of the inherent contradictions of metropolitanism, as well as into possible ana-

  17 Robert L. Rotenberg, “Metropolitanism and the Transformation of Urban Space in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Metropoles,” American Anthropologist 103, no. 1 (2001): 7–15. 18 Ibid., 7. 19 Ibid., 7–9. 20 See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: 1992). 21 Rotenberg, “Metropolitanism,” 9–11. 22 Ibid., 11.

16 | D OROTHEE B RANTZ / S ASHA D ISKO / G EORG W AGNER -K YORA

lytic approaches for framing socio-spatial complexities. In invoking the concept of “thick space,” it is first necessary to set “thickness” in relation to the concept of “density,” which, of course, has a long history in the disciplines associated with urban studies, and which holds a privileged place in analyses of the relationship between social and spatial components. In his detailed discursive analysis, Nikolai Roskamm has recently shown how the use of “density” was subject to ideological vagaries within urban studies in Germany at specific moments during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.23 What Roskamm argues is that “density,” despite its construction as a “potentially calculable metaphor,” is not a substantive concept.24 Instead, it is relational and contextual, meaning that it, like all categories of social description, carries implicit and explicit connotations depending on the context in which it is invoked.25 By employing “thickness” instead of “density,” we hope to flag the problematic causal and normative uses of “density” within urban studies, while still acknowledging its conceptual centrality to analyses of the metropolis. Jan Kemper, in his contribution to this volume, reminds us that it is the responsibility of the analyst to reflexively investigate how meaning is constituted. Thus, rather than employing the concept of “density,” we would like to propose analyzing metropolitanism as “thick space.” Clifford Geertz’s concepts of “thick and thin description” as ethnographic praxis can be seen as points of departure for our analytic approach. His assertion that “thick description” has the potential to open up an interpretive level that can first “grasp” and then “render” “a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit,” is certainly applicable to the study of variegated social spaces such as the metropolis.26 While Geertz’s insights present one way to frame metropolitanism as “thick space,” spatial analyses, many of them grounded in a critical geography approach, have become increasingly central for researchers from a variety of disciplines in providing a critical conceptualization of urban processes. Highlighting the importance of spatial dynamics and their social nature allows not only for greater interdisciplinary exchange, it also opens up inquiries into how social processes were and are written into urban space, which, in turn, broaden

  23 Nikolai Roskamm, Dichte. Eine transdisziplinäre Dekonstruktion. Diskurse zu Stadt und Raum (Bielefeld: 2011). 24 Ibid., 9–12. 25 Ibid., 9–12. 26 Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: 1973), 10.

T HICK S PACE

| 17

and deepen our perspectives for comprehending social change over time. Moreover, we are interested in analyzing metropolitan space in all of its facets. For example, Stefan Höhne in his essay on urban underground systems included here, points out that infrastructures are central actors in the “assemblage” of what becomes designated as “metropolitan.” In a similar vein, in her essay, Sonja Dümpelmann demonstrates that historical debates about the significance of urban green spaces underscore the complexity of metropolitan spatial relations. Going even further, Harold Platt reveals how the “organic city” was a constitutive element in twentieth-century discourses about architecture and urban planning on both sides of the Atlantic. Hence, what these essays all show is that the “thick spaces” of metropolitanism consist of urban assemblages that might give rise to other types of conflicts and contradictions, namely between the human and non-human aspects of urban living. To further clarify our use of “thick space,” we must also spell out that, much like Geertz, we are not arguing for the privileging of “thick” over “thin” in terms of the appropriate approach or level to analyzing metropolitanism.27 Instead, we insist on a critical theory perspective that posits metropolitan space as a relational category that is both material and abstract. The importance of approaching metropolitanism from both a thick and a thin perspective becomes apparent in Jane Jacobs’ description of the irreducibility of cities, claiming that they “happen to be problems in organized complexity.”28 If the concept of metropolitanism is to be of use to urban scholars, it must be able to handle a socio-spatial dynamic that appears to be impossible to grasp in all its facets. Thus, it cannot repudiate the abstract and the analytical that would represent the thin space of the metropolis, as Alexa Färber argues in her essay on hookahs and the construction of urban ethnicity in present-day Berlin. The term “thick space,” as it was initially invoked in 2001 by literary scholar Terry Harpold in analyzing the graphical user interfaces of computer games, denotes “actual embodied encounters” which are “persistently impermeable, resistant,” unlike “thin space.”29 In this sense, metropolitanism as “thick space” encompasses the frenetic yet rhythmic temporalities and the palimpsestic spatial consistencies as well as the “actual embodied encounters” that make up the actuality of everyday life in the metropolis. Feminist geographer Doreen Mass-

  27 Geertz, “Thick Description,” 29. 28 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: 1961), 433. 29 Terry Harpold, “Thick and Thin: Direct Manipulation and the Spatial Regimes of Human-Computer Interaction,” in Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2001 (New York: 2001), 78–79.

18 | D OROTHEE B RANTZ / S ASHA D ISKO / G EORG W AGNER -K YORA

ey’s works on “place” bear analogies to our conception of metropolitanism as “thick space.” For example, she posits, that “if it is now recognized that people have multiple identities, then the same point can be made in relation to places. Moreover, such multiple identities can either be a source of richness or a source of conflict, or both.”30 Metropolitan space is simultaneously interwoven and overlaid with linked networks that refuse to be defined exclusively as social or material or cultural or any other category. And it constitutes a ductile yet structured and structuring meshwork of difference and unequal power relations. For example, Despina Stratigakos in this volume uses various “thick descriptions” of architectural plans and photographs to demonstrate how women in imperial Berlin forged a “powerful female collective” and carved out “spaces of their own,” while at the same time being denied formal citizenship rights, foregrounding the “contested creation of the modern metropolis.”31 Aspects such as these could fall to the wayside if metropolitanism were conceived of solely from a presentist perspective that insisted on discreet categories rather than looking for the historical circumstances of their intertwinement. Building on the idea of the texture of intertwinement, a defining characteristic of a historically framed concept of metropolitanism as “thick space” would be its tensility. This tensility is always almost on the verge of being overwrought by daily frictions and fractions, but is something that evinces strength through its flexibility. It could be asked, thus, how do metropolitan spaces obtain this type of tensility, and under what kind of stress and at what points does this flexible strength start breaking down? Can it be and how it is repaired? Symbolic spaces —an aspect that Laura Frahm addresses in her essay on the transformative filmic spatiality of the metropolis and that Wolfgang Kaschuba refers to in his reading of the photographer Willy Römer’s oeuvre of Berlin street life in the first decades of the twentieth century—could represent a key site for the maintenance and restoration of the tensile quality of metropolitanism as “thick space.” The “imaginary” of a city should not be seen as the opposite of the “real city,” as anthropologist Ralf Lindner points out in his contribution to Toward a New Metropolitanism, rather “one could say the imaginary ‘deepens’ reality, gives substance to reality in a specific way. […] The lived nourishes, authentifies [sic] certain mythologies and these in return, give consistence to the lived.”32

  30 Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” in Space, Place, Gender (Minneapolis, MN: 2001), 153. 31 See Stratigakos in this volume, 306. 32 Ralf Lindner, “The Imaginary of the City,” in Toward a New Metropolitanism, Lenz et al., eds., 210–11.

T HICK S PACE

| 19

On the one hand, the metropolis as a symbolic space could thus resemble an allegorical tapestry spun from quasi-magical threads seemingly capable of infinite repatterning. Containing a surfeit of meanings in an elaborate and sometimes exuberant mélange of the sacred and the profane, the mixture of conservative and radical elements sometimes bubbles over to reconfigure the tapestry anew—though never completely. On the other hand, if metropolitanism as “thick space” also represents intertwined bundles of interrelated processes that create a thick complexity, and which in turn feed off of a city’s heterogeneity and diversity, then perhaps it becomes more evident that one of the most important distinguishing characteristics of the metropolis and metropolitan areas, including their symbolic spaces, is precisely the existence of real social unevenness, the propensity for all sorts of forms of social tension and the manifold mechanisms developed to contain social conflict and maintain social order. For example, Kristina Graaff’s interdisciplinary reading of the contemporary African-American genre of “street literature,” explores the production of a “street-prison symbiosis” as both a symbolic and material space within the metropolis, demonstrating the interdependent relationship between the state space of the prison and the quasi-anarchic space of the street. She argues that urban racial segregation in the US has a long history that can be traced back to the slave trade as a form of global forced migration, and that these patterns are produced and reproduced in the cultural imaginary and inscribed in the lived spaces of the metropolis. Thus, what needs to be stressed again in this context is that the “thick space” of metropoles never emerged independently or outside of the global relations in which they evolved. In earlier teleological accounts of the development of human society, conceived from a Western and/or Transatlantic/Eurocentric perspective, the ideological rhetoric of civilization—the erection of modern cities being one of its hallmarks—was used to construct hierarchies between places and people. Alongside Farías and Stemmler’s essay already mentioned above, Richard Rodger’s contribution to this volume points to how, through framing itself as a metropole, London positioned itself relationally towards the rest of England, Great Britain and the world. All over Europe in the nineteenth century, through constructing such an asymmetrical relations through imperial violence and civilizational ideology, imperial nation states initiated a new phase in the process of uneven spatial development that was also embedded in the understanding of what constitutes a metropolis, a point historian Tim Opitz also makes

20 | D OROTHEE B RANTZ / S ASHA D ISKO / G EORG W AGNER -K YORA

in his essay here on imperial late-comer Germany and its first backwater, then rising star capital city Berlin.33 This core-periphery perspective dominated modernization theory as well as subsequent searches for “civil society,” and it is perpetuated in many different analytic frameworks, including a good deal of the “European Cities” literature.34 What is more, such geopolitical narrow-mindedness is also reflected in the different inflections in value given to the terms used to describe massive urban conglomerations today: metropolis, global city, megacity. In this construct, a notion of quality is placed above sheer quantity, qualifying only certain types of cities as “metropoles,” which in turn marks their exemplary and foundational status in a hierarchy of cities on a global scale. As addressed in the opening section of this introduction, in the argot of many a city-marketing guru, “metropolis” is the shorthand for a unique, singular, authentic, to-be-envied city that others strive to emulate but never can. The very fact that city-marketing agencies are so keen to employ the term “metropolis” not only to confer a city with a certain flair but also to increase its heft in the global competition between cities should make

  33 A recently growing field of research is aiming to rectify these omissions. See the pioneering work of Felix Driver and David Gilbert, eds., Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester: 1999), as well as Liora Bigon, A History of Urban Planning in Two West African Colonial Capitals: Residential Segregation in British Lagos and French Dakar (1850–1930) (New York: 2009); Jennifer Ann Boittin, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (Lincoln, NE: 2010); Zeynep Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule (Berkeley: 1997); Edhem Eldem, The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul (Cambridge: 2008); Jonothan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven: 1999); Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism, (Chicago: 1991); Roger Keil, “Empire and the Global City,” in Studies in Political Economy 79 (2007): 167–92; Derek Keene, “Cities and Empire,” in Journal of Urban History 32, no. 1 (2005): 8–21; Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper (Berkeley: 1997), 1– 56. 34 See, for example, Stephen Kotkin and Jan Gross, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (New York: 2009), 7; Sean Chabot and Jan Willem Duyvendak, “Globalization and Transnational Diffusion between Social Movements,” Theory and Society 31, no. 6 (2002): 699–701.

T HICK S PACE

| 21

quite legible how underlying and historically grounded chauvinisms and hierarchies continue to haunt the term. Highlighting the ineluctable connection between the word “metropolis” and the spacio-political construct of the colony and its metropole, however, does not necessitate doing away with the term “metropolis.” Instead, we believe that only a perspective that openly recognizes the hierarchical inequalities so constitutive of the concept can hope to provide an adequate analysis of its historical dimensions and its current salience. Accordingly, and this follows our understanding of metropolitanism as thick space, what is arguably more relevant than the supposed singularity of any one metropolis are the connections that exist between them and beyond them, in the ways that they create order through time, space, and difference, and in how they produce this specific metropolitan networking around the globe.35 Thus, at the same time that we invoke the concept of “metropolitanism” as a networked relationship between metropolitan spaces, we also emphatically reject the idea of globalization as producing homogenization in the sense of a smoothing over of social and spatial inequality. Indeed, numerous urban scholars have demonstrated how geographical unevenness is endemic to modern societies from the classical period of industrialization to the ongoing and multidimensional impacts of neoliberal restructuring on spatial arrangements since the 1970s.36 For

  35 Manuel Castells, The Rise of Network Society (Oxford: 1996); Waltraud Kokot, ed., Port Cities as Areas of Transition: Ethnographic Perspectives (Bielefeld: 2008); Lars Amenda and Malte Fuhrmann, eds., Hafenstädte. Mobilität, Migration, Globalisierung, special issue, Comparativ 17, no. 2 (2007); Carola Hein, ed., Port Cities: Dynamic Landscapes and Global Networks (London: 2011). For comparative studies see: Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (Cambridge: 2008); Peter Alter, ed., Im Banne der Metropolen. Berlin und London in den zwanziger Jahren (Göttingen: 1993); Thomas Bender and Carl Schorske, Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation, 1870–1930 (New York: 1994); Hans Bock and Ilja Mieck, eds., Berlin – Paris, 1900–1933 (Berlin: 2005); Gerhard Brunn and Jürgen Reulecke, Metropolis Berlin. Berlin als deutsche Hauptstadt im Vergleich europäischer Hauptstädte 1871– 1939 (Bonn: 1992); and Donald Olsen, The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna (New Haven: 1986). 36 See, for example, Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: 2001); Ibid., Planet of Slums (London: 2006); Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (London: 1991).

22 | D OROTHEE B RANTZ / S ASHA D ISKO / G EORG W AGNER -K YORA

example, as Neil Brenner argues elsewhere, “precisely as interconnections among dispersed spaces around the globe are thickened, geographical differences are becoming more rather than less profound, at once in everyday life and in the operation of social, political, and economic power.”37 Offering a variety of analytic approaches to understanding these interconnections alongside the internal dynamics is central to our intention in this volume. Through taking seriously the materialized discourse of the metropolis—both in terms of historical and current processes and the conflicts and contradictions produced in such processes—this volume seeks to open up new perspectives on the contested concept of the metropolis from an interdisciplinary perspective. Indeed, given the relentless march of the urban through history, especially over the past two centuries and in light of the immensity of its significance today, the circumstances of metropolitan developments demand and deserve sustained and critical scholarly attention.

IV. T HE E SSAYS The first part of this volume addresses the history of the concept, and theories and methods for approaching “the metropolis” from a number of vantage points that, at times, reads as a debate between the authors. Our collection opens with an essay by Heinz Reif, who offers a concise introduction of how the concept of “metropolis” has been used by urban scholars, especially by historians, over time and which characteristics distinguish it from other types of cities. Focusing particularly on the positive attributes that have been associated with metropolitan growth, Reif maintains that the magnetism certain metropoles exude stems from a “surplus” of cultural and economic diversity as well as productivity, which generated and generates countless real and imagined opportunities, but which also gave rise to deep-seated inequalities and repeated strife during the twentieth century. Questioning what they call a “metropolitan turn” in urban studies, Ignacio Farías and Susanne Stemmler present a critical reflection on the inflationary usage of the term “metropolis” and what this means in terms of the relationship between its historical development and its current usage, both in academic discourses as well as by city-marketing agencies. In light of the fact that the histor-

  37 Neil Brenner, “A Thousand Leaves: Notes on the Geographies of Uneven Spatial Development,” in The New Political Economy of Scale, ed. Roger Keil and Rianne Mahon (Vancouver, BC: 2009), 27.

T HICK S PACE

| 23

ical development of the term indicates its inexorable connection to asymmetrical relationships and colonial hierarchies, they argue for its deconstruction and insist that only a reflexive understanding can further our analysis while maintaining a critical potential. Exploring this problem from a different register, Jan Kemper provides the reader with a structural outline for evaluating how cities have been and are studied within the discipline of urban sociology. Kemper argues that analyzing how sociological discourses, from Simmel to “New Urban Sociology,” are framed—whether as “an independent explanatory variable or a dependent variable,” as “freedom or cohesion”—can help us to understand how “meaning is constituted around the metropolis” and can enable us to reflect more broadly on social realities and social change. Richard Rodger’s essay first traces the origins and then meticulously charts long-term trends in the usage of the terms “metropolis” and “metropolitan” in various English-speaking catalogues. Through analyzing the fluctuations in the frequency of references, he is thus able to provide clues to how conjunctures in the English-language usage of these terms were tied to political decisions and social transformations, and can often be traced to concrete developments, often administrative, within London as well as in London’s shifting relationship to other cities and regions over the past six centuries. Concluding this section of the volume is Margit Mayer’s essay that examines the varying uses of the terms “metropolis” and “metropolitan” in German and North American academic and public debates. Through a more critical understanding of the nuances of these concepts, she hopes to retain them as analytically useful categories for urban research and for political debates about the contemporary problems and potentials of today’s metropolitan regions. The second section of this volume turns to the interplay of human and nonhuman factors in the historical creation of metropolitan spaces, which has been the purview of urban environmental historians.38 However, in recent years, the

  38 Christoph Bernhardt and Genevieve Massard-Guilbaud, eds., The Modern Demon: Pollution in Urban and Industrial European Societies (Clemont-Ferrand: 2002); Dorothee Brantz, “The Natural Space of Modernity: A Transatlantic Perspective on (Urban) Environmental History,” in Historians and Nature: Comparative Approaches to Environmental History, ed. Ursula Lehmkuhl and Hermann Wellenreuther (Oxford: 2007), 195–225; Martin Melosi, “The Place of the City in Environmental History,” Environmental History Review 17 (1993): 1–23; Ibid., Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment (College Station, TX: 1981); Ibid., The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore:

24 | D OROTHEE B RANTZ / S ASHA D ISKO / G EORG W AGNER -K YORA

materiality of urban environments and their impact on social processes has also gained prominence in cultural studies and urban history more generally. The concept of “urban assemblages,” in particular, has challenged traditional notions of how urban transformations occur.39 Thomas Bender, in his contribution to the current volume, explores the explanatory value of such assemblages. Examining the analytical potential of Actor-Network Theory, particularly in terms of studying the impacts of infrastructures on the layout of metropolitan life, he makes a plea for the centrality of urban history, the need to reconceptualize urban space and to rethink the categories of actors and agency. Stefan Höhne’s essay very concretely reflects upon the agency of such assemblages by looking at the history of urban infrastructures and their impact on the formation of metropolitan practices and identities. Providing a historiographical and theoretical overview of the use of “infrastructures” in urban studies, Höhne argues for a closer examination of the, in his words, “machinic aspects” of urban materiality. He maintains that in order to understand the complexities of urban systems, we need to pay attention to the power configurations that arise through the interconnectedness of natural, political, and sociocultural orders and disruptions. Harold Platt then takes us on a tour de force through the history of urban planning in the twentieth century. He demonstrates that conceptions of the “organic city” have been at the core of urban-planning concerns on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the twentieth century even though the meaning of “organic” has shifted considerably. He insists that we must include an “ecological perspective” if we hope to understand the different ways of seeing urban places and spaces. In the final contribution to this section, Sonja Dümpelmann focuses on the reciprocal relationship between urban green spaces and metropolitan growth during the past two centuries. Uncovering the palimpsest of transatlantic metropolitan ecosystems, Dümpelmann examines a broad range of gardens and parks to show how such green areas mirrored more general metropolitan contestations over the use of public and private spaces, social and material conditions, as well as contemporary and historical attitudes toward the commemoration of national identity.

    2000); Harold Platt, Shock Cities (Stuttgart: 1997); Joel Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, OH: 1996). 39 Ignacio Farías and Thomas Bender, eds., Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies (London: 2009).

T HICK S PACE

| 25

The third section of this book covers well-trodden terrain in the discipline of metropolitan studies by exploring social and symbolic manifestations of urban spaces. In investigating aspects of the social space of the metropolis, several of the authors point to the specificity of metropolitan space as being one that allows for the recognition and the accommodation of difference, an argument that follows the definition of “metropolitanism” as proposed by Lenz, Ulfers, and Dallmann. In questioning metropolitan processes through a broader understanding of their cultural materiality, however, this revisiting of the grounds of the cultural and symbolic production of the metropolis also presents challenges and at times surpasses older analyses and analytic approaches, and, having benefited from the interdisciplinarity of metropolitan studies, points to new avenues for undertaking metropolitan research. In the first essay in this section, Wolfgang Kaschuba reflects on the construction of Berlin as a metropolis around the turn of the twentieth century through the lens of Willy Römer’s photographs and the writings of Römer’s contemporaries such as Franz Hessel and Martin Andersen Nexö. Through such tableaus of “urban scenes and sights,” we can “read the streets” and recognize “types and dramatizations” of the metropolis, much of its dynamic being drawn from its rapid growth through immigration and migration and the visibility of both social inequality and conflict. In her essay, on the filmic production of the thick spatiality of the metropolis, Laura Frahm explores early cinematic “city symphonies” and their more recent successors, such as Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003). She argues that cinematic symphonic cities are “not only crucial in visualizing and amplifying the spatial thickness of the metropolis, they also actively participate in the process of multiplying its symbolic layers.” Thus, the symphonic city is “based on a transformative spatiality,” one that always “always resonates a trace of movement,” and that, while transforming its spatiality, simultaneously reveals a “metropolis in transformation.” Reading the architectural history of late-imperial Berlin against the grain, Despina Stratigakos reevaluates the construction—physical, social, and imaginary—of the metropolis through the lens of gender. Analyzing guidebooks and buildings designed by women, but also applying “thick description” to a series of photographs and snapshots, she traces women’s interventions into the built environment of Berlin. Through employing a specific architectural language that met their agenda of staking a place for women within the modern metropolis (of course, women of a certain class and race—bourgeois and white respectively), Stratigakos argues that these women created “spaces of their own” within impe-

26 | D OROTHEE B RANTZ / S ASHA D ISKO / G EORG W AGNER -K YORA

rial Berlin and asserted “a vision of the German capital that embraced their feminine modernity.” Moving forward in time to the beginning of the twenty-first century and traveling across the Atlantic to the metropolitan areas of the East Coast of the United States and New York in particular, Kristina Graaff analyzes the relatively new popular black genre of street literature. Employing the genre as a key to investigating the production of a material and narrative “street-prison symbiosis” within the social and symbolic structure of the metropolis, she argues that the genre and its protagonists, both literary and real, provide at once evidence of the interpenetration and interdependency between “a more dislocated, fragmented, and abandoned space” of “the streets” and the regimented state space of the prison, and can be read as “a response to urban segregation processes in twentyfirst-century America.” Returning to Berlin but remaining in the twenty-first century, Alexa Färber presents a “cultural analysis of a consumption landscape that is grounded translocally and has evolved around the water pipe,” as a means of evaluating the usefulness of thick versus thin approaches for analyzing such a metropolitan phenomenon. If the primary questions about “urban ethnicity” revolve around the production of difference, Färber argues that it is then necessary to look for mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion within the “thick metropolis.” As relying solely on “thick description” could serve to obfuscate macrolevels of social and economic practices that contribute to the production of urban ethnicity, she advocates a “thick-thin” approach. The final essay in this volume takes us back to the production of the imperial metropolis of Berlin, exploring how it was staged as the capital city of an empire that could compete with other global empires. Probing the erection of Berlin’s Siegessäule (or Victory Monument in English) that was raised in celebration of the Prussian victory over France in 1870–1871 and of the founding of the German Empire, Tim Opitz suggests that much of the symbolism embedded both in the materiality of the monument itself as well as in the ceremonial festivities around it foreshadows the entrance of imperial Germany as a colonial empire in the years to come. Critiquing histories of this event that only look to it as a symbol of the new nation-state, Opitz instead contends that the very founding of the nation-state of Germany was predicated on the impulse for imperial expansion, situating the metropolis in its complicated relationship between the nation-state and the world.

T HICK S PACE

| 27

V. C ONCLUDING R EMARKS All in all, the essays gathered in this volume posit a broad range of questions and offer many new insights regarding the conceptual viability of the metropolis and metropolitanism. We do not, however, purport that this volume provides definitive answers to these questions, but rather see this volume as contributing to an ongoing and evolving debate. Furthermore, we are fully aware that numerous important aspects have not been adequately addressed here. For example, given that this volume arose out of discussions held within a transatlantic research network focused primarily on Berlin and New York as exemplary twentiethcentury metropoles, the essays in this volume, for the most part, reflect this concentration to the exclusion of other metropoles, most notably those of the Global South. Indeed, in order to decenter traditional metropolitan discourses and also to critically reevaluate the impact of colonial and postcolonial urban ideologies, non-Western perspectives deserve much more attention than they have been given here. Our own collective research is also moving in that direction. In a new international graduate research program, “The City in the World: Metropolitanism and Globalization from the Nineteenth Century to the Present,” we are turning our focus to the global dimensions of metropolitan developments in order to examine how individual metropoles could only gain predominance through their often exploitative engagement with other parts of the world. Through fostering and engaging in this type of research we hope to contribute to the writing of a new and too long neglected chapter in the field of interdisciplinary metropolitan studies.



Section 1: Conflicting Concepts



Metropolises: History, Concepts, Methodologies H EINZ R EIF

I. Everyone seems to be talking about the metropolis, that fascinating and most prominently special case of the urban, as even a brief bit of research, especially on the Internet, reveals.1 Faced with the wave of logos that newly founded agencies and companies are using to harness the associative force of this term nowadays, one wonders which new words and compound words will enrich the semantic field of metropolis this time? What comes after the metro underground railway around 1900, the Metropole as the big-city cinema par excellence of the 1920s, and the Metro shopping centers since the consumer wave of the 1960s and 1970s? The concept of the “metropolis” has led a rather modest existence thus far among scholars, in striking contrast to its numerous boom phases in societal discourse. The eight-volume standard work on historical concepts, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1972–1997), mentions the word only twice. “Metropolis,” as editor Reinhard Koselleck noted laconically, is a loanword in German.2 Günter Hartfiel and Karl-Heinz Hillmann’s 1982 Wörterbuch der Soziologie (Dictionary of Sociology) offers the awkward and vague explanation, “As a rule, metropolises exhibit a culturally specific urbanity.” Consulting their definition of urbanity, one learns that this is a “way of life characteristic of the city.”3 Arriv-

  1

Editors’ note: A Google search in 2012 of the terms “metropolis” and “metropolitan”

2

Reinhardt Koselleck et al., eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart: 1972–1997).

3

Günter Hartfiel and Karl-Heinz Hillmann, Wörterbuch der Soziologie (Stuttgart:

resulted in a combined sum of over 350,000,000 hits.

1982).



32 | H EINZ R EIF

ing at the entry for “city,” one not only discovers that the term “metropolis” has disappeared, but also, depending on the lexicon, it encounters a plethora of diverse definitions, down to the sociologist Klaus Kuhn’s sobering finding that, “It is impossible to overlook nowadays that the unity of the ‘city’ as a research topic can only be asserted, but not proven.”4 Of course, previous attempts to clarify the concept of the “metropolis” have not been quite as hopeless as I suggest here. It seems appropriate to me, however, to draw attention to the enormous complexity and openness of this research topic—which at the moment is more of a research field. This openness stands in contrast to the certainty with which some scholars of urban studies use the term today, in most cases without feeling any need whatsoever to attempt a definition. Surveying the stock of definitions of “metropolis” that we have gathered thus far, and making a loose and largely cumulative summary of the wealth of previous findings from theoretical and empirical metropolitan studies, one arrives at the following set of, in part quantifiable and in part qualitative, thus only partially measurable, characteristics:5 • Metropolises are cities with “enormously” large, highly diverse populations

that coexist in extreme spatial density. Around 1900, what is known in German as a Millionenstadt, that is, a city with over a million inhabitants, attained this status; nowadays, the bar is a good deal higher—a city needs three, five, or even ten million people to qualify. • Metropolises are sites of structural wealth in material and cultural resources. Because of the high concentration of people and capital, more is possible here than elsewhere. Metropolises develop their own material urban forms, which are guided by concepts of order and represent patterns of order. For example, dominant, manifest, representative architecture: the skylines that largely shape our perceptions of the city. Complex, technologically extremely elaborate

  4

Klaus Kuhm, “Raum als Medium gesellschaftlicher Kommunikation,” Soziale Syst-

5

On this, see the following, among others: Ursula Keller, ed., Perspektiven metro-

eme 6, no. 2 (2000): 321–48. politaner Kultur (Frankfurt/M.: 2000); Gotthard Fuchs, ed., Mythos Metropole (Frankfurt/M.: 1995); Karl Schwarz, ed., Die Zukunft der Metropolen (Berlin: 1987); Thomas Steinfeld and Heidrun Suhr, eds., In der Großen Stadt (Frankfurt/M.: 1990); Hartmut Häussermann and Walter Siebel, eds., New York (Frankfurt/M.: 1993); Ortrud Gutjahr et al., eds., Attraktion Großstadt um 1900 (Berlin: 2001); Hans Bock and Ilja Mieck, eds, Berlin–Paris 1900–1933 (Berlin: 2005); Dirk Matejewski, ed., Metropolen (Frankfurt/M.: 2000).



M ETROPOLISES | 33

infrastructures and thoroughly differentiated, diverse public spaces: streets, squares, parks, landscapes of artworks and monuments. Because of the high costs of producing them, most of these elements of metropolitan space— underground transport systems, skyscrapers, large-scale sporting and entertainment complexes, international airports, and many other venues—can only be financed and amortized here. • A metropolis is a place that concentrates all of the forces and attention of its extensive environs, a prominent intersection of activities, decisions, and service offerings. It is a place that makes a wide range of information and news available. It is frequently the seat of government and a gathering point of national and international power and highly qualified elites—a place where elite and mass culture meet. In short, in social science parlance, a metropolis is a site of the highest national and international political, economic and, above all, (high) cultural centrality. • The metropolis has always been the preferred destination of migration, and thus a site of highly intensified ethnic, social, and cultural diversity. It thrives on encounters and confrontations with the “alien,” and is open to new things decidedly cosmopolitan in outlook, but, above all, is a preferred setting for frictions and crises. • Because of their sheer size and high density, metropolises create more scope for action and living for individuals and groups, more possibilities for the social constitution and enforcement of social acceptance for minorities, more and genuinely metropolitan opportunities for success and failure, as well as inclusion and exclusion, and innovation and identification with tradition. According to a widely accepted understanding of the inside and outside perspectives, the multifunctional quality and diversity of metropolises creates an extra element that far outstrips the sum of urban sub-functions. It is this—rightly assumed—extra element that provides metropolitan studies, which is so strongly influenced nowadays by cultural history and cultural sociology, with (new?) perspectives and inspires the formation of hypotheses. At the moment, scholars are trying to zero in on this extra element with two premises, both of which are essentially grounded in the particular magnetism of the metropolis. Like the legendary magnetic mountain, the metropolis attracts people and goods, but above all a plethora of plausible, extreme, and mythical interpretations, meanings, hopes, and fears. People flock here from everywhere because the big city, with its variety, extreme divisions of labor, high density, gigantic, thus “fluid” and unpredictable, society, offers a wealth of new opportunities, above all, for career success. This aspect can be found in displays of prestige and



34 | H EINZ R EIF

lifestyle and escape from social control. It can also be found in a wide range of tasks of day-to-day living, in chances to form new groups and networks, in free zones, niches, and gaps in which to work on one’s individual self-awareness and hopeful life plans. This diversity of people from different geographical, ethnic, social, and cultural origins makes the metropolis a space of opportunity and possibility. The unusually strong flow of people—who, particularly in Europe, come from increasingly distant lands—is fed not just by material and social structures of opportunity, markets, and new spaces of communication and action. Equally important, if not more so, is the cultural magnetism of the metropolis. The wealth of meanings that the metropolis attracts over time is processed in permanent discourses, from both interior and exterior perspectives, into mindscapes of great plausibility. The inhabitants of metropolises derive a particular view of themselves from these discourses and a specific style of self-presentation, both of which are rooted in diffuse validity claims. Large cities are also considered metropolises because of their conspicuous tendency towards trans-metropolitan discourses (Paris–Berlin, Berlin– Moscow, Moscow–Vienna, Vienna–London, etc.), which serve the purposes of mutual recognition and affirmation of membership in the club of metropolises. Viewed as a whole, a more profound and complementary image of a capital city (in the broad sense of the word) emerges, which, in a process of permanent self-reflexivity, concentrates, balances, and unifies the material and intellectual, the innovative and traditional forces of the environs, the region, the nation and, ultimately, the world. It is this image that spawned the oft-cited metaphor of the “metropolis” as a “laboratory of progress”: an innovative site for developing, testing, and representing new, plural identities for social and cultural socialization. This is a socialization that radiates from the big-city dweller to influence other cities, the country, and the world. As this overview clearly shows, metropolises today are largely regarded as winners and models in the competitive process of modernization and—because of the innovative power attributed to them—as the focus of hopes for future development as well. They are expected to take advantage of the central currents of social change earlier than other cities or countries, for that matter. They are the “temporal pioneers,” the first to develop, practice, and implement not only new forms of work, leisure, family, and governance of domestic life, but also of everyday comportment. They are home to the latest forms of material and cultural trends. They are considered the central marketplaces of knowledge and information, sites of exemplary, up-to-date experience, innovative producers of orientational models and sophisticated ways of life, and reflections of the higher ambitions of their respective societies. They see themselves—and are seen—as



M ETROPOLISES | 35

“laboratories of progress” and thus seem to have a particularly close relationship with societal change. This is the basis for their claims to be pioneers and trendsetters and for their acceptance as such. This approach is an important motor of metropolitan studies at the moment, and it has yielded significant results. We should not forget the other side of the coin, however: the preconditions for this laboratory function are specific economic and urban spatial structures. If, for example, one presents the cultural construct of the metropolis as a site of acceleration and tempo, one should not neglect metropolitan transport, particularly the metro subway as a technologically highly complex and extremely capital-intensive mobility machine. Nor should one give short shrift to the complex processes of planning and construction, the efficiency and design quality of this machine, which made such patterns of interpretation possible and got it off the ground in the first place. In other words, without the specific materiality of the metropolis, it could not have been constructed as a potential space of acceleration. Moreover, even the famous nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European metropolises, as Christiane Eisenberg recently pointed out, were not consistent and permanent “laboratories of progress.”6 Instead, each had its temporally circumscribed and specific innovative boom periods: Paris, the city of the World’s Fairs, modern art, and pleasure in the nineteenth century; Vienna of the Belle Époque; the “Golden Twenties” in Berlin; the “Swinging Sixties” in London; and even the New York of pop culture and Andy Warhol are now far behind us. Perhaps every metropolis has only one era of innovation that is uniquely its own. Furthermore, if we follow Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees and consider the metropolis from a longue durée perspective, it soon becomes evident that metropolises have frequently fallen victim to social change.7 They lost their positions in the hierarchy of cities and experienced serious, repeated crises. Criticisms and predictions of decline thus form a constant component of any discourse on the metropolis, a finding, by the way, that the eager experts in metropolitan ranking confirm again today. This small objection to an all-too euphoric and culture-based image of the metropolis may suffice to justify the following questions: How did we arrive at this positive image of the metropolis? What hopes and norms, what confidence and what needs and ways of finding orientation went into it? Finally, what analytical premises, concepts and research conclusions of metropolitan studies

  6

Christiane Eisenberg, Die kulturelle Moderne (Hamburg: 2001).

7

Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000-1994, (Cambridge, MA: 1995).



36 | H EINZ R EIF

served as a basis for the high expectations of metropolises formulated here, both then and now?

II. Let us begin with a brief overview of the history of the term metropolis and a statistical review. In ancient Greece, the metropolis was the “mother city” that cast a net of colonial cities across the Mediterranean world. In the Christian Middle Ages, the term came to signify the seat of a bishop. In the early modern period, under the influence of new colonial expansion and nascent forms of a “global economy,” the centers of colonial world empires such as London, Amsterdam, and Paris adorned themselves with this honorific title. They were, after all, the victors in an already highly dynamic and international competition among cities.8 During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the imperial metropolises of Europe and North America attained new, unprecedented dimensions in both size and function. The population of London rose from 2.3 to 6.5 million, Paris rose from 1.3 to 3.3 million, Chicago rose from 405,000 to 1.7 million, and Berlin rose from 446,000 to 2.5 million inhabitants. According to a saying by Mark Twain, who was a tourist in Berlin in the late nineteenth century, within a few decades the city was transformed from Athens on the Spree to Chicago on the Spree. A strongly intensified sense of the urban emerged in the reflexive, discursive, and practical everyday confrontation with the plethora of novel, bigcity problems that ensued. The flood of literature on the metropolis, but also on the big city or world city, at the turn of the twentieth century was immense. My English colleague Richard Rodger has studied the titles of books purchased by the British Library at that time, looking for these urban keywords. He found that books dealing with “metropolitan topics” increased substantially in the period between 1800 and 2000.9 New tasks, especially the portrayal of the national and—as the World’s Fairs of the time impressively illustrate—“global society,” were assigned to the big city. New strategies of genuinely urban city planning and city life were sought out, tested, and developed in an international cultural transfer with the aim of tackling the new problems and imperial tasks at the

  8

For statistics that support the arguments made in this essay, see Heinz Reif, “Metropolen. Geschichte, Begriffe, Methoden,” CMS Working Paper Series 001 (2006), http://www.geschundkunstgesch.tu-berlin.de/uploads/media/001-2006_03.pdf.

9



See Richard Rodger’s essay in this volume.

M ETROPOLISES | 37

urban planning, political, social, and subjective levels. The productive capacities of the metropolises and their inhabitants, as well as their limits, were measured anew in the days of accelerated modernization. As for the internal problems of large cities that chiefly interest us here, social reformers, policy experts, artists, and notably journalists (who in the wake of the era’s media expansion quickly grew in self-confidence, professionalism, and numbers) took the first steps.10 Writers and artists translated their new metropolitan experiences—especially the acceleration, simultaneity, and nervous energy of big-city life—into modern, visual, narrative, and acoustic forms of representation and expression. Abandoning moralizing social reportage, journalists began early on to train an ethnographic eye on the “urban wilderness,” especially on the other, darker side of the metropolis. Largely forgotten today, philosophers of history and even self-proclaimed prophets probed Western heritage for the “laws of life” in regards to the metropolis and its metamorphosis, in search of a potential “new Rome” or “new Athens.” The metropolis became a subject worthy of literature and science. It would be hard to overestimate the pioneering efforts of these intellectuals of the urban for metropolitan studies then as now, although, thus far, they have been little studied. This period witnessed the emergence of the cultural constructs of the metropolis as a workshop or laboratory of modernity; as a well-oiled machine susceptible to Fordist, rationalizing control and an extreme division of labor; and as a bewildering, yet well-ordered and harmonious organism or ecological system. Rarely has the connection between the material city and the habitus of its people, the reciprocal relationship between the metropolis and its inhabitants, as well as between external and internal urbanization, been as clearly visible as in this period of accelerated upheavals in city planning and urban ways of life. Naturally, anti-modernist counter-visions also arose on the opposing side, especially in Germany: the metropolis was cast as a palace of Mammon, a Moloch, a jungle and swamp that poisoned migrants and visitors from the countryside, a “mass grave” of the once demographically, “racially” healthy—largely agrarian— nation.11 In the long term, the majority of scholars and scientists—sociologists, economists, psychologists, educators, public health physicians, engineers, and city planners—who soon dominated the discourse on the big city, did not allow themselves to be swayed by these fearful images. The new experiences of the

  10 On this and what follows, see the vividly written and informative overview by Rolf Lindner, Walks on the Wild Side (Frankfurt/M.: 2004). 11 See Clemens Zimmermann et al., eds., Die Stadt als Moloch? (Basel: 1999).



38 | H EINZ R EIF

city were explosive and unnerving but ultimately positive. In unprecedented fashion, the metropolises brought together the most diverse people of different ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds in large numbers and at close quarters, or more precisely, in a range of urban sub-spaces of the most varied kinds. Metropolises served as conduits of integration for people who had migrated from villages and small towns. They provided a stage for the drama of “learning to live in the big city,” as well as for redefinitions of the identities of individual, groups, and the metropolis as a whole in discourses, social practices, and ultimately in institutionalized, civil society decision-making processes as well. What constituted genuine metropolitan materiality, and even more specifically metropolitan ways of life, was continually being renegotiated. Along with people—migrants and tourists alike—new everyday practices, cultural codes, and ideas flowed into the big city and encountered the trends in lifestyles and behaviors that had been recently developed and established in the metropolises. The social fabric of these metropolises was under permanent stress during these decades. The coexistence of a number of ethnic groups and social milieus, lifestyles and behaviors, and individualistic types promoted the breakdown of traditions and conventions in everyday conduct. While this fostered a cosmopolitan openness toward the new, it also exacerbated exclusion, segregation, isolation, and aggression. In short, the big city became the stage and workshop for a tension-filled modern socialization process. Patterns of thought, behavior, and creativity that might lend meaning and relative stability to life in a rapidly changing industrial and nascent service society were developed, tested, and disseminated here. This new socialization could, but did not necessarily, succeed. The fundamental functions of urban coexistence were constantly threatened, and the risk of the disintegration of urban society, but also the dissolution of the personal integrity of the urbanite, was an ever-present danger in the densely populated and exuberantly expanding metropolises. This was the basis of the big city’s capacity to evoke fear. But it was also the grounds for its potential to fascinate. It was this situation around 1900 that gave rise to the fundamental guiding questions of metropolitan studies that remain relevant today: What holds big cities together when urban culture becomes fragmented? When social and ethnic contrasts increase to the point of polarization, and disadvantaged minorities are shunted off into troubled neighborhoods, while privileged minorities withdraw into ghettos of their own choosing? Which forces produce, organize, and plan metropolitan urban development and life in such difficult situations? Which urban contexts and milieus can be expected to innovate, and in which spatiotemporal configurations? What does the relationship between integration and separation, social homogeneity and difference, and innovation and tradition, look like



M ETROPOLISES | 39

in successful versus stagnating metropolises? What are (and were) the downsides of those metropolises with the highest levels of cultural dynamism and innovation? How can we make the developments and effects of new and different—in short, metropolitan—processes of integration and identity formation easier to observe, analyze, and interpret? In other words, which research approaches do the new phenomenon of the metropolis or “world city” require, and which scholarly disciplines are needed to meet the challenge?

III. Many older disciplines, but especially new ones not yet established at universities, have translated the experiences of the big city that culminated around 1900 into fruitful research approaches. I can only touch briefly on a few of the concepts developed at that time, beginning with the material metropolis, the architectural and spatial structure and infrastructure it offered its population. Particularly in Germany, an extraordinarily fast-growing discipline of urban planning devoted itself to this area. In the twentieth century, urban planning and urban development policy became two sides of the same coin. The 1984 monumental volume on the metropolis edited by Anthony Sutcliffe impressively illustrates the genesis of increasingly complex but also increasingly interventionist, rational, and Fordist urban planning caught between increasing and decreasing density, the creation of centers and rampant suburbanization, and the delimitation of public and private space.12 Meanwhile, a broad literature has described a large number of foundations, concepts, and instruments and particular urban issues. Above all, it has described the results of this kind of urban planning and its successes and failures. The twentieth century became the era of rapidly alternating urban planning models: the compact city, the more open green city, the satellite and commuter city, the strip city, the auto-friendly city, and the European city. Speaking polemically, because of excessively centralist notions of feasibility and a stubbornly progressive retreat from reality, the history of urban planning must be told as a systematic sequence and consequence of errors. Following Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Willy Hellpach’s urban ethnography, Johannes Tews’s urban pedagogy, Carl Sonnenschein’s urban pastoral, and many other yet-to-be-rediscovered proponents of the new discipline, a complementary variant of metropolitan studies is more focused on internal urbanization. It focuses on how the city shapes people and groups,

  12 Anthony Sutcliffe, ed., Metropolis, 1890–1940, (London: 1984).



40 | H EINZ R EIF

and it concentrates on the mentalities, habitus, and lifestyles of the urbanite as a particular type of person or, following the Chicago School of human ecology, on the integrative and innovative potential of the metropolis as a tapestry of ethnoculturally diverse living environments and milieus.13 What all of these scholars share is the metropolitan experience of extreme density, diversity, and difference, and the question of how metropolitan culture contributes to the integration of urban society and the personal integrity of the big-city dweller. In contrast, different priorities meant that the research paradigms of the German and American schools of metropolitan cultural history and sociology were quite different. Hartmut Häussermann has written vividly and aptly of Georg Simmel’s “cold big city,” contrasting it with Robert E. Park’s “big city of warm nests.”14 Simmel was mainly interested in the future of an educated, middle-class individual and a progressively higher level of culture. How could these values, he asked, be transmitted with a functionally extremely specialized, highly institutionalized urban society driven by market competition? How could the unthinkable and much-feared disintegration of the self into a plethora of fragmented roles and random egoisms be prevented? Through distance and indifference, Simmel answered. Accordingly, big-city dwellers developed their own specific habitus in order to defend their individuality against the bewildering, simultaneous, transient, and nerve-racking succession of the inner and outer impressions of urban life. Aloof, indifferent, and superficial, or to use Simmel’s core concept, “blasé” (but by no means tolerant per se), urbanites held the diversity and alien quality of the big-city world at bay to a certain extent. Paradoxically, however, this behavioral pattern allowed them to utilize this same urban condition, with its wealth of simultaneity and surprising stimuli, to heighten their own individuality. The experience of the density

  13 Georg Simmel, “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben,” in Die Großstadt. Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung. Jahrbuch der Gehe-Stiftung zu Dresden, ed. Theodor Petermann (Dresden: 1903); Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk (Frankfurt/M.: 1982); Willy Hellpach, Mensch und Volk der Großstadt (Stuttgart: 1952); Siegfried Kracauer, Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt/M.: 1977 [1927]) and Straßen in Berlin und anderswo, (Frankfurt/M.: 1964); Johannes Tews, Großstadtpädagogik (Leipzig: 1911). On the pastoral theologian Carl Sonnenschein, see Alfred Kumpf, Ein Leben für die Großstadt (Leipzig: 1980). 14 On this and what follows, see Hartmut Häussermann, “Die Stadt und die Stadtsoziologie. Urbane Lebensweise und die Integration des Fremden,” Berliner Journal für Soziologie 5, no. 1 (1995); Lindner, Walks; and Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology 44 (1938).



M ETROPOLISES | 41

and diversity of negative and positive stimuli in the big city in ever-closer proximity and greater inner aloofness produces an “intensification of nervous stimulation”—a new, dreamlike, intoxicating “impersonal” sensitivity and receptivity, the artistic, literary, and scholarly productivity of which is obvious to us today. We see this, for example, in the form of fin-de-siècle Vienna and the Berlin of the “Golden Twenties.” Willy Hellpach’s “vigilant big city dweller” and Walter Benjamin’s “flâneur”—an observer fascinated by the “spectacle of the crowd” in street life—conform to this line of interpretation. So does Siegfried Kracauer’s “mass ornament,” which ultimately returns to the subjectively “emancipated” urban individual’s aversion to anything “merely” individual, to the bourgeois subject’s suffering under the compulsion to present him or herself always and everywhere (in the plurality of urban lifestyles and self-portrayal strategies) as something “special.” Like his successors in the Chicago School, Simmel mainly addressed the public space at the center of the metropolises. The spatial, educated, middleclass bias of the “urbanity” Simmel identified, however, becomes obvious as soon as one tries to incorporate other groups and classes, especially workers and their own public spaces: pubs, back courtyards, colliery washhouses, factory gates, and so on. American urban sociology, despite proceeding from similar urban conditions and also being influenced by Simmel, developed a very different paradigm of metropolitan culture known as “human ecology.” When it came to the integrative achievements of the metropolis, Robert E. Park, Ernest Burgess, and their followers concentrated not on the psychostructure of Simmel’s “blasé” and bourgeois individual, but rather on the social, ethnic, and cultural integration of city dwellers in their group and class formations, and internally, above all, on increasing social and income security. City dwellers derived their orientation and their sense of security, however, in a typically American perspective that was very different from the Western European tradition, in which state investments in infrastructure and social policy played less of a role than the “communal benefits” provided by ethnic, social, or religious “communities,” which, much like biotopes, segregated themselves in “natural areas”—i.e., concentrated neighborhoods, of the big city. For the Chicago School, segregation in one’s own space rather than in Simmel’s aloofness and indifference were at the heart of metropolitan culture: “community” among the members of one’s own subculture, “society” (in the sense proposed by Ferdinand Tönnies) between the various segregated groups, as well as ethnicities and classes of the metropolis. The Chicago School thus produced a model of metropolitan culture as a mosaic composed of the sum of little biotopes that organized difference and formed community, or “urban villages,” whose relative mutual indifference ensured the



42 | H EINZ R EIF

integration of big-city society. Moreover its cross connections—through young people, social outsiders, and professional “boundary crossers”—also could bring forth innovations as well as tentative and initially weak new ties. The research on metropolitan communities and creative milieus that has been done following this basis, from Little Italy to the rap music scene, is massive by now—and not only in the United States. One need only recall the numerous studies of Italian, Polish, Jewish, Chinese, or German immigrant communities in American cities, or the more recent research on the metropolitan bohemian, yuppie, pop art, rap, or hip-hop milieus.

IV. The various approaches of metropolitan studies outlined above have been corrected and refined many times over the decades, but I do not have the space to elaborate on that here. Instead, I will jump to the present—to more recent trends in metropolitan studies. The great transformative processes of the twentieth century have all affected and changed big cities in particular. For example, the rise of mass and leisure culture; the development of the media and information society; the accelerated spread of cultural, ethnic, and social heterogeneity in the wake of new, global waves of migration and capitalist dynamism, and not least the secular demographic trends; rising life expectancy; falling birth and marriage rates; and high divorce rates. Prognoses on the economic potential, controllability, and future of metropolises have become more skeptical under these conditions. The great era of the European metropolis appears to be over. Perhaps the big cities overall have exhausted their innovative reserves. The successes of socalled metropolitan areas such as Silicon Valley or Lahore have nourished such doubts. In a period of economic development in which the significance of so-called “hard location factors” has dwindled in marked contrast to the industrial nineteenth century, and the processing of materials as a source of profits is in continual decline, the competition between cities has increased considerably. Internal and external perspectives on the metropolis and the politics of memory, history, symbols, and images were once largely orientated toward the production of identity and internal integration. Now, as so-called “soft location factors,” they aim just as dominantly toward advertising and equipping the big cities with institutions of high culture and entertainment—from museums, theatres, orchestras, and galleries to the “stimulating milieus” of restaurants, music clubs, bars, artists’ studios, and waterfront locations. Nowadays, nearly all cities have



M ETROPOLISES | 43

jumped on this bandwagon. It is clear, however, that the big cities once again have great advantages and a head start. Since the 1970s, this fixation on image politics seems to have detached itself more and more from the concrete cities and has become arbitrary. According to authors such as Werner Durth, Hartmut Häussermann, and Sharon Zukin,15 the only things that matter under the decrees of short-term city promotions are “selling places,” activating and disseminating readily communicable, effective, and multiple images of the city, and transforming urban public space into a privatized mosaic of “places of desire.” The production of “places of desire,” which are subject to private control mechanisms, is based on manufacturing artificial, marketable emotions and “atmospheres” through a relentless wave of festivals, events, and entertainment. Corresponding to this is the production of inward-directed models suggesting an urban society that no longer exists. What eroded and destroyed public space, the core of what had once been metropolitan integration and identity, was not, however, simply the tendency to sell places. Such image politics were designed by marketing experts within the framework of a ruthless and unscrupulous competition among cities for international investors. They appealed to members of the creative professions and to free-spending tourists and launched an offensive for the commercial appropriation of space. The idea of new media and information technologies transporting—in real time—the experiences and standards of urbanity into every private home everywhere within one country, and indeed throughout the world, has become a common way of describing the connectivity of a “global society” since the latter half of the twentieth century. According to this intensely discussed hypothesis, global interactive networks (as well as networks of networks) that reach into private spaces devalue metropolitan public space as a preferred site of encounter and communication. On the level of the material city, “urban sprawl”—the migration of inhabitants but also of shopping malls and logistics companies to the peripheries of ever-expanding cities whose traditional centers are abandoned for unchecked growth—is portrayed as having a similar effect. In the long run, according to pessimistic prognoses, what is left behind in the center is an ineffectual jumble of “gentrified” elite ghettoes and segregated residential milieus filled with the hopeless. This is opposed to a culturally heterogeneous mix that could have the potential to generate innovation and integration.

  15 Werner Durth, Die Inszenierung der Alterswelt (Braunschweig: 1977); Hartmut Häussermann and Walter Siebel, Neue Urbanität (Frankfurt/M.: 1987); Hartmut Häussermann and Walter Siebel, eds., Festivalisierung der Stadtpolitik (Opladen: 1993); Sharon Zukin, The Cultures of Cities (Cambridge, MA: 1995).



44 | H EINZ R EIF

Overall, the old metropolitan hierarchy of urban space is disintegrating. The North American trend towards so-called “metropolitan areas,” which has now arrived in Europe, produces a new, mosaic-like urban spatial structure that can no longer be understood using the categories of “center” and “periphery.” It demands a new terminology, not just for the space (Netzstadt [net city], Zwischenstadt [in-between city], but also for the new spatial effects that emerge from this urban settlement pattern.16 While these North American metropolitan areas and European metropolitan regions already present challenges that threaten to deprive the concept of metropolis that was developed for the great cities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of its analytical value, this is even truer of the rapid rise of the megacities, of large cities in quickly developing countries, but also in other Third World nations, whose populations have grown in recent decades to new, unheard of dimensions. Cities such as Shanghai, Mumbai, São Paulo, and Mexico City, for example, have expanded to 15, 20, or 25 million.17 Not only their sheer size, both in terms of population numbers and geographical expanse, but above all their “unheard-of” poverty levels (with up to 50 percent of the population living in slums) and income disparities, are based on completely different mechanisms from the metropolitan growth of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moreover, so-called “megacities” appear as an open rejection of the basic principles of the European-North American model of the metropolis: the ability to plan and control, the privileging of the center, the metropolis as a synonym for peak economic capacity, social progress, high cultural standards, and intellectual innovation. Does this mean that the European and northeast American metropolis, the model of the metropolis developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has lost its power as a model of social and cultural organization? Are its days as a popular export numbered? Will the metropolis go down in history as an exceptional case (temporally and spatially), relatively limited in scope and applicability? Will its sole remaining function, as predicted by Herrmann Lübbe, ultimately be to serve as a reservoir of memories, bodies of knowledge, and mu-

  16 See, for example, Thomas Sieverts, Zwischenstadt (Braunschweig: 1997); Klaus Brake et al., eds., Suburbanisierung in Deutschland (Opladen: 2001); and Informationen zur modernen Stadtgeschichte’s 2002 special issue on suburbanization. 17 For a summary and recent literature, see Dirk Bronger, Metropolen, Megastädte, Global Cities (Darmstadt: 2004).



M ETROPOLISES | 45

seum artifacts?18 Will Shanghai, Mumbai, and Nairobi rather than Paris, London, and New York therefore be the metropolises of the twenty-first century and the more distant future? Are the new urban integration patterns and socialization standards of the second, post-modern era, which could hold together the big cities and society more generally, developing beyond the transatlantic North? And what do these big cities represent, anyway—their nation, their continent, the world? Must we conceive of the future world according not to the yardstick of the metropolis, but instead to that of the new megacities? Must we learn from Nairobi, and if so, what aspects should we be paying attention to?19 In light of our problems of financing future urban services and infrastructures, perhaps it would be productive to look towards organizing patterns of the self-regulating informal economy in the burgeoning megacities of the Third World? Or are we exaggerating the crisis of the traditional metropolises? Do we see losses of capacity where there are in fact shifts of function and new structures of opportunity? Doesn’t the traditional model of the metropolis still offer resources that will continue to guarantee organizational and placement advantages in a future modern age—such as opportunities for participation, civil society dynamics, more room for the self-regulation of milieus, context effects, and so-called “contact advantages” (Fühlungsvorteile) derived from informal interaction dynamics not controlled by the market or the state? Does it not offer greater potentials for perception and attraction, and, not least of all, a richer, more “fluid” arsenal of motives for the international, “glocal” political and cultural reconstruction of the image of the metropolis? As in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the twenty-first century metropolis, too, seems to me to be capable of functioning as a “world city,” albeit in an altered and renewed form. A medium analogous to the nineteenth-century World’s Fairs, for example, which could serve to exhibit those resources it takes

  18 Hermann Lübbe, “Trends zivilisatorischer Evolution. Funktionsverlust der Metropolen,” in Von der Bonner zur Berliner Republik, ed. Deutscher Werk Bund Berlin e.V. (Bielefeld: 1998). 19 This was the provocative thesis of Edward Soja, a leading figure of the Los Angeles School in a lecture organized by the Transatlantic Post-Graduate Program Berlin–New York at the Technical University Berlin on May 16, 2006. His argument raises a number of questions such as why the demand for European urban planning is so intense and at times even excessive at the current moment among rising developing countries and so-called “tiger states” in particular? What is being exported, and with what arguments and motives? What images and expectations do the importers in these emergent third-world countries associate with such European, Western-style urban implants?



46 | H EINZ R EIF

into the future—cosmopolitanism, innovative capacity, self-reflection, plurality, heterogeneity, hybridity, and ambivalence—remains to be devised. We have good reason to be skeptical of all this talk of a crisis or even the end of the metropolis. Metropolitan studies is a lively, dynamic research field. Moreover, even in the century of megacities and a digital age driven by despatialization, we now have counter-theses to refute each of the above-mentioned prognoses of decline. For instance, on the limits of competition between cities and the escalation of urban image politics, on the return of the compact big city, on the obvious dynamism of reurbanization, the indispensability of core cities for agglomeration, and the trend to strengthen the centers. Thus far, analyses that look at the future role of so-called “global cities,” which John Friedmann and Saskia Sassen have been publishing since the early 1990s, have provided the first important theoretical framework and empirical evidence of a new, heightened importance of metropolises and a segment of the megacities in the developed countries of the Third World as the economic, cultural, and political hubs of a new, transnational European and global spatial context.20 The rapid dissolution of market boundaries weakens the nation state and, so the prognosis goes, mainly benefits the metropolises and metropolitan areas because of a variety of new location advantages, which include knowledge, communications, transport, financial capital, and so on. Global cities, sometimes also called “world cities,” are positioned within this new context as: loci of control in the global network of international flows of human beings, commodities, and capital; sites of high network density; and as gathering points for the control, command, and managerial elites of the global economy. According to one of the many current definitions, global cities are anchorage points that hold the global capitalist economy together.21 The research influenced by these theses has largely taken two paths. On the one hand, it focuses on changes in the economic, spatial, demographic, and social structures as well as in municipal politics in big cities affected by the economic processes of globalization to varying degrees. On the other hand, the em-

  20 Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy (London: 1994); John Friedmann, “The World City Hypothesis,” Development and Change 17 (1986); Manuel Castells, "European Cities, the Informational Society, and the Global Economy," in Understanding Amsterdam: Essays on Economic Vitality, City Life & Urban Form, ed. Léon Deben, et al. (Madrid: 1994). 21 J. R. Feagin and M. P. Smith, 1990, quoted in Bronger, Metropolen, 144. The English original is “Cities and the New International Division of Labour: An Overview,” in The Capitalist City, ed. Joe R. Feagin and Michael P. Smith (Oxford: 1987), 66–86.



M ETROPOLISES | 47

phasis in this research is placed on determining which cities belong and are players in the process. It is no wonder that an older version of metropolitan studies— city ranking—is enjoying a revival. As an example, the research results of a group of English scholars provide a ranking “based upon a model of world city network formation as a product of the location of global service firms.”22 In this ranking, German cities, however, do not exactly feature prominently. This ranking, like any other, is naturally highly problematic and flawed. Without doubt, however, it is bound to produce tangible effects. After all, such rankings significantly influence the decisions of state institutions and companies on infrastructural considerations and appropriations that have effects on the rescaling of individual cities. For this reason, at a time when the future development of our universities appears to depend on rankings developed by the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) and conducted by researchers at the Center for World-Class Universities of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Germans working in metropolitan studies should also pay closer attention to the ranking of metropolises undertaken mainly by economic geographers and carefully study the stereograms produced thus far, be they the “blue banana,” the “triangle,” the “pentagon,” or the latest creation, the “Anglo-Scandinavian sickle.”23 Researchers should take the old saying of Skat card players to heart: “Wer schreibt, der bleibt,” or, loosely translated into English, “Those who write it down stick around.”

Translated from German by Pamela Selwyn

  22 Peter J. Taylor, “European Cities in the World City Network,” in The European Metropolis 1920–2000, ed. Henk van Dijk (Rotterdam: 2003). 23 See, for example, the special issue on “Metropolräume” (metropolitan spaces) from IRS-aktuell 47 (2005). Also see Peter J. Taylor et al., eds., Global Urban Analysis: A Survey of Cities in Globalization (London: 2011).





Deconstructing “Metropolis”: Critical Reflections on a European Concept 1 I GNACIO F ARÍAS AND S USANNE S TEMMLER

I.

I NTRODUCTION

At least since the 1980s, and particularly in Germany and the wider European context, the concept of “metropolis” has gained importance and notoriety within urban discourse. Reproduced in the titles of books, conferences, seminars, articles, journals, newspapers, walking tours, magazines, and certainly at the core of the self-descriptions that many cities produce of themselves, the metropolis has become a key concept for transmitting a sense of economic resurgence, urbanity, new urban lifestyles, and a renewed city. Such a rise of the metropolis has been mainly associated with important transformation processes affecting contemporary cities, such as the rediscovery and even invention of the historical city,2 the festivalization of urban politics,3 the systematic production and marketing of city images,4 the rise of a symbolic economy of the city,5 the mise en

  1

The first version of this paper was written in 2005 on occasion of the launching of the Transatlantic Graduate Research Program “Berlin-New York: The History and Culture of Metropolis in the 20th Century.”

2

Florian Urban, Neo-Historical East Berlin: Architecture and Urban Design in the German Democratic Republic 1970–1990 (Farnham: 2009).

3

Hartmut Häußermann and Walter Siebel, New York. Strukturen einer Metropole (Frankfurt/M.: 1993).

4

Stephen Ward, Selling Places: The Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities

5

Sharon Zukin, The Cultures of Cities (London: 1996).

1850–2000 (London: 1998).



50 | I GNACIO F ARÍAS / S USANNE STEMMLER

scène and commercialization of urban culture,6 and so on. By presenting themselves as metropolises, cities seek to become more attractive for tourists, artists, creative and cultural industries, financial investors, and high-tech industries among others. As David Harvey,7 Sharon Zukin,8 Saskia Sassen,9 Richard Florida,10 and other urban researchers have shown, non-economic factors, such as cultural diversity, lifestyle, and flair have become decisive factors in systems of city competition, as criteria of localization of capital and people. Apart from this, through its description as a place of intense perceptions and concentrated life in general, as well as of challenges, the big city as a concept has been turned into a sentimental object.11 In such context, appealing to the metropolitan character of cities has become an almost obligatory dimension of every marketing campaign. Berlin since its reunification, for example, has been often designated as “the only German metropolis.” At the same time, as Margit Mayer points out, European cities, and particularly German cities, are increasingly acquiring the administrative status of a metropolis and developing marketing campaigns that make extensive use of the concept “metropolis.”12 Urban researchers in Germany have not disregarded this fact and a number of academic programs of urban studies are being launched, renamed, and promoted under the label of “metropolitan studies.” In our view, however, there is a lack of critical reflection on the meaning and use of these new buzzwords among practitioners and theorists of this “metropolitan turn.” Often it seems the noun “city” has simply been replaced by “metropolis” and the adjective “urban” by “metropolitan.” Apart from introducing these new words, business is conducted as usual and academic research continues focusing on urban issues and problems but not necessarily “metropolitan” ones. Indeed, as some programmatic papers on the field of metropolitan studies show, confusion still seems to reign when it comes to defining the speci-

  6

Michael Müller and Franz Dröge, Die ausgestellte Stadt. Zur Differenz von Ort und

7

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: 1989).

8

Zukin, Cultures of Cities.

9

Saskia Sassen, Metropolen des Weltmarktes. Die neue Rolle der Global Cities (Frank-

Raum (Gütersloh: 2005).

furt/M.: 1996). 10 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life (New York: 2002). 11 Thomas Steinfeld and Heidrun Suhr, “Vorwort,” in In der großen Stadt. Die Metropole als kulturtheoretische Kategorie (Frankfurt/M.: 1990), 7. 12 Margit Mayer, “Metropolitan Research in Transatlantic Perspective,” in this volume.



D ECONSTRUCTING “M ETROPOLIS ”

| 51

 ficity of the metropolis and its contemporary “return.” More concretely, an ethnocentric critic of the megacity, a metaphorical use of the concept “world city,” and the increasing amount of research on global cities are used as sufficient reasons to reassess the integrative capacity of the metropolis.13 If the latter is the case, and global cities are the metropolises of today, then why do we need to introduce this blurring concept of metropolis, if we already work with a clear definition of what a global city is? And if this is not the case and something different is meant with metropolis altogether, then where can we find the claimed “sufficient reasons” for this big return of the metropolis? We ask these questions, because we are convinced that conceptual clarity and conceptual economy are two important virtues for the production of academic knowledge and, certainly, for any typological classification of cities. Therefore, we must seriously ask ourselves whether—with this change in the vocabulary of the city—we are witnessing a metropolitan turn in our understanding of the city and the urban and what this could mean. Even when this metropolitan turn might be rhetorical—and even political, as Heinz Reif suggests at the end of his programmatic essay14—we still must identify what is so attractive about the concept of metropolis for it to become such a beloved notion for talking and thinking about contemporary cities, particularly in Germany and Europe, but also elsewhere. The classical answer to these questions argues that the concept of metropolis identifies a new urban phenomenon, a new position of cities as labs of modernity, and a renewed interest in urbanity. Sociocultural and historical approaches to the city emphasize cities’ density, their rich material and cultural resources, their centrality, and their diversity. In short—as Heinz Reif points out—they represent a “surplus” that is more than the addition of all the city’s partial functions. This renders cities as “machines of integration”15 attractive for people and capital. The status of the metropolis is a product of history—the cultural precipitate of important activities occurring in a fixed place for generations. Such history, Thomas Bender argues, is “the special cultural capital of the metropolis.”16 At the same time, the presence of strangers, and the strangeness resulting from immigration, defines the everyday life of the city as a space of encounter, hy-

  13 Heinz Reif, “Metropolises: History, Concepts, Methods,” in this volume, especially 44-45. 14 Ibid., 47. 15 Ibid. 16 Thomas Bender, “Metropolitan Intellect,” in The Historical Metropolis: A Hidden Potential, ed. Jacek Purchla (Krakow: 1996): 73.



52 | I GNACIO F ARÍAS / S USANNE STEMMLER

bridity, and mixture.17 Metropolis is the concept to describe this city that constitutes a setting and a stage for urbanity, and for creating a public sphere.18 We would like to argue that such perspectives on the metropolis and its contemporary diffusion illuminate only one half of the story. A deconstruction of the concept of metropolis may also prove to be necessary for illuminating if not the other half than at least another good quarter of its great appeal. In a first step, we would like to explore the etymology of the metropolis, which entails a very suggestive metaphor. A brief revision of the historical context in which the concept originated proves to be necessary in order to specify the sense in which the term was used in antiquity. Interestingly, the term “metropolis” was seldom used during European modernity of the nineteenth and twentieth century. In a second step, then, we will show how the concept of metropolis copes with three key processes of the European modernity of the nineteenth and early twentieth century: the consolidation of colonial Empires, the formation of nation-states, and the accelerated processes of urbanization. At the end of this article, we would like to show that keeping the metaphorical character of the metropolis in mind can help us to better understand the contemporary rise and great appeal of this concept.

II. “M ETROPOLIS ” AND A NTIQUITY : T HE B IRTH OF A M ETAPHOR The word “metropolis” comes from Greek and can be divided in two parts: “metro” comes from the word metera, which means “mother,” while the word polis is usually translated as “city.” However, before we start thinking about the metropolis as “mother city,” it may be necessary to first clarify in which sense the word polis is related to the city. In The Conscience of the Eye, Richard Sennett mentions two main sources of the concept of city, which were identified by Saint Isidore of Seville around the year 600 AD. On the one hand, he points to the word urbs, which refers to the stones of the city, this is, to its material and physical dimension. On the other hand, it is connected to the word civitas, which refers to “the emotions, rituals and convictions that take form in a city.”19 Interestingly, the polis is not mentioned here as related to the city. For a clearer

  17 See Wolfgang Kaschuba, “Berlin Street Life; Scenes and Scenarios,” in this volume. 18 Ibid.,241, 246-248. 19 Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (London: 1993), 11.



D ECONSTRUCTING “M ETROPOLIS ”

| 53

 insight in the specific relation of polis and city, we can turn to the work of a second Spaniard, Manuel Delgado, who is not a medieval saint but rather a contemporary urban anthropologist.20 In his view, urbs does not refer to the stones of the city but rather to its society—to a collective and public space that cannot be controlled or steered by the urban political sphere, this is, the polis.21 We approach thus a negative definition of the polis: it is not what Saint Isidore understands as urbs, i.e., a physical city, nor what Delgado understands as urbs, i.e., an urban way of life. The polis refers rather to a political sphere where the common issues of the community are discussed and where decisions are taken.22 In that sense, the polis and, by extension, the metropolis are necessarily concerned with issues of power, domination, and government and are intertwined with mechanisms of social, ethnic, racial, and political inclusion and exclusion. Taking this into account, it is possible now to turn to the first part of the word: metro. The original Greek term metera or meter is a primary word, i.e., not derived from a previous word, and means “mother.” In everyday language, “mother” is the biological or social female parent of a child and usually has a very important role in the raising of this child. It seems important to remark that the idea of “mother” refers to a particular kind of relation between two persons or two entities—the mother and the child—and signalizes the relational position of one of these entities. Apart from this, the genealogical idea of “mother” refers to a kinship relation that is mostly relevant in the private sphere. The idea of “mother” has also been the object of more philosophical reflections and thought of as “origins of something.”23 In both cases, “mother” is a relational concept and signalizes the relational character of the concept of metropolis. Thus, while the term polis involves a reference to the public sphere—to the common issues of the community and to questions of power and dominance— the root metera introduces a reference to a relationship between two entities and proposes an interpretation of this relationship in terms of kinship. That said, even though etymological analyses do provide certain elements that should be taken into account, it is still difficult to see in which sense the metropolis can be understood as a “mother city.” What is it exactly meant with the term “mother”? How does the “mother” relate to the city? Is the city itself signified as the “mother”?

  20 Manuel Delgado, El animal público: Hacia una etnografía de los espacios públicos (Barcelona: 1999). 21 Ibid. 22 Cf. Gerard De Vries, “What is Political in Sub-Politics? How Aristotle Might Help STS,” Social Studies of Science 37, no. 5 (2007): 781–809. 23 Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Madrid: 1994), 220–21.



54 | I GNACIO F ARÍAS / S USANNE STEMMLER

And, in that case, whose mother? Is the city the “mother” of the city dweller or is the city the “mother” of other cities? At this point, it seems necessary to take a small historical detour back to the origins of the word. The term “metropolis”—originally the name of a city in Thessalia—was first used as a juridical term in Greek-Roman time to designate the capital cities of the Egyptian provinces.24 In the Greek world, the metropolis was the sponsor of a network of colonial cities.25 Sending out a colony, usually a trading colony, was a crucial issue for Greek cities. Oracles were consulted, sacred ceremonies took place, some citizens were sent to populate the new city, some others to make the arrangements, and so on. In the colonies, the relation of the new city to the metropolis was very close and considered as one of “mutual affection.” The political constitution of the “mother city” was usually adopted by the colonial capital and complicated decisions in the new city—such as going to war or founding a new colony—were usually done in consultation with the home territory.26 In this historical context, the meaning of “metropolis” becomes clearer. Greek metropolises were defined with regard to the political relations that they maintained with their surrounding colonized area. Thus, the word “metropolis” emerged to refer to a particular kind of political and economic relationship between two entities, but did so metaphorically by using a category normally used for describing a relation of kinship. In this sense, a category of the private sphere was used for describing an issue of the public sphere. It is this analogy of two different kinds of relation, a kinship relation one and a political and economic one, and the description of the political as being familiar that makes “metropolis” a metaphorical concept. “Metropolis” is nevertheless a very particular kind of metaphor whose origins can only be traced etymologically. It is important to distinguish these kinds of conceptual metaphors, usually studied by cognitive linguistics, from those formed through a rhetorical trope, typically studied in language and literature studies. Conceptual metaphors propose a relation between two conceptual domains in which one domain is understood in terms of the other. The source

  24 Michael Gagarin and Elain Fantham, The Oxford Encyclopedia of ancient Greece and Rome. Volume 1 (Oxford: 2010). 25 Bender, “Metropolitan Intellect,” 73. 26 In Rome, the usage was similar, though center and periphery were more firmly tied and hierarchically structured. In the era of medieval Christianity, the system of Roman cities was adapted to the ecclesiastical organization of the Roman church, and with the weakening of the center the seat of each bishop was denoted a metropolis. Bender, “Metropolitan Intellect,” 73.



D ECONSTRUCTING “M ETROPOLIS ”

| 55

 domain, that is, the domain from which metaphorical expressions are drawn, would be in this case kinship, while the target domain, the one to which the metaphor is applied, would be the political relation between two cities. In his book Moral Politics, George Lakoff has argued that the public political arena is usually conceived of with the help of a basic conceptual metaphor: the family.27 Starting from this point, the use of the metaphor “mother city” is not really surprising. Nowadays, the word “metropolis” can certainly be considered a dead metaphor whose origin most speakers are entirely unaware of.28 Such lack of awareness is certainly the background to the contemporary addition of new dimensions and layers of meaning, rendering “metropolis” into a passe-partout.

III. “M ETROPOLIS ”

AND

M ODERNITY

After antiquity there were no more metropolises. The concept was not widely used during the Middle Ages or during the Renaissance. Indeed, the spread of small, politically and economically independent cities in Europe during the final centuries of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was not accompanied by a new centrality of the concept of metropolis. This is not a surprise considering its original meaning and the fact that these new cities were not inserted in colonial or imperial networks. The systematic absence of metropolis as a concept for describing cities persisted until very recent times, which can be shown in relation to three central processes of European modernity: the global expansion of colonial regimes, the internal consolidation of the nation-states, and the rapid processes of urbanization. In this section, we will briefly analyze whether and how the concept of metropolis was used in relation to these processes, focusing particularly on the latter.

  27 Georg Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (Chicago: 1996). 28 Dead metaphors are those in which the sense of a transferred image is not present. In the case of dead metaphors, speakers are not aware that the concept they are using is a metaphor, as in the case of the metaphor “understand”, meaning to get underneath, or the metaphorical image of “grasping” a concept. In a similar way, metropolis can be understood as a dead metaphor.



56 | I GNACIO F ARÍAS / S USANNE STEMMLER

Colonial and Postcolonial “Metropolis” The concept of metropolis was rediscovered during the eighteenth and nineteenth century along with the consolidation of the modern European empires, mainly England and France. The idea of France non métropolitaine refers still today to the overseas French territories, while the state of France is called France métropolitaine.29 At the same time, “metropole” was the name given to the center of the British Empire, which depending on the context referred to England, London, or the imperial institutions based in London. In the British Empire, the other side of the metropolis was the periphery, which was informed by and controlled from the metropolitan center.30 These usages show very clearly that “the metropolis” is constituted by a very particular asymmetrical relationship between a center and a periphery. Interestingly, the concept does not define the characteristics of the center, which could be a land, a city, or an institutional arrangement. In this sense, polis does not define here a city but rather the political and governmental character of the relationship between imperial center and the periphery, while metera or mother describes the relation of political dependency of the colonies. The Latin American case is also very interesting. From the 1940s until the late 1970s, the word “metropolis” was very popular. It was popular above all as a theoretical concept developed by the sociological theory of dependency that tried to explain the situation of economic underdevelopment in the region. An example of the meaning that the concept of metropolis acquired within these theories can be found in the book Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution by Andre Gunder Frank.31 In his view, a system of dependency and extraction regulates the international relations between developed countries and underdeveloped provinces. During the twentieth century, this system changed its scale, transforming the world into a network of metropolises and satellites. In this worldwide network, whole countries can become metropolises and satellites. In this theory, the division between metropolis and satellites is a structure that functions at different scales but follows the same principles. The first principle is that the metropolis tends toward development, while satellites tend toward

  29 Klaus Schüle, Paris: Die kulturelle Konstruktion der französischen Metropole. Alltag, mentaler Raum und sozial-kulturelles Feld in der Stadt und in der Vorstadt (Leverkusen: 2003). 30 Jürgen Osterhammel, Kolonialismus. Geschichte Formen Folgen (Munich: 2003). 31 Andre Gunder Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution; Essays on the Development of Underdevelopment and the Immediate Enemy (New York: 1969).



D ECONSTRUCTING “M ETROPOLIS ”

| 57

 underdevelopment. Another principle is that development in satellites is only possible when there is a crisis in the metropolis. A third central principle is that the most underdeveloped regions of the world are the ones that had the closest connections with the metropolis, as was the case with India. Analyzing these usages of the concept, it is possible to adopt a relational understanding in which the metropolis is at the center of a wider imperialist network, be it in colonial or postcolonial contexts. The examples also show that the quality and characteristics of the metropolis or “political mother” are not specified in the concept. It may be multiple things: a city, a particular city area, a whole region, or a nation-state. Second, metropolis is a concept through which social and political identities are constructed. Nevertheless, metropolis is less a category used for self-identification, i.e., for the self-definition of a center as a center (“we” are the metropolis) than it is a category for referring to an “Other” (“they” are the metropolis). In this sense, metropolis creates a counter-image against which the “rest of the world” defines itself. It is the Other of the Others; the Other of those who place themselves in the periphery and satellites. In short, it is a category used in the periphery to describe the asymmetrical power relationship in which they are subsumed. This is exactly the way Jacques Derrida describes the language situation in colonial Algeria, a French colony from 1830 to 1962. In Algeria, the French language was imposed and substituted for the mother tongue. But “its sources, its norms, its rules, its law” are from another country, situated elsewhere, anywhere but at home—in the métropole, as Jacques Derrida, a Sephardic Jew going to a French school in Algiers points out.32 The métropole was “a distant country […] not foreign […] but strange, fantastic, phantasmagoric […] a dream country, at a non-objectivable distance.”33 Derrida describes distance between colony and métropole as a “symbolic infinite dimension, a gorge for all the schoolchildren […] an abyss.”34 Hence, the gap between the native, often non-literate mother tongues of Algeria and the French of the Académie Française that the schoolmasters were teaching is symbolized by the gap between métropole and colony. The mother tongue is replaced by the language of the metropolis: the political-mother tongue.

  32 Jacques Derrida, “L’école a été un enfer pour moi [...],” Cahiers Pédagogiques 270 and 272 (1989), http://www.cahiers-pedagogiques.com/article.php3?id_article=1127. Our translation. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid.



58 | I GNACIO F ARÍAS / S USANNE STEMMLER

The Capital and the Nation-State Almost all over Europe, the centers of the nation-states are called capitals, not metropolises: in Spanish la capital, in French la capitale, in German die Hauptstadt. The concept of capital comes from the Latin term cap, which means head. Derrida points out that the cap “refers […] to the head or the extremity of the extreme, the aim and the end, the ultimate, the last, the final moment or last legs [...] the end, the telos of an oriented, calculated, deliberate, voluntary, ordered movement.”35 The capital refers then to the head of a bigger body (the nation) and the place in which a direction is defined, a center of command. It has a tendency to fix the “other” and “otherness.”36 Michael Herzfeld argues that the “European ideology” used to distinguish between Europe and “the rest” has also been reintroduced in Europe to distinguish between the centers of the nationstates and the domestic exotics. This explains, in his view, the existence of a double hierarchy, by which “the European intellectual emerged as the peasant’s superior; but the European peasant claimed pride of place over all exotic peoples.”37 In his view, the othering of the rest of the world is somehow equivalent to the othering of the rural areas within the European nation states. However, the hierarchical relationships within European nations and between European nations and its colonies, as inscribed in the concepts metropolis and capital, seem to be of very different quality. Even though the capital maintains asymmetrical relations with the provinces—giving orders, taking the helm—these relations perform only a relative othering of the provinces and their traditional inhabitants, the peasantry, while in the case of metropolis the other is not internal but rather external. The capital points to the head of a body, to the central point of one entity, while “metropolis” refers to a relation of dependency between two different entities: mother and child. The concepts used to refer to the centers of the European nation-states suggest a relation with the “provinces” quite different

  35 Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading (Bloomington: 1992), 13–14. 36 Jacques Derrida, Le Monolinguisme de l’Autre (Paris: 1996). In order to look for alternatives to European ethnocentrism, Derrida tries to develop a concept “l’autre du cap” (opposite to du cap): “qui serait l’au-delà de cette tradition moderne, une autre structure de bord, un autre ravage [...]. Ou bien tenter d’inventer un autre geste, une longue geste en vérité qui suppose la mémoire précisément pour assigner l’identité depuis l’altérité, depuis l’autre cap et l’autre du cap, depuis un tout autre bord?” Jacques Derrida, L'autre cap (Paris: 1991), 33. 37 Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology Through The Looking Glass: Critical Ethnography in Europe (Cambridge: 1987), 10.



D ECONSTRUCTING “M ETROPOLIS ”

| 59

 from the relation between the metropolis and its colonies or satellites. The concept of capital entails a functionalist understanding of one organism, while the concept of metropolis conveys a relational understanding of two entities. Großstädte, “Metropolitan” Areas and the Urbanization Process As pointed out in our introduction, it is nowadays quite normal to look at the big cities of the turn of the twentieth century, especially of the Golden Twenties, as though they were the original metropolises. Nevertheless, by the turn of the century, and even during the 1920s, the concept of metropolis was not widely used in Europe to make sense of the new urban realities. Indeed, as Gerwin Zohlen points out, a close inspection of the concepts used by those intellectuals and writers who explored the modern city reveals a significant absence of the word “metropolis.”38 In Germany, for example, the word was not used among the most important sociologists of the city. In their analyses of the forces that gave form to a European modernity, sociologists Max Weber and Werner Sombart spoke of “the European city,” die europäische Stadt, and not of “metropolises.” The most important German sociologist of the city, Georg Simmel, wrote about “the large city,” die Großstadt, and not about the “metropolis.” The most important writers of novels at the turn of the century, such as Robert Musil or Alfred Döblin, author of the famous novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), similarly did not use the term “metropolis.” In the same way, philosophers such as Walter Benjamin and intellectuals such as Franz Hessel, who during the 1920s wrote a beautiful collection of flâneur-like descriptions of Berlin, did not use the word “metropolis.”39 In France, a similar phenomenon can be observed. Charles Baudelaire, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Jules Verne, Stendhal and others writers of the nineteenth and twentieth century do not refer to Paris as “the metropolis” but as “the capital.” Probably the most famous proof that the word “metropolis” did not refer to the cities of those times is the science-fiction film Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang and released in 1927 during the Weimar Republic. The film is set in 2026 and the metropolis is a futuristic urban dystopia. Metropolis is a corporate citystate, physically and socially divided in two groups. Above the earth dwell the planners and thinkers, in a city with skyscrapers and green areas that resembles the urban utopias of Le Corbusier. Below the earth and without sunlight live the

  38 Gerwin Zohlen, “Metropole als Metapher,” in Mythos Metropole, ed. Gotthard Fuchs, Bernhard Moltmann, and Walter Prigge (Frankfurt/M.: 1995), 23–34. 39 Franz Hessel, Ein Flaneur in Berlin (Berlin: 1984 [1929]).



60 | I GNACIO F ARÍAS / S USANNE STEMMLER

workers, who must work constantly in order to sustain the lives of the privileged. There have been many political interpretations of this film: as a critique of capitalism, as a critique of communism, as a quest for an alternative between these two systems, and so on. In any case, it is clear that the film does not refer directly to the new urban realities of the first decades of the century. Even though it could have been based partially on the cities of the time, on the skyline of New York for example, Metropolis was not directly about these cities but instead about a dystopian future. This absence of the noun “metropolis” to refer to modern cities and its urbanity can also be observed in the Anglo-Saxon world. This becomes obvious for example in the work of the Chicago School. In the sixty-eight pages of “A Bibliography of the Urban Community,” published in 1925 by Louis Wirth,40 which listed all relevant academic works on the modern city, the word “metropolis” appeared only once in the titles. It was used in James Grant’s book about London entitled The Great Metropolis written in 1836, that is, in a time when London still had a relatively small population but was nonetheless a powerful imperial center. Here, it is clear that Grant used the term metropolis to refer to London as the center of the British Empire, and not as a way to reference the city’s urban culture, life, or dynamic. But the absence of the term “metropolis” is more systematic than this, partly due to the fact that the term “city” is the concept preferred by the Chicago School for making sense of the urbanization processes and “for the investigation of human behavior in the urban environment,” as the programmatic subtitle of Robert Park’s essay “The City” of 1925 claims. Park argues that the city is both a product of and the natural environment of the civilized man. It is an economic, political, and administrative unit on the one hand, and an ecological organization based on great mobility and great concentration on the other. Moreover, Park contends, the city constitutes a peculiar and unique cultural area and constitutes “a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of the organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in these customs and are transmitted with this tradition.”41 Understanding the city as a multidimensional phenomenon rooted in human dynamics and culture, the Chicago School developed radically new

  40 Louis Wirth, “A Bibliography of the Urban Community,” in The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment, ed. Robert Park and Ernest Burgess (Chicago: 1967 [1925]), 161–230. 41 Robert Park, “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment,” in The City, ed. Park and Burgess (Chicago: 1967 [1925]), 1.



D ECONSTRUCTING “M ETROPOLIS ”

| 61

 perspectives on the moral and the physical organization of the city and on the way these two ambits interact with each other. Two brief insights into Park’s conceptions of the nature of the “neighborhood” and of the urban “moral regions” should suffice to highlight the conception of the city conveyed by the Chicago School. Neighborhoods constitute the smallest local units of the city and exist without formal organization. They are a product of history that impregnate every section and quarter with the peculiar sentiments, character, and qualities of its inhabitants. Social and functional segregation that give rise to racial colonies, segregated vice districts, occupational suburbs, and residential enclaves with homogeneous populations are thus natural products of the ecological, spatial, and temporal relations of human beings in the city.42 From this perspective, human communities in urban environments create homogeneous ecological niches, neighborhoods, districts, enclaves, and ghettos in which they settle. The city emerges thus as a radically fragmented spatial unity, as “a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate.”43 Neighborhoods, argues Park, also constitute “moral regions” structured by certain moral restrictions and licenses. However, moral regions in the city do not necessarily correspond to ecological niches of the city and may well be associated with places of encounter—mere rendezvous. The emergence of moral regions is due to the fact that the city permits and stimulates the full and free expression of innate human dispositions and temperaments. Eccentricity and divergence is rewarded in city, not just tolerated. Thus, “individuals who seek same forms of excitement […] should find themselves from time to time in the same places. The result of this is that [...] population tends to segregate itself.”44 Thus, the differentiation of moral regions, just like segregation at the neighborhood level, is seen as the natural, and even normal, product of human life in cities. It is possible to connect this brief review of the Chicago School’s conception of the city to our discussion of metropolis by means of an apparently trivial question: if the word “metropolis” was not widely used in North American sociological discussion of the city, the modern urbanization processes, and its consequences, why was Georg Simmel’s famous 1903 article “Die Großstadt

  42 Roderick McKenzie, “The Ecological Approach to the Study of The Human Community,” American Journal of Sociology 30 (1924): 287–301. 43 Robert Park, “The City: Human Behavior,” 40. 44 Ibid., 43.



62 | I GNACIO F ARÍAS / S USANNE STEMMLER

und das Geistesleben”45 translated as “The Metropolis and the Mental Life”?46 It is possible to argue that this choice of words was motivated by poetic criteria: the alliteration of Großstadt and Geistesleben is echoed with the words “metropolis” and “mental life.” This may be an explanation. However, we would like to argue that the answer might have to do with the varying conceptions of the city and the urban that prevailed on different sides of the Atlantic. If the city as an analytical concept was biased towards the Chicago School conception, then the urbanity of which Simmel was talking about could not simply be associated with it. Simmel’s article portrayed a different city, a different type of urbanity and therefore could not have been translated as “The City and the Mental Life.” What may be called the “Berlin School” of urban studies, in order to signalize the specific approach to the city and the urban that can be found in the work of Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Willy Hellpachs, Franz Hessel, and Joseph Roth, portrayed in fact a very different city than the city of the Chicago School. Their focus was on the center of the city and its main public spaces. This center was unlike the neighborhoods of the Chicago School, which were seen as imbued in the history and identity of one specific social group. Rather, the center was viewed as a space of transit and difference, in which the speed, multiplicity, and anonymity of the urban life in the Großstadt could be experienced more radically than in any other place. Such experience, argued Simmel, was at the core of the psychological constitution of the “man” [sic] of the great city. The new urban habitus described by Simmel was an answer to this new urban condition and involved a distant, indifferent, superficial, and blasé attitude. In this sense, Simmel was talking of an urban experience that, despite a few exceptions, was not in the foreground of the urban sociology of the United States, which was much more focused on the neighborhood and on local forms of belonging. Hartmut Häußermann summarized these different approaches with two opposed images of the city: “big city of coldness” and “big city of warm nests.”47 According to such paradigmatic discrepancies, it can be thought that the word “metropolis” was selected to signalize that Simmel was talking about a form of urbanity alien to the US city—a form of European urbanity. Connecting this with our analysis of the term “metropolis,” it is possi-

  45 Georg Simmel, “Die Großstadt und das Geistesleben,” in Die Großstadt. Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung, ed. Th. Petermann (Dresden: 1903), 185–206. 46 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and the Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: 1950), 409–24. 47 Hartmut Häußermann, “Die Stadt und die Stadtsoziologie. Urbane Lebensweise und die Integration des Fremden,” Berliner Journal für Soziologie 5 (1995): 89–98.



D ECONSTRUCTING “M ETROPOLIS ”

| 63

 ble to think that similar to the cases of Greek colonies or Latin American postcolonial theory, the word “metropolis” served here to refer to the “Other,” in this case the European urbanity as “Other” to US cities. Not by chance, the adjective “metropolitan” started to be applied in the first decades of the twentieth century to those US cities like New York that had a particular flair—a European flair. In the contemporary Anglo-Saxon world, it is possible to find another very interesting connection between our concept and modern urbanization processes. Margit Mayer points out that within the terminology of the “Los Angeles School,” the concept of “metropolitanization” since 1980 designates a spatial transformation of urbanization processes consisting of the fragmentation of urban areas: “The object of study is no longer the core and its surrounding quarters, but rather the production of different spatial configurations and the new problems and questions thrown up by these new configurations [...] the transformation of urban form from monocentric to polycentric urban regions, to exopoles, edge cities, megacities etc.”48 As we can see, this is a very different, more “pragmatic” use of the term. In the US and in Britain, the concept is not used so much as a noun, “the metropolis,” but as an adjective, “the metropolitan,” and a process, “the metropolitanization.” “The metropolitan” appeared above all as an administrative expression to designate an urban area that normally includes one city and its suburban hinterlands. It can also be the case that a “metropolitan area” is composed of many small cities that are located within the zones of influence of a central city. Usually these urban and suburban zones function as commuter belts of the big city. In all these cases, “the metropolitan” seems to be describing something not very different from what we have seen in the other examples: an asymmetrical relation between a center and its peripheries. A “metropolitan area” is indeed very different from a conurbation, which requires urban contiguity and does not suppose a relation of influence or dependency. On the contrary, the entities that belong to a “metropolitan area” need not to be physically connected with the central city, but rather must be highly—mostly politically and economically—integrated. Correspondingly, in a “postmetropolis” the inner city is not any more the center of accumulation, power, or representation.49 Edge cities, suburbs, ghettos, and gated communities constitute new urban units with a life of their own. The term “exopolis,” for example, refers “both to the city growing ‘outside’ of the traditional urban nucle-

  48 Mayer, “Metropolitan Research in Transatlantic Perspective,” 108. 49 Edward Soja, “Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis,” in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Malden: 2005), 188–96.



64 | I GNACIO F ARÍAS / S USANNE STEMMLER

us and to the city ‘without’ the city that no longer conveys the traditional qualities of cityness.”50 “Edge cities” also points to a new configuration in which the integrative function of the center disappears.51 There are multiple connections between the metropolis and modernity. Above all, two levels of connection can be distinguished: First, the noun “metropolis” has been used in contexts of colonial imperialism and postcolonial criticism. Second, and above all in the Anglo-Saxon world, the adjective “metropolitan” has been used in connection to urbanization processes. As we have shown, in both cases, the terms “metropolis” and “metropolitan area” are used to describe asymmetrical relations of power between two independent entities— asymmetrical relations that can be described with the distinction between center and periphery. In all the cases mentioned above, political relations between independent entities—the metropolis and the colonies, a core city and its zones of influence—have been described with the metaphor of the “mother,” as though these political relations were familiar ones or were based on kinship.

IV. C ONTEMPORARY U SES OF “M ETROPOLIS ”: B ETWEEN C ITY M ARKETING AND U RBAN S TUDIES The contemporary metropolitan turn, or in other words, the inflationary use of the word “metropolis” in city marketing and urban studies is striking. As pointed out, most politicians, city boosters, urban researchers, and urban theorists have merely replaced the word “city” with the word “metropolis.” The small group that has actually looked for explanations to this metropolitan turn argue that the word “metropolis” has become popular because its application to a city means that this city is particularly rich in history, culture, and arts, and that this city has a particular dynamic, a bohemian flair, a creative milieu, a multicultural composition, a cosmopolitan air, and so on. In other words, most of the explanations about the contemporary metropolitan turn argue that the word “metropolis” defines an urban way of life, a particular urbanity, which is not only “in” or “hip” but that also has proved to be a source of economic success. This is true, but only one half of the history. A second layer explaining the contemporary metropolitan turn can be found in the etymological and metaphorical character of “metropolis.” Taking this layer into account, it is possible to shed some new light on the contemporary uses of “metropolis,” for example, as a

  50 Ibid., 193. 51 Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: 1991).



D ECONSTRUCTING “M ETROPOLIS ”

| 65

 catchword in the city marketing and, more interestingly, as an analytical concept for the study of cities. We would like to conclude by commenting briefly on these two developments. The first important city-marketing strategy for Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall was implemented by Partner für Berlin (Partner for Berlin) between 1996 and 2002. Its main aim was to provide a new and unified image for a city that had no new images to overcome its internal division. The slogan “Das Neue Berlin” (“The New Berlin”) established itself as the central brand for the city and in a certain way was quite successful.52 After 2002, Partner für Berlin changed its strategy. With “Das Neue Berlin,” a more or less unified city image had been established and filling this “new Berlin” with content became the agenda. Since then and until 2008, the communicational strategy of Partner für Berlin relied on five key concepts. Two of these concepts focus on the image of Berlin as a “metropolis,” namely “Ost-West-Metropole” (“East-West-Metropolis”) and “Kulturmetropole” (“Culture Metropolis”). What did they intend with this reference to the “metropolis”? It was not meant to signify the seat of the German government and parliament in Berlin, which was promoted with the key concept “Deutschlands Hauptstadt” (“Germany’s Capital City”). Neither did it refer to the economic potential of the city, which was emphasized in the concept “Kreative Stadt” (“Creative City”). The word “metropolis” was used here in a very classical sense, as being located at the center of a wider network: “In the newly unified Europe, Berlin lays at the center and no longer at the edge [...] Berlin will become a place of encounter between the East and the West [...]. An East-West-Metropolis.”53 In this context, the growing popularity of the word “metropolis” in Berlin, and in city marketing more generally, should be understood as a direct consequence of the growing competition between cities. To name a city a “metropolis” is not so much to promote a particular “metropolitan” way of life. As pointed out above, “metropolis” does not define a particular content. It is rather a relational concept that implies a distinction between center and periphery and enables promoting a city as though it were at the top of a system of cities.

  52 Ignacio Farías, “Zukunft zum Greifen nah. Strukturelle Bedingungen, Semantik und Verortung von Berliner Stadtmarketing,” Berliner Blätter 37, no. 3 (2005), 22–31. 53 Editors’ translation. In original: “Im neuen vereinigten Europa liegt Berlin in der Mitte nicht mehr am Rand [...] Berlin wird zum Ort der Begegnung von Ost und West [...] zur Ost-West Metropole.” Berlin Partner, accessed January 2007, www.berlinpartner.de.



66 | I GNACIO F ARÍAS / S USANNE STEMMLER

Another use of the word “metropolis” can be found in the field of urban studies, which in Berlin are increasingly called “metropolitan studies.” This is a rather new development and as such very difficult to analyze. In January 2005, the Technical University of Berlin (TU) founded a new Center for Metropolitan Studies, which has a graduate research program oriented towards a transatlantic comparison of Berlin and New York. In July 2005, the Humboldt University of Berlin created the Georg Simmel Center for Metropolitan Studies. In September 2005, the Free University of Berlin inaugurated a new master’s program in metropolitan studies. In all these programs, the word “metropolis” is used to talk about German cities and particularly about Berlin. According to the Georg Simmel Center, for example, Berlin must be understood as a “metropolitan city,”54 that is, as a particular type of city that because of its heterogeneity, density, and culture would be a new site for the new economy. In the terms of the Center for Metropolitan Studies at the TU, Berlin is assumed to be a metropolis and as such it can be compared with cities such as London or New York. A double strategy can be detected in these academic uses of the word “metropolis.” The field is redefined in a way where not only can German cities be put on the top of city rankings, but German urban studies also become more relevant. It is only within this newly created metropolitan approach that it becomes possible to compare Berlin with New York, London, or Tokyo. Otherwise, following the more established approaches in urban studies, German cities and Berlin tend not to appear in the rankings. Again, the noun “metropolis” and the adjective “metropolitan” are being used in their more classical sense, as metaphors that suggest an asymmetrical distinction in order to present oneself as being at the center of a wider network. While this short survey has made clear that the concept of the “metropolis” is a European concept with a relational postcolonial connotation, this insight is still far from conclusive regarding any contemporary transformations of our cities. Indeed, the power of concepts, such as “metropolis,” to perform urban realities does not just stem from a sort of symbolic efficacy, but critically depends on finely tuned socio-material arrangements, within which these concepts can freely circulate as plausible or even true. So, if the concept of “metropolis” is increasingly plausible and convincing, as this book seems to suggest, the key question we need to ask is whether and how the socio-material realities of these metropolises are being arranged and transformed in ways that sustain such postcolonial connotations.

  54 Georg-Simmel-Zentrum für Metropolenforschung, accessed January 2007, www. gsz.hu-berlin.de.





Explanans vs. Explanandum, Freedom vs. Cohesion: The Conceptual Structure of Urban Sociology J AN K EMPER

Sociological topics and theoretical approaches change parallel to the dynamics of social reality. Conceptual explorations of urban sociologists can therefore be described in an epistemological realist manner, as the academic reaction to specific “urban” situations as well as to broader economic, political, and cultural conditions. Seen in this way, cognitive interests and conceptual structures in urban sociology are perceived merely as epiphenomena, reflecting societal factors that are external to them. Consequentially, their analysis must be situated within a sociohistorical context, which is granted a privileged status relative to the analyzed object. For urban sociology, this contextual approach suggests the discipline’s historical rise out of the process of industrialization and urbanization in Western societies as well as the altering of its key problems and concepts in different stages of urban development. Urban sociology thus reflects the social changes Western industrialized societies underwent in phases from the formation of a “Fordist” model of production and consumption at the beginning of the twentieth century, to its heydays in the decades after World War II, its crisis in the 1970s, and the ways toward a “post-Fordist” reconfiguration of production and consumption during the past decades. In conceptualizing the dynamics in urban sociology as produced by transformations in its perceived subject matter (the city) or in a broader context (the society), reconstructions of the intellectual history of urban sociology tend to follow one of the substantial claims of urban sociology itself: that it describes a given set of spatial forms and social practices and institutions rather than prescribing patterns of sociological thought and political ideas upon space and



68 | J AN K EMPER

social life. In so doing, research in the intellectual history of urban sociology has successfully identified and evaluated the time- and culture-bounded impact on previous views on issues labeled as “urban,” but has tended to neglect the internal logic of reasoning in the field of urban sociology itself. The rationality of urban sociology—the selective conceptual choices of urban sociologists in defining their object of study—and its history appears to be not so much the result of debates and conjunctures internal to the field of urban studies as it is an answer to external conditions and situations. Based on a critical understanding of urban social theory as an effort to make use of the metropolis both empirically and conceptually, as a jumping-off point for the sociological conceptualization of social order, social action, and social change, what follows is not intended as an explanation of urban sociology’s theoretical practice in relation to the city (or to the metropolis) as a clear, given, and real object of analysis. Instead, to borrow Manual Castells’s phrase, this essay aims to track urban sociology’s different conceptual means and ways of constituting meaning and thus of gaining intellectual control over an apparently opaque “urban question.”1 To explore the rationality of urban sociology, i.e., its common conceptual knowledge as well as its different framings of the urban question, the first section introduces the quarrel between traditional and critical modes of urban social theory as the main theoretical-epistemological bias central to urban sociology and outlines a framework, allowing a structured reading of basic conceptual positions and guiding differences in urban sociology. Against this background, the next section surveys a series of key concepts in the field of urban sociology, all of which gave and continue to give meaning to the urban question. Finally, I conclude with an exposition of urban sociology’s conceptual structure, visualizing value perspectives and strategic potentials of each of its approaches.

I. R EADING U RBAN S OCIAL T HEORY Traditional and Critical Theory in Urban Sociology Social theory, to put it roughly, is concerned with abstract and generalizable assumptions about what produces and reproduces social order, what enables

  1



Manuel Castells, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach (London: 1977).

E XPLANANS

VS.

EXPLANANDUM | 69

social action, and what defines and explains social change.2 Accordingly, urban social theory, urban sociology’s theoretical practice, can be understood in the way that it describes the role of cities in the process of production and reproduction of a given social order; gives meaning to patterns of social action and social behavior under urban conditions; and offers conceptual tools to understand social change regarding challenging urban social problems and urban development. To establish understanding about the form and task of urban social theory along these lines of argumentation works quite well while its basic signifier of reasoning and knowledge about social reality, “the urban” itself, remains untouched. As long as there is a common and not questioned understanding of “urban semiotics,”3 shared by popular consent and the academic community, urban social theory in this sense is not only concerned with detailed aspects that take place in modern metropoles, but is also able to describe patterns of social relations with reference to certain factors labeled as “urban.” Furthermore, it allows for an explanation of the formation and characteristics of social reality with reference to spatial, moral, and social patterns attributed to its presumed subject matter: the city. Inasmuch as this fashion of urban social theory operates on the assumption that its central core of understanding modern society, “the urban,” can function as empirical term as well as analytical concept, it tends to represent social reality as urban social reality. Thus, today’s forms of social organization could be seen as those of a distinctive urban society; its institutions and practices could be represented, in Louis Wirth’s well-known words, as those of a distinct “urban way of life.”4 Theorizing the city in this conventional way is not confined to the academic field of urban sociology. It also affects the realm of public policy debates. Given a mode of social theory that allows for a meaningful rendering as well as explanation of today’s social reality with regard to the label “urban,” it puts forward a broad spectrum of visions and fears that build upon the recognition of the modern metropolis. Loosely governed by assumptions on “urbanity” or “metropolitanism” as a distinctive conduct of life emerging out of urban conditions, in

  2

On this definition of meaning, tasks, and aims of social theory, see Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl, Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lectures (Cambridge: 2009), 18.

3

Algirdas Julien Greimas, Narrative Semiotics and Cognitive Discourses (London: 1990), 143.

4

Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” The American Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (1938).



70 | J AN K EMPER

order to stabilize or to change social order, “metropolitan” space as well as “urban” social life have become the vantage point of various political strategies and ideologies, intended to either prevent or to foster contemporary “urban” society against antagonistic tendencies and crises. If, however, common ground on what the signifiers “urban” or “metropolitan” entail is vanishing, and therefore political strategies and ideological visions that build upon assumptions about a certain meaning of “urban” or “metropolitan” become vague and contested, theorizing the city in a different way seems to become possible. In urban studies discourse, this was the case in the 1960s and 1970s, when in Western industrialized societies the representation of social problems as “metropolitan problems” gave way to the consideration of a general “urban crisis.” This was finally broken down to the analysis of underlying social realities that seemed less obvious but were nevertheless implicit in the academic and political use of urban semiotics. This formative period gave rise to and was shaped by a mode of critical urban social theory that was not so much interested in theorizing the city or issues labeled “urban” as objects appropriate for the description and explanation of social reality, as it was an attempt to theorize the common vague and unquestioned notions of the signifier “urban” itself.

The Conceptual Structure of Urban Social Theory: A Reading Grid Historically, initiating a critical attitude in urban sociology reflected an increased awareness of the weaknesses in the established approaches of urban social theory at that time. It mobilized a perspective to critique empiricist tendencies in urban sociology, and defined itself as intellectual support and advocated engagement for the then-emerging oppositional social movements against rent increase, slum clearance, and urban renewal. Systematically, what the theoretical strategy of “exposing, proposing and politicizing”5 in the late 1960s and early 1970s had pushed to the center of debates were: (1) the question of whether “the urban” describes a social and spatial pattern on its own and therefore has to be considered as an independent variable in the explanation of social reality or whether “the urban” has no socio-ontological reality on its own, but spatially and socially expresses society’s general political, economical, and cultural forces, and therefore must be deciphered as the dependent variable in explaining social reality.

  5

Peter Marcuse, “From Critical Urban Theory to the Right to the City,” City 13, nos. 2– 3 (2009): 185.



E XPLANANS

VS.

EXPLANANDUM | 71

And (2), the question of whether the sociopolitical intentions implicitly or explicitly inherent to academic approaches in urban sociology should be acknowledged as directed to defend a given socio-spatial order represented as “urban” or whether they should be seen as directed to change existing “urban” spatial structures and social conditions.6 Taken together, these two questions suggest a two-coded reading grid that builds on the heritage of the critical intervention in urban social theory but that goes beyond the traditional/critical divide in urban sociology. It allows for a systematic (and therefore criticizable) reading of different approaches toward constituting meaning around the modern metropolis, its spatial form, and its social life. These two codes are summarized as follows: • (1) Explanans vs. explanandum: The first code is an epistemological one that is

related to the presumed explanatory significance of urban sociology’s scientific object: the city. The code’s guiding difference is constructed on the question of whether “the urban” functions as explanans or explanandum in urban social theory, i.e., whether it is treated as an independent, explanatory variable or as a dependent variable. • (2) Freedom vs. cohesion: The second code tackles urban sociology’s practical impetus and its sociopolitical intentions. Whether in the traditional or critical understanding of urban social theory, the bulk of urban sociology is directed at studying “urban” aspects because they seem related to political concerns with society’s “social problems” and therefore closely linked to strategies and interventions which aim to prevent, to reform, or to challenge a given social order. In advising administrative authorities, community organizations, or social movements, urban sociologists therefore do not only conceptually define the appropriate subject matter under consideration, but also give meaning to the question: “What is to be done?”7 This practical impetus seems essential to academic research on “urban problems,” but should not simply be reduced to a distinction between theories that either challenge or defend a given status quo. More useful seems to be to situate the pragmatics of urban social theory in a less formal, more substantially defined political-ideological distinction

  6

On the first question, see, for example, Claude S. Fischer, The Urban Experience, 2nd ed. (San Diego: 1984). On the second, see David Harvey’s distinction between “status quo-theory,” “counter-revolutionary theory,” and “revolutionary theory” in urban social theory in David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (London: 1973), 150–51.

7

This paradigmatic impulse of urban social theory is emphasized in Michael P. Smith, The City and Social Theory (New York: 1979).



72 | J AN K EMPER

between the wish for, or the fear of, individual or collective freedom on the one hand and the wish, respectively the fear, for a society’s capacity for integration and thus to guarantee social cohesion on the other hand.8 The two aforementioned codes, explanans vs. explanandum and freedom vs. cohesion, structure the following analysis of the conceptual history of urban social theory. The interpretation is framed (1) by distinguishing between an analysis of the social and spatial “urban” reality as either (a) explained through a genuine “urban” spatial, moral, and social order itself and therefore dealing with “the urban” as explanans in social theory or (b) as explaining the “urban problem” out of social forces and therefore dealing with “the urban” as explanandum in social theory. And (2) by distinguishing between (a) a critical judgment of the city’s spatial and social reality as either a threat to or a chance for (individual or collective) freedom or (b) as a threat to or a chance for social cohesion.

II. P ATTERNS

OF

U RBAN S OCIAL T HEORY

Modern Society and Individual Freedom The German sociologist and cultural philosopher Georg Simmel (1858–1918) is best known as one of the founding fathers of urban sociology. Virtually every introductory textbook on urban social theory deals with his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” which was originally published in 1903 and which has become a guiding reference in defining the scope and subject matter of urban

  8

The taxonomy is suggested in Algirdas Julien Greimas’s essay “Toward a Topological Semiotics,” a structuralist-semiotic reading of urban discourses, and is motivated by Luc Boltanski's and Eve Chiapello's analysis of a “critique artiste” and a “critique social” as the two modes of criticism in capitalist societies. See Greimas, Narrative Semiotics, 139--59; Luc Boltanski, Ève Chiapello, "The Role of Criticism in the Dynamics of Capitalism: Social Criticism and Artistic Criticism," in: Worlds of Capitalism: Institutions, Economics, Performance and Governance in the Era of Globalisation, ed. Max Miller (London: 2005), 229--258. Methodologically, the analysis is motivated by a reading of Richard H. Brown, "Historical Science as Linguistic Figuration," Theory and Society 14, no. 5 (1985): 677--703.



E XPLANANS

VS.

EXPLANANDUM | 73

sociology.9 Building on Simmel’s association of the emergence of big cities (Großstädte) with the arrival of modernity, especially in its economic sense (social division of labor, commodity production, money as medium of exchange), as well as in its behavioral and its psychosocial meanings (intellectualism (Verstandesmäßigkeit), indifference, “blasé attitude”), Simmel’s essay is claimed to be a study of a specific “metropolitan” mental structure and a distinctive “urban” social behavior. It is therefore treated as an essential contribution to the conceptual construction of the modern city as a scientific object and to urban sociology as a disciplinary project in its own right.10 The cooptation of Simmel’s metropolis essay in the field of urban sociology is not without reason. As Dietmar Jazbinsek has stressed, in “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Simmel avoided clear-cut formulations that would suggest a unidirectional, deterministic relationship between overreaching social characteristics (i.e., the economical, political, and cultural dimensions of modern society) as causal factors of urban life, and the socio-spatial (concentration, density), behavioral, and psycho-structural (intellectualism, indifference, “blasé attitude”) phenomena as the resulting effects, or vice versa (i.e., dealing with the sociospatial, behavioral, and psycho-structural attributes of urban environment and modern city life as the conditional elements in order for modern society to come

  9

Simmel’s essay on the modern metropolis was originally published as Georg Simmel, “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben,” in Die Großstadt: Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung, ed. Theodor Petermann (Dresden: 1903), 185–206. The essay’s first translation into English in its entirety appeared in Kurt H. Wolff, ed., The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Glencoe, Ill.: 1950), 409–24. The following sketch of Simmel’s approach toward the modern city relies on Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary Bridge and Sophia Watson (Malden, Mass.: 2002), 11–19.

10 The foundational role that is attributed to Simmel’s text in urban studies becomes obvious in, e.g., Malcolm Miles and Tim Hall, eds., The City Cultures Reader, 2nd ed. (London: 2008). The reader presents Simmel’s essay on the metropolis as one answer to the introductory question: “What is the city?” Against hagiographic presentations of Simmel as a worshipper of modern city life, a critical attempt to understand Simmel’s remarks on the modern metropolis through his biography and his in-no-way-justrelaxed relation to his hometown Berlin is formulated by Dietmar Jazbinsek, “The Metropolis and the Mental Life of Georg Simmel: On the History of an Antipathy,” Journal of Urban History 30, no. 1 (2003). The most careful analysis of Simmel’s essay and its context is given by David Frisby, Cityscapes of Modernity: Critical Explorations (Cambridge: 2001), 100–158.



74 | J AN K EMPER

into existence).11 Instead, Simmel’s general affinity toward formal sociology put forward a style of presenting the modern metropolis that introduced its phenomena as situated in a web of relations, and therefore could be approached both as the starting point of social processes and as the outcome of an already-existing social structure. Quite paradoxically, however, it seems it is exactly Simmel’s refusal to clearly signify cause and effect in the interlinked social processes of the overall modernization of society, urbanization, and the formation of modern subjectivity that has often been understood as an invitation to perform a selective reading of Simmel’s perspective on the metropolis. Drawing on those parts of the essay where Simmel indeed suggested the emergence of new forms of social behavior and new attitudes through the challenges of modern city life and the difficulties of an urban environment, the essay’s message is then inaccurately reduced to apparently timelessly significant and therefore exemplary commentaries on the practices and characteristics of the urban form, as opposed to rural qualities. As a consequence, Simmel’s remarks are taken as an explanation of modern society in which the modern metropolis becomes explanatory value itself.12 In contrast to the reductionist treatment of Simmel’s metropolis essay, a perspective interested in the structural elements of Simmel’s theoretical approach to the modern city could expose the more foundational principles upon which Simmel was creating his view of the metropolis. One of the fundamental sociological themes that dominate the text is the conflicting relationship between individual and society.13 For Simmel, what is mirrored in the setting of the modern city, therefore introducing the modern metropolis as explanandum rather than as explanans, was an expression of the antagonistic process of the overwhelming of individuality through social forces on the one hand, and the individual’s resistance against its subordination on the other. In his introductory remarks, he stated: “The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heri-

  11 Cf. Jazbinsek, “Mental Life of Georg Simmel,” 104–106. 12 For an assessment of the essay’s integration into the canon of urban sociology’s essential readings as a result of urban sociology’s tendency to isolate scholars’ remarks on the modern city from their broader social and intellectual context, see Oliver SchöllerSchwedes, “Der Stadtsoziologie Georg Simmel – Ein Missverständnis und seine Folgen,” Berliner Journal für Soziologie 18, no. 4 (2008). 13 The following reading of Simmel’s text draws extensively on Frisby, Cityscapes of Modernity, 139pp.



E XPLANANS

VS.

EXPLANANDUM | 75

tage and the external culture and technique of life. This antagonism represents the most modern form of the conflict which primitive man must carry on with nature for his own bodily existence.”14 In the overall social history of modernity, Simmel continues, “the same fundamental motive was at work, namely the resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.”15 Big cities, or metropolises, as far as they have to be seen as “products of the specifically modern aspects of contemporary life” for Simmel,16 therefore must be analyzed as the site where the latent processes of developing modernity are manifest. This analysis is introduced in three analytical steps. First, Simmel pictures modern subjectivity as developed through and embedded in the individual’s need to adapt to the rationalization of daily life. This adaptation has a doubled-edged outcome. On the one hand, it enforces the tendency to give up individual personality in order to fulfill the obligations of modern society. On the other hand, it allows for abstaining from communal and moral ties, which first of all introduces individuality as a basic pattern of modern life. Second, because of its rootedness in the process of rationalization, modern subjectivity appears as a result of an overall dynamic in social history, as the result of “social evolution” in the field of “social organization.”17 Simmel describes the evolutionary process of social life as a tendency toward increasingly overlapping social circles, which basically means a further functional differentiation of society. It is from here that Simmel, third, interprets the modern metropolis as the contemporary expression of the conflictual relationship between supra-individual forces and the individual’s claim of independence. The emergence of the big city appears to be the endpoint in the socio-ontological conflict, which may have its physical and socio-spatial locus in the modern metropolis but nevertheless has its roots in a conflictive process of social evolution itself. In this struggle, Simmel’s metropolis essay itself appears as a counter-narrative that defends the individual’s gains of autonomy—a struggle, however, in which Simmel did not seek to engage politically but rather through its valueneutral recognition as a matter of fact. He concluded: “It is our task not to complain or to condone” the objectivity of modernity “but only to understand.”18

  14 Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life,” 11. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 15. 18 Ibid., 19.



76 | J AN K EMPER

Modern society in all its variations and expressions, for Simmel, becomes an unquestioned, self-evident truth. Natural Areas and Social Control Simmel’s metropolis essay still discussed the social, spatial, and emotional patterns of the metropolis in relation to and as the outcome of the breakthrough of modern society. Inasmuch the emerging modern society became dominant, however, sociology’s attention to the different social forms of traditional and modern society vanished. Modern society in its basic attributes was increasingly rendered natural, i.e., deprived of history and without fundamental social change. As presented in the Chicago School of urban sociology and in the writings of the school’s most influential scholar, Robert E. Park (1864–1944), the basic attributes of modern society were reified in urban sociology as those belonging to the nature of city life per se. This reification rests on two pillars: One is the scientific, positivist notion of sociology’s tasks and aims. The other is the conceptual meaning of the metropolis as a gathering of different “natural areas.” Sociology, for Park, had to be subsumed under the “knowledge of law,” represented by natural science. The discipline’s character therefore ought to be established in opposition to history. According to Park, although both sociology and the historical sciences have one subject matter in common—i.e., “the political process, by which men are controlled and states governed, and the cultural process, by which man has been domesticated and human nature formed”19— because of their diverse epistemological goals, they must be seen quite differently. History “seeks to reproduce and interpret concrete events as they actually occurred in time and space.”20 By contrast, sociology “seeks to arrive at natural laws and generalizations in regard to human nature and society, irrespective of time and place.”21 The latter aims at determining types of social interaction and patterns of social life in order to fulfill sociology’s task of gaining control over social reality.22

  19 Robert E. Park, “Sociology and the Social Sciences,” The American Journal of Sociology 26, no. 4 (1921): 411. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Cf. ibid., 424: “Our explanations of phenomena […] are the basis for technique and practical devices for controlling nature and human nature, man and the physical world.”



E XPLANANS

VS.

EXPLANANDUM | 77

The nomothetic understanding of sociology’s overall tasks and goals goes hand in hand with the ecologist frame of reference Park suggests for the investigation of social behavior in the context of urban environment and modern city life. According to Park, the process of social life in cities can be described as analogous with an unconscious biotic struggle, and a city’s spatial and social patterning recognized as a social organism.23 In a broader sense, this perspective conceives of urban sociology as concentrated on “the relationship between urban spaces, types of social interaction and personality types.”24 More strictly speaking, Park’s organic analogy designs urban sociology as knowledge about the process of the adaptation of individuals and social groups toward a preexisting and spatially bounded social order.25 Central to his view is a conception of the metropolis as “a constellation of natural areas,” each of them conceived as a socio-spatial unit of functions and values that are structured through a competitive and conflictive (and therefore problematic) “natural history” of assimilation—functioning independently from anybody’s personal will or desire.26 It

  23 For comprehensive information on Park’s affiliation with human ecology, see Peter Saunders, “Urban Ecology,” in Handbook of Urban Studies, ed. Ronan Paddison (London: 2001), 36–51. 24 Hans Pols, “Anomie in the Metropolis: The City in American Sociology and Psychiatry,” Osiris 18 (2003): 199. 25 See, e.g., Robert E. Park, “The Urban Community as a Spatial Pattern and a Moral Order,” in Human Communities: The City and Human Ecology (Glencoe, Ill.: 1952), 168–69: “Every new generation has to learn to accommodate itself to an order which is defined and maintained mainly by the older. Every society imposes some sort of discipline upon its members. Individuals grow up, are incorporated into the life of the community, and eventually drop out and disappear. But the community, with the moral order which it embodies, lives on. The life of the community therefore involves a kind of metabolism. It is constantly assimilating new individuals, and just as steadily, by death or otherwise, eliminating older ones. But assimilation is not a simple process, and, above all else, takes time.” 26 Cf. Robert E. Park, “The City as a Social Laboratory,” in Human Communities, 79. In the words of Patricia Madoo Lengermann, Park viewed the “natural area” as “the most important sub-component of the metropolis. Natural area involves a unit of physical and social space, in which population, division of labor, economic, political, and cultural factors intersect to produce an integrated system. Metropolitan areas are a heterogeneity of natural areas.” See Patricia Madoo Lengermann, “Robert E. Park and the Theoretical Content of Chicago Sociology: 1920–1940,” Sociological Inquiry 58, no. 4 (1988): 369.



78 | J AN K EMPER

mainly emanates in segregation, i.e., in the spatial separation of social groups, which, for Park, “the conditions and tendencies of city life inevitably produce.”27 Thus, the metropolis can be understood as “a great sifting and sorting mechanism, which […] infallibly selects out of the population as a whole the individuals best suited to live in a particular region and a particular milieu.”28 As Park’s narrative unfolds, the Chicago School’s concentration on the process of assimilation through segregation epistemologically leads to the metropolis as the explanatory category of urban social phenomena itself. Presented as if it were the metropolitan condition per se, the distinctive urban milieu—defined through a nexus of competition, segregation, and assimilation—becomes the crucial independent variable in the sociological investigation of urban social life, thus functioning as an explanans. In terms of political and practical contexts, the Chicago School’s intention to produce valid knowledge on the metropolis emerged out of this idea in order to prevent social disorganization. If assimilation is essential to metropolitan life, and if this process is necessarily operating through selection and segregation, then it seems an obvious task to foster the overall process of assimilation. Consequentially, in policy affairs, Park’s view on the metropolis is not centered on fostering the individual’s autonomy against its overwhelming social forces, as Simmel’s metropolis essay suggests, but leads to a “plea for community,” as Morton and Lucia White put it, against a feared breakdown of social control in the metropolis.29 Social Reproduction and Collective Consumption In opposition to the Chicago School’s equation of social and biological processes, the evolving, self-ascribed, critical urban social theory aimed at deciphering a false identification of social reality with its surface-level events. In contrast to the traditional mode of urban social theory, the critical conceptualization of urban social theory suggested a treating of apparently “urban” issues as symptomatic but not essential to Western industrialized societies. In this attempt, what is articulated in the common usage of urban semiotics and therefore appears to

  27 Robert E. Park, “The Urban Community as a Spatial Pattern and a Moral Order,” in Park, Human Communities, 170. 28 Robert E. Park, “The City as a Social Laboratory,” in Park, Human Communities, 79. 29 Cf. Morton G. White and Lucia White, “The Plea for Community,” in The Intellectual Versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (Oxford: 1977), 155– 78.



E XPLANANS

VS.

EXPLANANDUM | 79

be an “urban question” must be rearticulated theoretically in a way that is able to transcend the appearance of social problems as genuinely “urban” or “metropolitan problems”—problems that in actuality are rooted in the capitalist mode of production and its mode of social integration. What appears to be urban complexity must be decoded as contradictory social positions and dynamics inherent to the economic realm of production, distribution, and consumption, as well as to the political realm of domination and state power. In a more narrow sense, what was formulated as “new urban sociology” against older approaches aimed at a definition of “urban problems” or of the “urban question” centered not primarily around geographical concepts of spatial centrality or ecological notions of the city as a natural organization, but instead around the problem of the reproduction of a given set of social relations under the conditions of capital’s accumulation and its problems of valorization. With regard to general Marxist assumptions on the functional role of the state in maintaining the socioeconomic order of capitalist production, scholars such as Manuel Castells (born 1942) have stressed the importance of state intervention and state provisions in order to secure the capitalist mode of production against its own inherent social contradictions and crisis tendencies.30 Castells in particular argued that maintaining the general conditions of capitalist production needs state-organized “collective consumption,” i.e., the provision of housing, education, transport, and other services through welfare state arrangements. They aim at regulating the costs of reproducing labor power as a commodity, and therefore function as stabilizer of social relations under capitalism. In addition, to the extent that it is the working class that is mainly concentrated in cities, for Castells, the process of collective consumption, its strategic function, as well as the conflicts evolving around its implementation and performance, gives meaning to the “urban question.” According to Castells, what structures daily life in the social life in the metropolis is the problem of social reproduction under capitalism, mediated through state intervention and social conflicts, in contests over its implementation and benefits.31

  30 See Castells, The Urban Question. For an extensive discussion on Marxist approaches toward the city, see Peter Saunders, Social Theory and the Urban Question (London: 1981). 31 For a short synopsis of the interrelation between the “urban question,” collective consumption, state intervention, and the crisis tendencies of capitalism see, for example, Manuel Castells, City, Class and Power (London: 1978), 3: “Fundamentally the urban question refers to the organisation of the means of collective consumption at the basis of the daily life of all social groups: housing, education, health, culture, commerce,



80 | J AN K EMPER

In Castells’s narrative, social life in the metropolis and its socio-spatial patterning have no inherent explanatory value but rather can be explained through the conceptual linkage of the capitalist mode of production, forms of state regulation, and protest movements. Furthermore, from a pragmatic perspective, this conception of urban social theory claims not only to present valid knowledge for providing a description and explanation of so-called urban social realities, but also as an emancipatory conception of urban social theory toward social change. Similar to the Chicago School approach, the functional analysis of the “new urban sociology” is concerned with collectively organized efforts regarding social order. Quite different from the Chicago School, however, it does not aim at collectively preserving an existing urban milieu against a feared breakdown of social control. Instead, it tries to orient political praxis toward a collectively organized social change. Discourse, Culture, and Recognition While critical urban social theory in its focus on capitalist economy, state regulation, and social conflict dominated urban sociology’s theoretical practice in the decades after the turmoil of the 1960s, in recent years, urban social theory has moved to having an engagement with concepts of discourse and culture in the investigation of metropolitan social life. Similar to general tendencies in overall social theory, this renewed interest in the symbolic realm of city life (in metaphors, images, and aesthetics) in urban social theory has questioned established disciplinary boundaries. Moreover, it is accompanied by an epistemological distrust toward universal claims regarding the metropolis’s nature or social function.

    transport, etc. In advanced capitalism it expresses the fundamental contradicttion between, on the one hand, the increasing socialisation of consumption (as a result of the concentration of capital and the means of production), and on the other hand, the capitalist logic of the production and distribution of its means of consumption, the outcome of which is a deepening crisis in this sector at the same time as popular protest demands an amelioration of the collective material conditions of daily existence. In attempt to resolve these contradictions and their resulting conflicts, the state increasingly intervenes in the city; but, as an expression of a class society, the state in practice acts according to the relations of forces between classes and social groups, generally in favour of the hegemonic fraction of the dominant classes. It is in this way that specified problems become globalised, the urban question increasingly relates the state to daily life, and provokes political crisis.”



E XPLANANS

VS.

EXPLANANDUM | 81

The growing perspective on cities in their discursive and cultural dimensions rejects both the Chicago School’s invocation of universal, “natural” laws of metropolitan life as well as the critical claim for abstract and unobservable entities that have to be grasped theoretically. Instead, it features the recognition of differences (in cities as well as between them) rather than the search for the urban form of social life. It also stresses the generative potential of symboliccultural practices in producing, defining, and “doing” a city’s social practices as central to the analysis of the metropolitan situation.32 Although claiming the importance of discourse and culture in shaping metropolitan daily life does not necessarily mean the refusal of any social context that finds its expression in discursive and cultural levels, the analytical focus on how cities are constituted symbolically often seems to be combined with a rejection of the idea of representation of an underlying social structure through its symbolic forms. Instead, explanatory emphasis is placed on the symbolic-cultural realm as a social force on its own. Research that follows postmodern trends in urban sociology focuses on how using signs and symbols actively constructs a city’s meaning and social order, rather than treating them as an ideological reaction to preexisting social realities.33 How does this trend, then, line up with the two different trajectories of urban social theory under consideration here—explaining social order, social action, and social change as evoked by a given pattern of certain urban spatial structures and distinctive urban sets of social relations on the one hand and deciphering the appearance of so-called urban spatial and social issues as the surface of underlying, less obvious social relations structuring social order, social action, and social change on the other? In the degree to which some of the recent literature treats the symbolic-cultural dimension as independent from broader social contexts, more structuring social practices than structured by social practices, it renews the idea of distinctive urban milieus that are defined not so much through

  32 For an influential description of this movement as a paradigm shift in urban social theory, see Anthony D. King, “Introduction: Cities, Texts and Paradigms,” in RePresenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st-Century Metropolis, ed. Anthony D. King (New York: 1996), 1–19. 33 For example, Rob Shields appears to be arguing in this direction when he insists on acknowledging the urban in “its virtuality and hence treat it as a dynamic object of knowledge,” in order to open up “the intangible to social science analysis.” Rob Shields, “The Virtuality of Urban Culture: Blanks, Dark Moments and Blind Fields,” in Die Wirklichkeit der Städte, ed. Helmuth Berking and Martina Löw (Baden-Baden: 2005), 384–85.



82 | J AN K EMPER

socio-spatial issues but rather as a system of signs, symbols, and their interrelation, which (consciously or not) acts as explanans of what is and what happens in the modern metropolis. Regarding urban social theory’s affiliation with politics and practical affairs, the notion of (different) urban symbolic-cultural milieus effectively shaping social life seems to obviously overlap with calls for recognition of the customs, practices, and identities that are produced by them. To think of the “urban question” in terms of discourse and culture appears closely connected to appeals for freedom from threatening totalitarian impulses—not so much in defense of an individual’s autonomy against the overwhelming social forces of society, as Simmel’s metropolis essay suggests, but rather in defense of the seemingly particular habits of social groups and communities against their feared transfer into sameness.

III. C ONCLUSION : T HE M ETROPOLIS

IN

U RBAN S OCIOLOGY

Urban sociology is by no means a singular entity. Indeed, it might be better described as an unsettled disciplinary field that has unclear boundaries and has numerous overlaps with, for example, the broader field of urban studies. Nevertheless, or precisely for this reason, urban sociology’s continual need for stability has established a broad range of concepts that all aim to define the discipline’s vague and contested subject matter. In this essay, I have questioned the conceptual structure of urban sociology that emerged out of this situation. Urban social theory—urban sociology’s theoretical practice—made and continues to make use of certain constants (or leitmotifs) in order to describe and determine social phenomena labeled as “urban.” In so far as each of these basic approaches can be criticized from the perspective of the others, they could be read as the epistemological positions and components that intellectually span the field of urban sociology. As an entry point for their analysis, I chose a two-coded reading grid, based on the codes explanans vs. explanandum and freedom vs. cohesion. With this systematic orientation, I reconsidered the conceptual history of urban sociology. Initially, I looked at the idea of a certain urban mindset and a distinctive urban social behavior, constituted by the emerging of modern society, and first formulated by Georg Simmel. Second, I depicted the basic ecologist assumptions of Robert E. Park’s conception of the city as the place of social integration through a renewing of social control. Third, I exposed Manuel Castells’s theoretical an-



E XPLANANS

VS.

EXPLANANDUM | 83

swer to the “urban question,” which is the recognition of the urban process as process of collective consumption. Fourth, I followed urban social theory on its path toward poststructuralism and postmodernism. Reading the conceptual history of urban sociology in this way reveals four modes of urban social theory that structure the field of urban sociology. Epistemologically, urban social theory approaches the metropolis in two different ways. First, it treats the metropolis as a distinctive milieu (or as a container for different milieus), presenting an already existing structure of relations. Social phenomena labeled as “urban” are explained due to the conditions the urban condition entails. Therefore, emphasis is on the effects that the urban milieu (or milieus) evoke(s). This is the common perspective of traditional urban sociology, as represented in the Chicago School, and of postmodern approaches toward the city. While quite different in defining the urban situation substantially (in ecologist terms as a constellation of natural areas and in postmodern terms as a cultural arrangement), they both handle the metropolis formally as an alreadygiven set of relations that ought to explain the various social patterns of urban social life (a). Second, the metropolis is viewed as the arena of overall social forces that lie beneath its so-called urban surface. They constitute a social and environmental situation that we experience as “urban.” Emphasis is on the assumed-to-be abstract social preconditions, on latent content, as the so-called urban situation is symptomatic (b). This is definitely claimed by Marxist approaches toward the city. However, it is also claimed by Simmel, who understood the metropolis as the manifest site of the latent processes of developing modernity. In a practico-ideological perspective, urban sociology can be described as divided between a mode of theory emphasizing the freedom of the metropolis (1), and a mode of theory emphasizing social cohesion (2). While the former mode formulates its view on the metropolis in order to stress its ability to promote individuation (Simmel) or to enable the freedom and diversity of different social groups and communities (postmodern approaches), the latter analyzes the metropolis as a stage for the reconfiguration of social order. This is done either in the defense of a given status quo (the Chicago School) or in favor of an anticipated common good (the new urban sociology). There is no doubt that these different views on the metropolis in themselves answer social problems external to them and that the conceptual conjuncture in urban sociology is shaped by the social changes the field takes into account (aware of it or not). Nevertheless, as analytical paradigms relatively autonomous from the wider social fabric, each of these different views offer definitions of the “urban question” and ways to interpret the metropolis that allow people to stress



84 | J AN K EMPER

and to downplay certain aspects of “urban” social life at the same time. They either enable an analysis of social phenomena as rooted in a given milieu, labeled “urban,” allowing for research into its actual effects while simultaneously courting the danger of fetishizing the existing “urban” situation and concealing broader social contexts. Or they enable the deconstruction of an existing “urban” situation with regard to social universals, allowing for insights into macro social processes but entailing the dangers of pure theorizing and abstract knowledge. They either highlight the city’s potentials for freedom (of individuals or of different social groups) but tend to neglect any concern for social cohesion. Or they enable the stressing of the city as a place to (re-)invent social order but tend to negate concerns for individual freedom or for a social group’s autonomy. Cognizance of the different ways of theorizing a field of study does not entail a need for their homogenization rather, as Richard Brown suggests in “Historical Science as Linguistic Figuration,” it allows for and obliges intellectual choices that ought to be expressions of deliberation and responsibility in theoretical practice.34

  34 Richard H. Brown, “Historical Science,” 701.





The Significance of the Metropolis R ICHARD R ODGER

“Metropolis” is a term that has come to be widely used in the twentieth century with reference to large urban settlements. Often, rather loosely, “metropolis” is applied to any large city, though the word is more specifically used with reference to the chief city of a country with the definite article preceding it—the metropolis. The relationship between the principal city of a country and the state is an axis of power, a tension that is inescapable when considering the modern use of the term “metropolis.”1 The overtones of a dark, dislocating experience associated with the metropolis were brilliantly captured in the dystopia of Fritz Lang’s German expressionist film, Metropolis, produced in Berlin in 1927 in which themes of large-scale and non-utopian urban living prevailed. The original Greek meaning, literally the “mother city” to smaller settlements, is explicitly concerned with urban scale. It is this apex to the networked city to which this essay turns first, exploring some of the earlier usages of the terms “metropolis” and “metropolitan.” Attention is then directed to considering when the terms entered into common parlance, and under what influences. Early references to the metropolis were religious, based as they were on a particular meaning of metropolis as the chief ecclesiastical province of a bishop, and the spatial extent of a bishop’s jurisdictional reach was sometimes de-

  1

See Derek Keene, “Metropolitan Comparisons: London as a City-State,” Historical Research 77 (2004): 459–80; Ibid., “Ideas of the Metropolis,” Historical Research 84 (2011): 378–98, accessed January 18, 2011, doi: 10.1111/j.1468–2281.2010.00563.x. I am grateful to Rosemary Sweet for bringing this to my attention.



86 | R ICHARD RODGER

scribed as “metropolitical.”2 An early example in England is in the chronicler Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (completed in approximately AD 731), where sixth-century Canterbury is described as the “metropolis” of King Ethelbert’s imperium, later translated into the vernacular as “the 3 chief city of all his realm.” The mission to reestablish the Christian church in Anglo-Saxon England gave a specific meaning to the concept of the “mother city,” when Canterbury, and subsequently York, were designated as metropolitan sees. This ecclesiastical designation has persisted, whether in reference to a cathedral city or to the heads of the ecclesiastical hierarchy—the archbishop and bishops—based in it.4 In a similar reference to the centralized power of the church, it was noted that the principal Scottish location of the bishops was moved to St Andrew’s.5 The secular usage of “metropolis,” in comparison, seems not to have been widely employed until the emergence of London in the seventeenth century as the political and cultural center of England, as well as its capital city. In 1636, the English dramatist William Davenant reflected on the preeminence of London: “O to live here I’ th’ fair metropolis / Of our great isle.”6 Dudley Lord North’s poem entitled “Metropolis” celebrated in 1659 the attractions of the fashionable west end of London. In 1667, John Dryden published his poem “Annus Mirabilis” with reference to the tragedies of fire, war, and plague in the years of 1665 to 1666. He addressed the capital city reverentially from his rural retreat: “To the Metropolis of Great Britain, the most renowned [...] city of London.”7

  2

See for example Act 5 Geo. III c.26 Preamble “The Bishoprick [was] united to the

3

Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum [Ecclesiastical History of the English

Prouince and Metropolitical Iurisdiction of York.” People] (731), Book 1, chapter 25. For a translation, see L. Sherley-Price, A History of the English Church and People (Harmondsworth: 1955), 70. 4

Liverpool, for example, has its metropolitan cathedral.

5

William Stewart, The buik of (sic) the croniclis of Scotland; or, A metrical version of the History of Hector Boece, [Book of the Chronicles of Scotland], vol. 2, (London: 1858), 425: “The bischopis sait . Fra Abirnethie translatit [...] To Sanct Androis Metropolus of all Scotland to be.” Stewart’s translation of Hector Boece’s 1527 Scotorum Historiae.

6

Sir William Davenant, The Wits, as quoted in Thomas N. Corns, A History of Seventeenth-century English Literature, (Oxford: 2007), 196.

7

Dudley, Lord North, “Metropolis,” in A Forest Promiscuous of Several Seasons Predictions (London: 1659), 17–18. This was reproduced in Lawrence Manley, Lit-



T HE S IGNIFICANCE OF

THE

M ETROPOLIS | 87

During the eighteenth century, the position of London was strengthened. It became the largest city in Europe in terms of population and as its political, social, and cultural importance developed within Britain. So, not surprisingly, several examples of the term “metropolis” can be found in statements about London. It was described in a well-known survey in 1720 as “the Metropolis and Glory of the Kingdom,” and referred to in a letter by the British prime minister, the Earl of Shelbourne, in 1783 as “London, the Metropolis of Great Britain.”8 On the title page of his Anecdotes of the English Language, the antiquarian and lexicographer Samuel Pegge referred to “the natives of the metropolis.”9 As a proposal for street improvements noted in 1755, the term “metropolis” was used in relation to Edinburgh before the Act of Union 1707 with England.10 Edinburgh, the “Athens of the North,” was also described as a metropolis in 1816 by Sir Walter Scott in one of his Waverley novels. He contrasted “our metropolis of law, by which I mean Edinburgh[...] [with] our metropolis and mart of gain, whereby I insinuate Glasgow.”11 Just a few years later in 1829, the watercolorist Thomas Shepherd confidently stated in his book Modern Athens that “The Metropolis of Scotland is inferior to none of the cities of Europe.”12 Despite this rather grand claim, it was in the 1820s and 1830s—when the new buildings and streets of regency London so impressed observers from home and abroad—that the term “metropolis” became synonymous with the British capital.13 As the center of government, trading, and financial activity, London was increasingly recognized as of a different order—sui generis—in magnitude and importance in comparison to other towns and cities in the country.14 This designation also carried overtones of social and cultural superiority so that by the 1840s, London was frequently

    erature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: 1995), 184. See also the Oxford English Dictionary Online. 8

John Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster (London: 1720), 1; D. George, London Life in the XVIIIth Century (London: 1925), 63.

9

Samuel Pegge, Anecdotes of the English Language (London: 1814 [1796]).

10 Alexander John Youngson, The Making of Classical Edinburgh (Edinburgh: 1966), 5. 11 Walter Scott, Tales of my Landlord: The Black Dwarf (Edinburgh: 1816), 3. 12 Thomas Homser Shepherd, preface to Modern Athens (London: 1829), iii. 13 Marquis de Vermont, London and Paris, or Comparative Sketches (London: 1823), 181. 14 See for example, John Corry, The English Metropolis, or, London in the Year 1820 (London: 1820); James Grant, The Great Metropolis (London: 1836).



88 | R ICHARD RODGER

distinguished from the rest of the country, as in the distinction made between the “metropolis” and the “provinces.”15 “Metropolis” has a lengthy pedigree in English. It was, however, urban sprawl that encouraged a wider use of the adjective “metropolitan.” By engulfing surrounding settlements, London extended the concept of territoriality and in so doing the term “metropolitan” acquired a currency to describe that process.16 Guidebooks and maps began to incorporate areas on the fringe of London, nineteenth-century civil registration and census enumeration districts required strict boundaries, as did the jurisdictional reach of the Metropolitan Police Force (1823), Metropolitan Sewer Commission (1840), Metropolitan Board of Works (1855), and other agencies, as is shown below. Therefore the institutional aspects of the governance of London brought the adjective “metropolitan” into widespread usage. Thus a geopolitical dimension exists in a secular setting in a way that is parallel to the metropolitical dimensions of religious administration. “Metropolitan” was an adjective that was synonymous with “city wide,” and this acquired formal status in 1889 with the formation of London County Council (LCC). This consolidated the administration of a large number of vestries and the Metropolitan Board of Works that had, until 1889, governed London. A decade later, twenty-eight metropolitan boroughs were created to implement the policies of the LCC. London’s two-tier system of government, reinforced by the creation of the “metropolitan” boroughs in 1899, was a product of tensions between suburban localist interests and the need for area-wide administration. Such tensions have been designated “the metropolitan problem” by English political analysts, and the study of “metropolitan” governmental reform has been described as “metropology.”17 Thus by the early twentieth century, a concept of the metropolitan region of Greater London had been created.18 This metropolitan region was defined as

  15 Harold James Dyos, “Greater and Greater London: Metropolis and Provinces in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” Reprinted in David Cannadine and David Reeder, eds., Exploring the Urban Past (Cambridge: 1982), 37–55. 16 Ken Young and Patricia L. Garside, Metropolitan London: Politics and Urban Change 1837–1981 (London: 1982), 16–20. 17 Ken Young, “‘Metropology’ Revisited: On the Political Integration of Metropolitan Areas” in Essays on the Study of Urban Politics, ed. Ken Young (London: 1975), 135; Theo Barker, “London: A Unique Megalopolis,” in Megalopolis, ed. Theodore Cardwell Barker and Anthony Sutcliffe (London: 1993), 43–60. 18 Anthony Sutcliffe, ed., Metropolis 1890–1940 (London: 1984), 3.



T HE S IGNIFICANCE OF

THE

M ETROPOLIS | 89

including all those people to whom London constituted their “town,” which is to say the city to which they related in respect of their business, news and information, and cultural and social points of reference.19 This regional perspective that developed at the end of the nineteenth century thus created space for other regional centers to which inhabitants related for economic, social, cultural, and political purposes to also adopt the concept of “metropolis.” This phenomenon has been perpetuated through such terms as “coal metropolis” (Cardiff), “cottonopolis” (Manchester), and “worstedopolis” (Bradford). Thus, important regional centers became an axis for the surrounding area based usually on a dominant industrial product. English regionalism was not created in this way, but these processes undoubtedly reinforced it. The failure to include London in the reform of English local government in 1835 meant it lacked the political and administrative cohesion of other English boroughs. London lacked focus as a result and this allowed a freer rein to the various boards and organizations that emerged to manage affairs in the capital.20 As a corollary, regional urban centers—and towns generally—acquired more freedom to maneuver: central and local government were often in opposition and London lacked a voice in that dialogue until the end of the nineteenth century. Though Patrick Geddes’ term “conurbation” has proved very durable,21 and “megalopolis” has never gained ground in Britain, the term “metropolitan” was given a new administrative dimension in 1974 with the creation of six metropolitan counties as the unit of provincial local government for urbanized regions.22

I. L ONG - TERM I NTEREST IN “M ETROPOLIS ” AND “M ETROPOLITAN ” To understand in more detail how the terms “metropolis” and “metropolitan” have been used, an analysis of different sources has been conducted. This

  19 Halford J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, 2nd ed. (Oxford: 1930). 20 See for example: John Davis, Reforming London: The London Government Problem, 1855–1900 (Oxford: 1988); ibid., “Central Government and the Towns,” in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, ed. Martin James Daunton, vol. 3 (Cambridge: 2000), 261–86. 21 Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution (London: 1915), 34–47. 22 Tyne and Wear, West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, Greater Manchester, Merseyside, and West Midlands.



90 | R ICHARD RODGER

involves an investigation of how often, and to some extent in what context, the words have appeared in various indexes and newspapers. Three sources provide an insight into the long-term trends in both book production and the frequency of references to the words “metropolis” and “metropolitan.” The first of these cases involves Early English Books Online (EEBO).23 This online resource covers the period from 1473 to 1700. It reveals that 2 to 3 percent of works and 15 percent of citations to both the words “metropolis” and “metropolitan” occurred in the 125 years leading up to 1600, and mostly these were in the years after 1540. Perhaps predictably, given the religious turmoil of the English Reformation, the majority of these references were to the religious jurisdiction of the bishops; civil mention of towns and cities was less common. Consequently, with 97 percent of works and 85 percent of citations in the seventeenth century, it was evident that the terms “metropolis” and “metropolitan” occurred increasingly frequently, as the moving average and rising trend in figure 1 illustrates. Prominent literary figures, men such as Christopher Marlowe, Richard Hakluyt, John Milton, and William Shakespeare, also appeared in this lexicographical list as using the “metropolis” and “metropolitan” motifs. So too did mapmakers John Speed and Gerhard Mercator. Most numerous, though, were antiquarians—Robert Lewes, Peter Heylen, Henry Hammond—and foreigners writing in English such as travelers Adam Olearius and Pietro della Valle. Perhaps the most prodigious of writers, however, was the Reverend Peter Heylyn (1600–1662), chaplain to Charles I, who referred to the two terms in 115 works no less than on 451 occasions. Further analysis would be required to unravel the civil and religious references to the metropolitanism identified in these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century tracts. However, initial conclusions suggest that civil and religious references were often intertwined by contemporaries in their accounts of the jurisdictional reach and spatial dominance of church administration. Town, place, and power were therefore intertwined; it was just ecclesiastical rather than civil power.

  23 Early English Books Online, http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.webfeat.lib.ed.ac.uk/ home.



T HE S IGNIFICANCE OF

THE

M ETROPOLIS | 91

Figure 1: Annual citations in English of “metropolis” and “metropolitan,” 1600–1700 (seven-year moving averages) PHWURSROLV PHWURSROLWDQYDULDQWV SHU0RY$YJPHWURSROLWDQYDULDQWV SHU0RY$YJPHWURSROLV

            

























Source: Based on Early English Books Online

Although not without its problems, an analysis of over 11,000 citations of the terms “metropolis” and “metropolitan” revealed 54 percent more references to “metropolitan” than to “metropolis” in seventeenth-century books. This is reflected in figure 1 in the fact that almost throughout the seventeenth century, the grey line of the references to “metropolis” was below that of the “metropolitan” line. The use of the adjective, then, describing something pertaining or attached to a physical extent or jurisdiction is a reflection of how common it was to be governed by an ecclesiastical body and this written about extensively. Even using a moving average, however, cannot obscure the year-to-year fluctuations in the frequency with which the two terms were used. Significantly, though, the use of the noun “metropolis” was on a gently rising trend throughout the seventeenth century, and both terms surged during the period of the English Civil War (1642–1651), the Commonwealth (1649–1653), and Protectorate (1653– 1659). The relationship between church and state was fundamental to English politics in this period, and continued thereafter with a similar, if reduced, degree of synchronicity. In the years 1473 to 1600, 1.7 percent of books published



92 | R ICHARD RODGER

included at least one reference to “metropolis” or “metropolitan.”; during the seventeenth century, 2.1 percent of over 110,000 books catalogued did so.24 During the eighteenth century and in the course of over 197,000 published works, the interest in the metropolis and metropolitanism increased appreciably (see table 1). By 1700, every seventh book published included some reference to these two terms, and of course, many made multiple references to the keywords. The step change was notable in the 1750s, when British overseas expansion was pronounced and when the relationship of colonies to the motherland or metropole came under closer scrutiny. Hence the adjective “metropolitan” was less prominent in the seventeenth century than in the sixteenth, as the religious connotations receded and those of the state and its functional relationship the empire grew in significance. In this context, Britain, England, and London were metropoles or the metropolis and the word grew in significance and currency.

Table 1: Citations of “metropolis” and “metropolitan” in eighteenth-century works Metropolis

Metropolitan

1700–1709

5.7

4.9

1710–1719

5.1

3.7

1720–1729

7.7

4.5

1730–1739

8.4

4.2

1740–1749

9.8

3.6

1750–1759

12.7

3.4

1760–1769

12.6

3.0

1770–1779

13.5

3.2

1780–1789

15.2

3.0

  24 There were multiple references to the two words in many books but it was “metropolitan” that was cited more frequently within a book than “metropolis.” The ratio was about 3:2 in the period of 1600 to 1700 and 2:1 in the period of 1473 to 1600.



T HE S IGNIFICANCE OF

Metropolis

THE

M ETROPOLIS | 93

Metropolitan

1790–1799

16.8

3.4

Average

12.1

3.5

Source: Eighteenth Century Collections Online

A closer inspection of the Eighteenth Century Collections Online reveals important features relating to the use of the term “metropolis.” From more than one-third of all books in English at the beginning of the century to less one in seven by 1800 constituted a significant decline in the proportion of religious and philosophical works using the term. This was mirrored in the shift to a more secular outlook. The proportion of social-science topics associated with politics, society, trade, and industry rose appreciably in the last third of the century as industrialization and urbanization gained pace. Publications concerned with language and literature were also increasing in much the same way as in social sciences—rather unevenly in the early eighteenth century but then with a more sustained proportionate increase in the last decades before 1800. Though still very numerous, proportionately, historical and geographical uses of “metropolis” declined slightly in the eighteenth century and, together with the language and literature and social-science categories, these three groupings constituted almost 70 percent of the instances of the word “metropolis” in the course of the eighteenth century. Other categories—fine art, the law, and general reference works—in which the word metropolis appeared maintained their modest place, and the medical, scientific and technological category in the 1720s is worth noting. The final row of table 2 presents comparative data for the 3.5 percent of references in the Eighteenth Century Catalogue that refer to “metropolitan.” Since this adjectival use was fairly steady throughout the eighteenth century the overall average is presented and is directly comparable to the row above, the average for “metropolis” citations. The increased use of “metropolitan” in connection with historical, geographical and legal topics is instructive, whereas in social sciences, scientific and literary topics, important areas of expansion in the use of the word “metropolis,” it was less frequently used as an adjective.



94 | R ICHARD RODGER

Table 2: Classification of “metropolis” by discipline, 1700–1799 Total

Medicine, science and technology General reference

Law

Religion and Philosophy

Literature and language

Social science

Fine arts

History and Geography 1700–09

24.5 0.6

13.6

19.3

35.9

0.9

2.5

2.6

100

1710–19

18.1 0.8

20.1

18.6

36.0

2.3

2.6

1.5

100

1720–29

23.2 1.3

12.9

25.1

28.2

1.1

4.0

4.3

100

1730–39

22.5 1.1

16.8

24.6

24.6

1.6

4.5

4.2

100

1740–49

24.5 0.7

21.5

22.1

22.0

1.7

3.9

3.6

100

1750–59

19.7 1.2

20.8

29.3

19.2

1.8

3.2

4.8

100

1760–69

20.6 1.2

19.9

30.8

16.2

2.3

4.1

5.0

100

1770–79

20.8 0.9

17.5

31.7

16.2

2.2

4.0

6.7

100

1780–89

18.8 0.7

23.9

30.7

12.9

2.5

3.2

7.2

100

1790–99

18.5 1.1

26.8

24.7

14.7

3.2

4.2

6.7

100

Average

20.1 1.0

21.7

27.3

18.0

2.4

3.8

5.7

100

Metropolitan Average

31.0 0.8

13.7

12.8

27.8

8.7

3.5

1.7

100

Source: Eighteenth Century Collections Online

The term “metropolis” assumed an areal or spatial significance as the governance of the country was redefined. With pressure to endow urban areas with new powers sought and obtained in the 1830s, local administrative responsebilities needed maps and jurisdictional powers associated with raising revenues and assigning expenditures. The introduction of civil registration in England and Wales (1837) and Scotland (1855) brought a statistical dimension into view,



T HE S IGNIFICANCE OF

THE

M ETROPOLIS | 95

with comparable data on density of population and causes of mortality. The towns and cities defined themselves in contrast to and in opposition to London and its environs, and the “metropolis” and “metropolitan” served as useful terms for the tensions between central and local government. There was almost universal antagonism to the ceding of authority to London; “metropolitan” often was code for centralization. Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South (1855) conveyed this rift and the politicization of the term in the mid-nineteenth century. Parliament was complicit in this process, fearing that if it elevated London to a unitary authority then an alternative power base in the capital city would materialize. Thus emphasizing the local through the names of clubs and societies, such as the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers (a cooperative) or the Liverpool Economic and Statistical Society, was one way of stressing this anti-metropolitanism. By these various routes, “metropolis” and “metropolitan” gained a new, largely secular meaning and currency in the modern era. Reduced were the religious references to bishops and the parish-based system of governance. Meanwhile works that dealt with the largest city, London, and its relations with regional centers were on the rise. Greater literacy, the removal of taxes on newspapers, and widening political participation brought significant annual additions to the British Library (BL) shelves, and the metropolis figured prominently in this expanding print medium.25 Annual additions to the BL catalogue are shown in figure 2, as are the number references in which “metroolis” and “metropolitan” were recorded. This provides a long-term view of published works dealing with “metropolitan topics” in relation to the overall expansion of printed books. The use of a logarithmic scale enables a direct comparison to be made between the series and shows how interest in metropolitan topics maintained the same growth rate as books in general between 1810 and the mid-1850s. Thereafter, the rate of acquisition of metropolitan subject matter declined until World War I relative to the overall expansion of the catalogue. From the 1920s until the end of the twentieth century, metropolitan topics then tracked the general trend of publications, if at a lower level.

  25 The British Library is one of six repository libraries in the British Isles that has a right to a copy of every book published.



Figure 2: A comparison of al British Library Catalogue entries with those entries that mention “metropolis” and “metropolitan,” 1800-2000.

96 | R ICHARD RODGER

Note: There is a logarithmic scale for all entries on the left and one on the right for “metropolis” and “metropolitan” entries; “metropoli*” indicates entries beginning with “metropoli*” Source: British Library Catalogue



T HE S IGNIFICANCE OF

THE

M ETROPOLIS | 97

II. E XPLORING “M ETROPOLITAN ” R EFERENCES The Times (London) newspaper provides insights at another level of metropolitan analysis. The newspaper was founded in 1785 and from the first full decennial figures in the 1790s, the frequency of “metropolitan” citations increased in every decade until 1880. The crude peak of Times references to the metropolis was achieved in the 1870s with over 4,300 occurrences and the next six decades then averaged around 3,400 references before falling steeply after 1940. The decennial growth in the number of citations was most spectacular, predictably, in the first years—591 percent in the 1810s—given the low base from which the newspaper started. But it then enjoyed a sustained decennial growth rate over 120 percent between 1830 and 1870, corresponding closely to the rate of expansion identified in the British Library catalogue. Though the opening of the world’s first underground railway line, the Metropolitan line, on January 10, 1863 understandably boosted references to the word “metropolitan,” the more significant explanation for this surge in citations was largely political. London was omitted from the municipal reforms of 1835, and though there were other agencies that had an interest in the management of London, the governance of the capital between 1856 and 1889 was controlled in large part by the Metropolitan Board of Works. Any enquiry, select committee of Parliament, or other official investigation styled their reports as “metropolitan” and these were reported in newspapers.26 There were 510 such metropolitan commissions and enquiries between 1779 and 1980, and 57 percent of these conducted their proceedings between 1840 and 1889.27 A reliable indicator of change in the use of the terms “metropolis” and “metropolitan” has been obtained by the use of a logarithmic scale for the increase in citations (table 3 and figure 3). This eliminates the effect of very large and very small numbers of references and associated growth rates. Thus, the comparability between decades (figure 3) shows the sustained expansion of references to “the metropolis” until 1870, when despite the political debates concerning the formation of the London County Council, the newspaper recorded a negative growth rate in reporting metropolitan issues.

  26 David Owen, The Government of Victorian London 1855–1889 (London: 1982); Young and Garside, Metropolitan London. 27 Based on: House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, http://parlipapers.chadwyck. co.uk.



98 | R ICHARD RODGER

Table 3: Citations of “metropoli”* in the Times, 1790–1980 Increase in citations (%)

Growth rate (log value)

1800–1809

38

1.6

1810–1819

591

2.8

1820–1829

51

1.7

1830–1839

137

2.1

1840–1849

135

2.1

1850–1859

116

2.1

1860–1869

102

2.0

1870–1879

55

1.7

1880–1889

17

-1.2

1890–1899

35

-1.5

1900–1909

37

1.6

1910–1919

29

1.5

1920–1929

16

-1.2

1930–1939

3

0.5

1940–1949

69

-1.8

1950–1959

3

-0.5

1960–1969

18

1.2

1970–1979

84

1.9

Source: A Review of the Times archives from 1785–1980



T HE E S IGNIFICANCE OF

THE

M ETROPOLIS | 99

Figure 3: Decennial growth rate in the Timees’ citations of “metropoli,”* 1790–1980

 Source: Review of the Times archives 1790–19800 Note: A log value below 1.0 indicates a growth rate r of less 10%; a log value between 1.0 and 2.0 indicates a growth rate over 100% but bellow 1000%.

In the twentieth century, interest in the mettropolis fluctuated considerably with an increased interest in metropolitan issues only really surfacing again in the 1960s as local government arrangements came under the microscope in the Report of the Royal Commission on Local Government in England, known as the Redcliffe-Maud Report (1969). This increase in use was furthered in 1972 when an act of parliament revised local govvernment boundaries to include certain areas denominated as “metropolitan.”288 Thus, the local government system of county boroughs, municipal boroughs, and urban and rural districts introduced in 1835 was revised in 1972, effectivve from 1974, in England and Wales (and 1975 in Scotland). From 1974, metroppolitan boroughs were created as part of new metropolitan counties for the six laargest areas outside of Greater Lon-

 28 The Redcliffe-Maud Royal Commission repport advocated a fundamental reform of local authority boundaries and the introductioon of large unitary councils based on the principle of mixing rural and urban areas. The Labour government accepted the report, which was rejected by the Conservative government elected in 1970, following intense pressure from rural areas.



100 | R ICHARD RODGER

don. The newly created six metropolitan counties were Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Tyne and Wear, West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, and West Midlands. They were the conurbations—or “metropolitan districts” as they were officially called—based around, respectively, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Leeds, Sheffield, and Birmingham. From 1986 the Metropolitan County Councils were abolished and some of their powers assigned to the principal Metropolitan Boroughs, and others to separate authorities for fire, police, and transport. Thus the term “metropolitan” gained a new meaning and a wider currency from the 1970s onward, appearing not just in the citation indices for books and other publications but also on the road signs, garbage containers, new logos, and a multiplicity of headed notepaper and websites defining the new identities of these councils In an earlier period, the character and changing composition of metropolitan references revealed transitions over time between social sciences, science and technology, and religious and secular topics. The interrelated processes of industrialization and urbanization were reflected in and affected by linguistic changes too; the cultural contribution to the process of modernity needs no introduction. How, then in the twentieth century, with newspapers subdivided into many subject areas and sections, did the emphasis on and meaning of “metropolis” change? Were “metropolis” and “metropolitan” deployed in a particular part of the newspaper, and not in others? A detailed content analysis of the Times for a thirty-year period on either side of World War II offers a cross-sectional approach to this issue. Overall, almost half of the “metropolitan” references related to news, and a quarter to editorial and comment columns mostly associated with current affairs (figure 4). Rarely were the words used is association with pictures or people. Even with business articles, the concept of “metropolitan” was rather foreign, presumably as the city of London was itself a highly specific location, and where there were provincial connections to business then the spatial reference frame was not a metropolitan one.



Figure 4: The Times and a typology of references: “Metropolis” and “metropolitan” references, 1924–1954

T HE S IGNIFICANCE OF

Source: Review of Times archive 1924–1954

 THE

M ETROPOLIS | 101

102 | R ICHARD RODGER

Category

1924–1928

1929–1933

1934–1938

1939–1945

1946–1950

1951–1954

1924–1954

Table 4: The Times and a typology of references: “Metropolis” and “metropolitan” references, 1924–1954

Advertising

16.7

16.7

14.6

12.9

20.5

11.3

15.6

Business

5.2

6.5

5.7

6.6

3.3

2.3

5.4

Editorial/ Comment

22.7

22.4

21.3

34.1

33.9

33.3

25.4

Features

2.6

3.9

3.8

3.4

6.2

9.7

4.1

News

50.1

47.1

51.6

39.0

32.2

40.3

46.4

People

2.5

2.6

2.9

3.8

3.6

3.0

2.9

Pictures

0.2

0.7

0.0

0.2

0.3

0.0

0.2

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

Total

Source: Review of the Times archives 1920–1954

Within these broad patterns of coverage of metropolitan matters by the Times, there were some structural changes during the years from 1920s to the 1950s (see table 4). Wartime saw a steep rise in the column inches devoted to the metropolis by editorials and commentaries, and this level of political and editorial engagement with metropolitan issues continued in the first post-war decade. Conversely, with wartime mobility restricted for strategic and practical reasons, reporters were limited in the pursuit of stories. Though they stayed closer to the London headquarters of the major newspapers, perhaps surpriseingly journalists wrote less about the metropolis during the war. Whereas news and comment together accounted for 70 percent of “metropolitan” references in the 1924 to 1954 years, it actually was at its lowest level, 66 percent, between 1946 and 1950. If the cult of personality was a wartime legacy, it certainly was



T HE S IGNIFICANCE OF

THE

M ETROPOLIS | 103

not reflected in the newspaper stories associated with people. Features on the metropolis, in contrast, did expand in the immediate post war decade. This was the case for advertising too, though metropolitan references were a little more volatile in this category than others.

III. C ONCLUSION The indicators used to explore the extent, nature, and trends in the use of the words “metropolis” and “metropolitan” have been based on three major bibliographical sources: Early English Books Online, the Eighteenth Century Collections Catalogue, and the British Library catalogue. These have provided a longitudinal approach to the frequency of metropolitan references, and though none of the sources is perfect, or perfectly compatible, they are indicative, and for that reason have utility. A fourth source, the Times (London) newspaper, along with the Eighteenth Century Collections Catalogue, have been used to explore in greater detail the character of metropolitan references. The methodological approach adopted here, and begun some years ago, has been facilitated by the recent improved availability of online bibliographies. It is a methodology that might, to great benefit, be more widely applied both to sources in the English language and, for comparative purposes, to other languages. What has emerged is a very long-term acceptance and use of the word “metropolis.” Moreover, a sophisticated use of this term and of “metropolitan” as a basis to explore spatial and political relationships within and between the major cities of a country has emerged as well. Subjecting terminology to detailed examination, particularly when accompanied by an analysis of concepts and processes, enriches the study of urban history—and cross-cultural and cross-linguistic dimensions have much more to offer.29

  29 See, for example, Christian Topalov et al., eds, L’Aventure de mots de la ville: à travers le temps, les langues, les sociétés (Paris: 2010).





Metropolitan Research from a Transatlantic Perspective: Differences, Similarities, and Conceptual Diffusion M ARGIT M AYER

According to the German government, seven regions in Germany have been considered “metropolitan regions” for the last fifteen years, among them Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich, and, of course, Berlin. In 2005, however, the 130,000 Göttingers and the 160,000 Oldenburgers were also officially included in the ranks of the metropolitans. According to the German federal government's definition, Göttingen, Hanover, Braunschweig, Oldenburg, Bremen, Nuremburg, and the Rhine-Neckar Region qualify as metropoles, providing them conglomeration advantages in the European competition.1 Given the variety of connotations which the term “metropolitan” has carried over the centuries and in different countries (which are scrutinized in this volume), this recent addition of a political dimension within the German context, where the concept had so far primarily been applied to urban centers characterized by specifically cosmopolitan features, raises questions of conceptual transfer across different national contexts. Particularly, as urbanization processes intensified and urban regions have taken on new significance within global and national competition, issues of measuring, defining, and labeling these entities have emerged, and former pathdependent categorizations have become questionable or been overridden. The contrast, as well as the relationship, between North American and German usages of the term “metropolis” and its respective academic discourse and epistemologies proves particularly revealing in this regard. The US government introduced the term “metropolitan district” in 1910 when the Bureau of the

  1



“Ein Land voller Metropolen,” Tageszeitung, April 28, 2005, 9.

106 | M ARGIT M AYER

Census sought to capture the dynamic growth of rapidly expanding cities whose populations spilled over city boundaries and whose manufacturing began to move to the suburban fringe. This bureaucratic act had consequences for the development of the concept in American urban studies.2 The metropolitan form captured in the United States was shaped by the decentralization of economic activities and daily life, while, in Germany, the metropolitan concept prioritized referencing the concentration of cultural and political life in the great cosmopolitan centers. This essay seeks to tease out the implications of the different histories underlying contemporary academic discourse, as well as to trace mutual influences in transatlantic urban research. The goal is not merely precision and clarity of understanding but—given the growing pressures to instrumentalize “the metropolitan” as a marketing concept—also to refine and adjust the concept in order to retain it as an analytically useful category for researching the specific contemporary problems and potentials of today’s metropolitan regions. In other words, the goal is to show what the added value of a metropolitan perspective would be, as opposed to just plain “urban studies.”

I. C ONTRASTING THE “M ETROPOLIS ” G ERMAN ACADEMIC D ISCOURSE

IN

AMERICAN

AND

In the early 1990s, the American historian of the urban form, Robert Fishman, argued that the contemporary city had radically broken with traditional urban spatial structures. As he wrote, the city in the early 1990s “lacks what gave shape and meaning to every urban form of the past: a dominant single core and definable boundaries.”3 The city has reached a scale previously unimaginable. While the leading metropolitan centers of the last century, such as New York, London, and Berlin, spanned about a hundred square miles, the contemporary metropolis covers two to three thousand square miles and its boundaries are far from clear. It is this geographic expansion of the city into a “metropolitan form” or “to the metropolitan scale.”4 In other words, since Jane Jacobs, it is the

  2

Blake McKelvey, The Emergence of Metropolitan America, 1915–1966 (New Brunswick, NJ: 1968).

3

Robert Fishman, “Metropolis Unbound,” The Wilson Quarterly (1990, repr., Philip Kasinitz, ed., Metropolis: Center and Symbol of Our Times (New York: 1995)), 398.

4

Thomas Bender, “The New Metropolitanism and a Pluralized Public,” Harvard Design Magazine 13 (2001): 70–77.



M ETROPOLITAN R ESEARCH | 107

metropolitan agglomeration that has, in North American urban research,5 increasingly made the metropolitan region the appropriate focus for analyzing urban developments. This “metropolitan turn” in urban research—thinking in metropolitan categories instead of in the traditional binary of city vs. suburb—implies that the old dichotomies of center/periphery no longer hold and that cultural, as well as class and strata variables, can also no longer be attributed along a center/periphery pattern or along the Chicago School’s concept of concentric rings. The social ecology perspective of University of Chicago sociologists Robert Park and Ernest Burgess (based on studies of the city of Chicago) argued that as a result of the urban land market, social classes sorted themselves out spatially. Older “inner ring” suburbs, which they defined as working class and poor, and newer “outer ring” suburbs, which they defined as middle class, became rings in which real estate values were based on the relationship of the ring to the central business district. Sprawling metropolitan regions, by contrast, are structured by different residential patterns. While some authors describe polynuclear patchworks based on the premise of territorial fragmentation and decentralization of urban activities shifting toward “edge cities” or “technoburbs,” others continue to identify central cities, as well as inner and outer ring suburbs. Along with these changing spatial patterns are new socioeconomic ones: Poor people now inhabit central cities, whereas more affluent city dwellers are located around this center. Tract suburbs, formerly housing the middle classes, have become depressing places due to their lack of public spaces and cultural institutions, and surrounding these pools of suburban working class drabness are “outer” suburbs containing more affluent middle and upper class residents.6 But these patterns seem in constant flux, as back-to-the-city movements have upgraded certain neighborhoods close to the central business districts and exclusive communities have emerged in well-located or well-defended parts of inner suburbs, making the reality of sociospatial patterns of the metropolitan region increasingly complex. The “metropolitan turn” in North American urban research also implied that many features and practices that used to be seen as applying exclusively to cities (such as segregation, ghettoization, congestion, etc.) became recognized as widespread, also in what used to be called suburbs (which actually are no longer sub-urbs). As these “typically urban” features became scattered across the whole

  5

Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations (New York: 1984).

6

See for example Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom, Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century (Lawrence, KS: 2001).



108 | M ARGIT M AYER

metropolitan region, researchers recognized that, conversely, the concept of the “suburb” was no longer an adequate category for describing the expanding varieties of settlement forms outside of core cities. The relations between them are no longer hierarchical but lateral, and in many respects, the outlying settlements have become autonomous of the former center. In fact, their inhabitants no longer necessarily relate to the center at all. In order to capture this demographic shift toward exurban regions, North American urban researchers have, since the 1980s, begun to speak of “metropolitanization.” This new conceptual language is also reflected in university “Metropolitan Studies” programs that, in their various self-presentations, assume that “urbanization” increasingly manifests itself in a variety of forms that transcend that of the traditional, self-enclosed city. Their object of study is therefore no longer merely the core and its surrounding quarters, but rather the production of different spatial configurations and the new problems and questions thrown up by these new configurations, such as problems of political steering, of administrative coordination, and of adequate political representation across the multiply fragmented metropolitan region. Whether Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, or advanced programs,7 all of these interdisciplinary initiatives share a focus on questions that have most explicitly been put on the agenda by the so-called Los Angeles School—Ed Soja, Michael Dear, Allen Scott, and others. They are interested in the transformation of urban form from monocentric to polycentric regions, to exopoles, edge cities, or megacities. In other words, in contrast to the Chicago School tradition, they inquire about, teach, and research regionalization and metropolitanization processes (as well as the questions of political regulation and governance they raise); the construction of local public spheres under such fragmented conditions; and the cultural transformations and sociopolitical contestations in these

  7

See for example the Bachelor of Arts at New York University (http://www.nyu.edu/ pages/metro.studies/), the Master of Arts in Metropolitan Studies at Arizona State University in Phoenix (http://www.west.asu.edu/koptiuch/MetroStudiesMA/vision. html), the Great Cities Program at the University of Illinois in Chicago (http://www. uic.edu/homeindex/gc_chancellor.shtml), and the Global Metropolitan Studies Center at the University of California at Berkeley, which not only houses graduate and undergraduate curricula, but also supports research as one of the strategic initiatives to mark a new generation of scholarship (http://metrostudies.berkeley.edu/index.html). However, recent endeavors such as the Center for Metropolitan Studies in Berlin have been launched in Germany to draw on both European conceptions as well as the Anglo-American debate in metropolitan research (http://www.metropolitanstudies.de).



M ETROPOLITAN R ESEARCH | 109

spaces. In particular, the question specifically of “integration” in the context of a fragmented and sprawling metropolitan region is very much on the agenda of this research. A focus on metropolitan governance, in this context, recasts traditional definitions of urban political processes by suggesting overlapping, fluid conceptions of the space of urban politics and by focusing on networks, projectbased decision-making (rather than rational comprehensive planning), and the collaboration of state and non-state actors. In spite of its complexity, the concept of “metropolitan” employed here does not convey much more than the pragmatic claim to analyze the spatial, economic, and political transformations of urbanization processes, whether in its historical or contemporary constellation. In this way, it differs significantly from the more normative concept of the “metropolis” widely used in German academic debate, which associates the term (unlike the federal government) primarily with cities that: • have a certain minimum size of population and density and a certain scale and

intensity of economic and cultural activities; • represent a qualitative degree of something cosmopolitan, which radiates a certain flair and atmosphere; • possess significant symbolic power, aura, or collective memory, or what is often referred to as a strong “metropolitan identity” and a surplus of symbolic capital; • which in turn, makes them into magnets that attract further immigration, further diversity and difference, such as creative classes and creative milieus, i.e., the stuff that makes for “cosmopolitanism.”8 Some of the proponents of this European concept of the “metropolis” define these cities then, as “central places of a society.”9 They are thought of as the opposite of provincial-homogeneous localities—a definition that would of course exclude significant components of, if not entire, North American “metro-

  8

See Dirk Matejovski, ed., Metropolen. Laboratorien der Moderne (Frankfurt: 2000); See also Heinz Reif, “Metropolises: History, Concepts, Methodologies,” in this volume.

9

See Wolfgang Kaschuba, “Stadtluft macht frei? Metropolen als Experimentierfelder für Sinndeutungen und Lebensentwürfe” (lecture, Symposium of the Leibniz Gemeinschaft and the Thomas Morus Akademie “Metropolen. Kulturelle, soziale, politische, ökonomische Deutungsansätze,” Berlin, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, October 13, 2004).



110 | M ARGIT M AYER

politan regions.” This concept of the “metropolis,” which is rather prevalent in German research, is strongly shaped by Paris and London of the nineteenth century, the first European metropoles, which were succeeded by Berlin and Vienna. These metropolises were also considered showcases of their respective nations and defined by their unique identities, their citoyen-culture, and their projections of power. Metropolitan research in this vein draws, for its perspective and hypotheses, on this “surplus.” It assumes that the metropolis is more than its many functions, that some extra value is responsible for its “magnet function,” or “magnetic force,”10 and that, as Heinz Reif argues, to this day, it is characterized by “cosmopolitanism, innovative capacity, self-reflection, plurality, heterogeneity, hybridity, and ambivalence […].”11 The founding document of the Transatlantic Graduate Program (Transatlantisches Graduiertenkolleg),12 a joint endeavor of urbanists from Berlin’s three universities located at the Center for Metropolitan Studies, also described—in outlining its research program—the metropolis as an “obvious and fascinating special case (Sonderfall) of the urban,” which dominates on the basis of its special position (Sonderstellung),which it is said to have been able to develop due to its position “at the center of accelerated industrial change,” since the nineteenth century.13 In spite of the envisaged transatlantic perspective of this program, American metropoles such as Los Angeles, which reached maturity only after the Fordist period, would not fit this definition. The outline of the research endeavor defined the “particular big cities” to be studied as “locations of highest cultural achievements,” as laboratories and stages for modern forms of societalization, as workshops and symbols of modernity, and as the most significant places of modern societalization. The metropolis to be studied is defined as a “large, particular, and very complex city with a far reaching hinterland, that thrives on engaging with the foreign/other, and, as a consequence, is open to the world.” The goal of the program is to identify the differences between big cities (such as Saarbrücken, Leipzig, Baltimore, or Portland) and cities with a “metropolitan” character such as New York or Berlin.14

  10 Reif, “Metropolises,” 34-35. 11 Ibid, 46. 12 “Transatlantisches Graduiertenkolleg Berlin–New York. Geschichte und Kultur der Metropolen im 20. Jahrhundert,” 2004. 13 Ibid., 4. My translation. See also Reif, “Metropolises.” 14 Ibid., 5–7. My translation. See also Reif, “Metropolises.”



M ETROPOLITAN R ESEARCH | 111

Thus, the agenda of metropolitan studies in Berlin, at least as framed by some of its founders, is different than that which is pursued in Berkeley, California, Chicago, Phoenix, or New York. The European-modeled and normative agenda, as expressed in the notion of “metropolis” as used here, however, clashes with trends both political and academic, and challenges the suitability of this culturally imbued concept for providing analytically helpful frameworks for contemporary urban questions. It is noteworthy that the term “metropolis” was not used during the era when Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and London actually embodied the pride of their respective bourgeois societies and provided the stage for their representation. Instead, it became widely popular, both in research and in politics, at the moment when these cities might have lost their former significance and function. This argument has been suggested by Gerwin Zohlen, who claims that the widespread adoption of the term “metropolis” reflects the changing meaning of the city in our culture: far from representing the epitome of bourgeois society, the city itself has now become object of commercialization.15 At the point where large cities are becoming increasingly characterized by their disintegration and fragmentation, the concept seems to have turned, instead, into a marketing concept, valuable within the competitive strategies for image enhancement and the design of “urbanity,” for fabricating public spheres and staging “integration” efforts. It has also become useful for creating a particular type of urban studies—namely metropolitan studies, which is playing an increasingly important role in academic self-legitimation.

  15 “The concept (of the metropolis) therefore almost exactly reflects the change in meaning of the city in late-modernity. It is by no means the pride of the society of burghers, their stage to perform on [...] the city has now itself become an object of marketing.[..].They are hardly spaces and, that is to say, places, of public of its own kind.” [“Ziemlich exakt reflektiert der (Metropolen-)Begriff damit die Bedeutungsveränderung der Stadt in unserer Spätkultur. Beileibe ist sie nicht mehr der Stolz der BürgerGesellschaft, eine Bühne ihres Auftretens […] die Stadt (ist) jetzt selbst zum Objekt der Vermarktung geworden […] Räume und, scilicet, Orte einer Öffentlichkeit sui generis sind sie kaum mehr.”] Gerwin Zohlen, “Metropole als Metapher,” in Mythos Metropole, ed. Gotthard Fuchs et al. (Frankfurt: 1995), 31–32.



112 | M ARGIT M AYER

II. T RANSATLANTIC M IGRATION OF U RBAN R ESEARCH C ONCEPTS What might Europeans have to learn from the other side of the Atlantic, from North American urban research where conditions have been so drastically different than in the European city? There is a long tradition of ambivalence toward cities and urbanism in the North American settler societies. Europeans, by contrast, seem to take the urban more seriously and value cities as places of culture and learning. Lynn Staeheli, in a review of urban journals, found that the importance of the urban as a political, social, and cultural opportunity was more pronounced in the articles by Europeans, which she identified through the Web of Science database, than in articles by American, British, and Canadian authors.16 The list of contrasts between social-spatial structures in the US and in Europe has often been pointed out: more pronounced market liberalism in the US; sharper social divisions and societal polarizations; completely different urban structures (i.e., “doughnut”) than the gradually evolved structure of the European city; and ethnic heterogeneities which surpass those of any European city.17 And yet, the primary reason why European cities as well as European urban research are increasingly oriented to the US is because such tendencies have accelerated and are becoming increasingly visible in Europe as well. Precisely because the urban problems connected with these tendencies are far more pronounced in the US, they have been researched more extensively in the American literatures. In fact, a broad and differentiated research landscape exists with a variety of theoretical approaches and multiple suggestions for intervention, from which urban and metropolitan research in Europe stands to profit, particularly in this era of convergent neoliberal trends. In the recent past, German urban research already sought to compensate for its comparative underdevelopment with Anglo-American imports in a variety of fields. In the 1970s, the founders of the Local Politics Working Group (Arbeitskreis Lokale Politikforschung) signaled, by borrowing the term “local politics” (Lokale Politikforschung) from Anglo-American discourse, their effort to distance and emancipate themselves from the traditional German Kommunalwissen-

  16 Lynn Staeheli, “Re-Reading Castells: Indifference or Irrelevance Twenty Years On?,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30, no. 1 (2006): 198–201. 17 See William W. Goldsmith, “The Metropolis and Globalization: The Dialectics of Racial Discrimination, Deregulation, and Urban Form,” American Behavioral Scientist 41, no. 3 (1997): 299–310.



M ETROPOLITAN R ESEARCH | 113

schaften (municipal studies), which focused on public administration and laws governing municipalities, and which lacked a conception of urban research as embedded in and shaped by its broader social and political environment.18 This shift of urbanists within the professional association of German political scientists deliberately introduced Anglo-American research on urban politics to German urban studies, importing scores of novel categories and concepts with which to capture the waves of urban restructuring that began during the 1970s— primarily the rescaling and reorganization of political-economic space transcending traditional urban categories. City-regions as collective actors in the global market and within national intergovernmental relations, transnational networks of global cities, and new urban forms such as the polycentric sprawl of Los Angeles were increasingly seen as not just emblematic of urban restructureing in America, but were also increasingly recognized, though in somewhat different forms, in Europe as well. The trajectory of these restructuring processes and their implications for the social and spatial order of the city (new forms of socio-spatial polarization and gentrification), as well as for urban planning and policymaking, were increasingly similar to what had been described for North American cities. Several key concepts were thus imported during the following decades and became absorbed into academic research, frequently triggering their own “Germanized” debates. They were also widely picked up by the policy community, generating various “turns” in German urban policy. The most well known of these “concept imports” has been the “global city” thesis as originally presented by John Friedmann and Saskia Sassen.19 In 1997, at the German Political Science Association Meeting, Sassen put forth her argument that the materialization of global processes in concrete places creates a regulatory void in these places, which cities and their actors attempt to fill with new modes of regulation; this thesis stimulated a series of research projects on local governance systems in Germany.20 After initial hesitation, urban policy

  18 See Hubert Heinelt and Margit Mayer, “Lokale Politikforschung in Deutschland— Entwicklungen und Besonderheiten im internationalen Vergleich,” in Empirische Policy- und Verwaltungsforschung: Lokale, nationale und internationale Perspektiven, ed. Eckhard Schröter (Opladen: 2001), 63–76. 19 John Friedmann, “The World City Hypothesis,” Development and Change 1 (1986); Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: 1991). 20 See Jan Rolf Hauke, Urbane Globalisierung: Bedeutung und Wandel der Stadt im Globalisierungsprozess (Wiesbaden: 2006); Christoph Parnreiter, “Global City Formation and the Transnationalization of Urban Spaces: Conceptual Considerations and



114 | M ARGIT M AYER

makers, for example in Frankfurt, Hamburg, and later Berlin, seized on the term to place themselves strategically in the global intra-urban competition.21 American concepts brought into German urban studies have even included some that appear to be strictly germane to the US context, such as “urban regime theory” or the Los Angeles School. The analytic concept of “urban regime” (and, connected with it, that of growth coalitions) has found many adopters and adapters.22 But in this case, there is still a serious shortage of studies that empirically analyze German cities along the lines of this approach, in spite of some interesting adaptations by Heinz Kleger, Karin Lenhart, and Elizabeth Strom.23 In particular, there are still few studies that might productively assess the current role and transformations of urban forms of governance and regulation. These lags may have to do with the ongoing debate about the adaptability of this particularly American import, making the theoretical transfer from US cities to European cities very challenging.24 In fact, some authors have suggested that

    Empirical Findings,” GaWC Research Bulletin 336 (2010), http://www.lboro.ac.uk/ gawc/rb/rb336.html. 21 See Roger Keil and Klaus Ronneberger, “The Globalization of Frankfurt am Main: Core, Periphery and Social Conflict,” in Globalizing Cities, ed. Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen (Oxford: 2000), 228–48; Margit Mayer, “Global City Berlin?,” Prokla 109 (1997): 519–43; Albert Scharenberg, ed., Berlin: Global City oder Konkursmasse? (Berlin: 2000); Ute Lehrer, “Willing the Global City: Berlin’s Cultural Strategies of Inter-Urban Competition after 1989,” in The Global Cities Reader, ed. Neil Brenner and Roger Keil (New York: 2006), 332–38. 22 Studies working with the urban regime approach have been undertaken on the model of Clarence Stone’s Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988 (Lawrence: 1989). For a series of further North American cities, see Mickey Lauria, ed., Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory: Regulating Urban Politics in a Global Economy (Thousand Oaks: 1997). 23 See Heinz Kleger, Metropolitane Transformation durch urbane Regime (Amsterdam: 1996); Karin Lenhart, Berliner Metropoly (Opladen: 2001); Elizabeth Strom, “In Search of the Growth Coalition: American Urban Theories and the Redevelopment of Berlin,” Urban Affairs Review 31 (1996): 455–81; Elizabeth Strom, Building the New Berlin: The Politics of Urban Development in Germany’s Capital City (Landham, MD,:2001). 24 See Alan Harding, “North American Urban Political Economy, Urban Theory and British Research,” British Journal of Political Science 29 (1999): 673–98; Kevin Ward, “Rereading Urban Regime Theory: A Sympathetic Critique,” Geoforum 27, no. 4 (1996): 427–38.



M ETROPOLITAN R ESEARCH | 115

rather than uncritically importing such perspectives, scholars should use European alternatives to regime theory and growth coalitions, for example, regulation theory, actor and policy network, Foucauldian theories, and social movement literatures.25 The Los Angeles School—launched as successor to the Chicago School’s paradigms of concentric circles and its binary of city versus suburb—had limited traction in Europe because urbanity and corresponding public spheres have always been more widespread across the European city and not just limited to its downtown. German urbanists nonetheless drew upon frameworks and concepts developed by the Los Angeles School and the writings of its authors, Ed Soja, Allen Scott, Michael Storper, and Michael Dear, regarding urban restructuring processes and their relationship to new urban forms and social practices. These relationships emanated from the demise of traditional manufacturing and the rise of high-tech industries, the de-industrialization of certain regions, and the reindustrialization on the basis of low-wage jobs. While they had studied the spatial and economic restructuring of Southern California, they argued that the trends observed there—the simultaneous de- and reindustrialization, growing income disparities, urbanizing suburbs, eroding political institutions, exploding crime rates, and so on—were paradigmatic for urban regions of the twenty-first century.26 In fact, they have become characteristic features of many North American cities, in some of which, these transformations are said to have taken place even faster than in Los Angeles, for example in Miami.27 “Regionalization” is another concept that has been imported into Germany from the Anglo-American debate. It was also promoted within the European Union, at first as a strategy to support economic revitalization and political em-

  25 Andrew Wood, “Domesticating Urban Theory?,” Urban Studies 41, no. 11 (2004). 26 Edward W. Soja, “Postmodern Geographies: Taking Los Angeles Apart,” in NowHere: Space, Time and Modernity, ed. Roger Friedland and Deidre Boden (Berkeley: 1994); Edward Soja and Alan Scott, The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the 20th Century (Berkeley: 1996). The title of this latter book deliberate echoes “The City” of 1925 of the Chicago School; Allen Scott, Metropolis: From the Division of Labor to Urban Form (Berkeley: 1988); Allen J. Scott and Michael Storper, eds., Production, Work, Territory: The Geographical Anatomy of Industrial Capitalism (London: 1986); Allen Scott and Michael Storper, “Regions, Globalization, Development,” Regional Studies 37 (2003): 579–93; Michael Dear, The Postmodern Urban Condition (Oxford: 2000). 27 See. Jan Nijman, “The Paradigmatic City,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89 (2000): 135–45.



116 | M ARGIT M AYER

powerment on a regional basis aided by regional networks and institutions. Meanwhile, some progressive variants of “new regionalism” have been migrating from North America to Europe. These concepts seek to limit excessive regional growth and to regulate it in social and sustainable ways. In other words, they critically challenge the idea of urban regions as “growth machines.”28 This so-called “social regionalism” merges the assumptions of the Californian regional economic geography with insights from regional regime theory and neocommunitarian elements with “Third-way” rhetoric (social capital, social inclusion), arguing not only that more collaborative regional governance structures will improve local well-being, but that they will enhance the competitiveness of regions in the global economy as well. As this approach emerged in academia, it also had a political correlation in the new regional (metropolitan) alliances for social justice sprouting up in many urban regions29 and in the progressive political regimes that have been gaining in numbers.30 European urbanists, particularly planners, began to introduce the approach and the American experience with it in the early 2000s31 and have since been applying it to case studies of urban and regional change across Germany and beyond.32

  28 Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom, Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century (Lawrence, KS: 2001); Manuel Pastor, Peter Dreier, E. Grigsby, and M. Lopez-Garza, Regions that Work: How Cities and Suburbs Can Grow Together (Minneapolis, MN: 2000); Myron Orfield, American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality (Washington D.C.: 2002); Annick Germain and Damaris Rose, Montreal: The Quest for a Metropolis (Chichester: 2000). 29 For example, Metro Alliance/AGENDA in Los Angeles formed in 1993 as a reaction to the Los Angeles riots and is based on the concept of “community-based regionalism.” Such alliances have been important preconditions for the successful electoral campaigns of progressive city council members and, for example, of Antonio Ramón Villaraigosa's election as mayor of Los Angeles. 30 Some authors have observed a left trend in US urban politics, aided by organizations such as “New Cities,” “Campaign for America's Future,” and “Cities for Progress.” These organizations have formed not only to help recent progressive mayors (of Madison, Milwaukee, Salt Lake City, Berkeley, Chicago, Irvine, Los Angeles, etc.) implement labor- and environmentally friendly policies, but also to influence national policy (John Nichols, “Urban Archipelago,” The Nation, June 20, 2005). 31 See. the special issue of European Planning Studies 9, no. 5 (2001) that focuses on “Regional Planning and Innovation—Experiences in North America.” 32 See for example C. Langenhagen-Rohrbach and R. Fischer, “Regionalwerkstadt Frankfurt-Rhein-Main—Region als Prozess,” Standort 29, no. 2 (2005): 76–80; Hans



M ETROPOLITAN R ESEARCH | 117

Another Anglo-American concept introduced into the German discourse to great effect, even though it has been clumsy to translate, has been “gentrification.” It has frequently been applied to analyze and explain recent German urban development processes, both by German33 as well as American34 researchers, but it has also been critiqued as unsuitable to explain German urban change.35 The term achieved unexpected prominence when German authorities in 2007 identified the use of “phrases and key words” such as “gentrification” as potential evidence for suspecting academics that use them of being intellectual leaders of a terrorist group, especially if they deemed close to anti-gentrification activists.36 As critical geographer Neil Smith remarked, “Several urban social scientists in Berlin were secretly investigated and charged—one was imprisoned—on suspicion of terrorism. […] The authorities also cited [Andrej] Holm’s frequent use of the terms ‘gentrification’ and ‘inequality’ in his work as pointing to his alliance with the militant group.”37 There are quite a few US-grown concepts, especially of the kind that promise to lend themselves to effective solutions, that get directly “flown in” by policy makers for advice on bringing innovation to German policies, ranging from

    Joachim Kujath, ed., Knoten im Netz. Zur neuen Rolle der Metropolregionen in der Dienstleistungswirtschaft und Wissensökonomie (Münster: 2005); Hans Joachim Kujath, “Restructuring of the Metropolitan Region of Berlin-Brandenburg: Economic Trends and Political Answers,” Geographica Polonica 1 (2005): 117–36; James W. Scott, ed., New Regionalism in Socio-Political Context: Space-Making and Systemic Transformation in Central Europe and Latin America (London: 2008). 33 Jürgen Friedrichs and Robert Kecskes, eds., Gentrification: Theorie und Forschungsergebnisse (Opladen: 1996); Jörg Blasius and Jens Dangschat, eds., Gentrification: Die Aufwertung innenstadtnaher Wohngebiete (Frankfurt: 1990); Matthias Bernt and Andrej Holm, “Gentrification in Ostdeutschland,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Kommunalwissenschaften 41, no. 7 (2002): 125–50. 34 Myron A. Levine, “Government Policy, the Local State, and Gentrification: The Case of Prenzlauer Berg (Berlin), Germany,” Journal of Urban Affairs 26, no. 1 (2004). 35 Hartmut Häußermann, “Marginalisierung als Folge sozialräumlichen Wandels in der Großstadt,” Zeitschrift für sozialistische Politik und Wirtschaft 118 (2001): 27–33. 36 “GegenGentrification,” ambivalenz, January 30, 2009, http://ambivalenz.blogsport.de/ 2009/01/30/gegengentrification/. 37 Neil Smith, “German GWOT Misfire,” The Nation, September 24, 2007, http://www. thenation.com/doc/20070924/smith.



118 | M ARGIT M AYER

“zero tolerance” (via Police Commissioner William Bratton from New York),38 all the way to “social capital” (presented personally by the guru Robert Putnam to the German Enquete Commission ‘Future of Civic Engagement’).39 In the realm of urban policy innovation, the concept of the “creative city,” proselytized by North American scholar Richard Florida, has had an especially noteworthy career. As one newspaper article noted, “A few years ago, Jörg Dräger, at the time Hamburg’s science minister, showed up one day at the citystate’s administration, the Hamburg Senate, with Florida’s books under his arm. […] The result was called ‘Hamburg, City of Talent,’ and Florida […] even came to the city in person and gave presentations there.”40 Not just Hamburg, but also Berlin, Amsterdam, and other European cities (as well as cities around the world) have made efforts to import the “creativity fix” via Richard Florida. In each, the arrival of the currently most “charismatic economic-development troubadour” of urban policy has accelerated creative cities programs, pushing creativity to the top of the city’s agenda, but also triggering protest by cultural activists and anti-gentrification movements.41

III. E MULATING THE “M ETROPOLITAN T URN ” IN G ERMANY All of these American-born concepts and perspectives, including those associated with the “metropolitan turn,” have served to inspire German urban research.42 Obviously, they are neither to be imported uncritically nor without

  38 See Gunther Dreher and Thomas Feltes, eds., Das Modell New York. Kriminalprävention durch ‘Zero Tolerance’? (Holzkirchen: 1997). 39 See Enquete-Kommission, “Zukunft des Bürgerschaftlichen Engagements,” in Deutscher Bundestag, Bürgerschaftliches Engagement: Auf dem Weg in eine zukunftsfähige Gesellschaft (Opladen: 2002); Ansgar Klein et al., eds., Zivilgesellschaft und Sozialkapital (Wiesbaden: 2004). 40 Philipp Oehmke, “Who Has the Right to Shape the City?,” Spiegel Online, May 29, 2010, http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,670600,00.html. 41 See the manifesto “Not in Our Name! Jamming the Gentrification Machine” published activists from Hamburg in November 2009: http://www.signandsight.com/features/ 1961.html. 42 There also have been transatlantic “counter movements,” i.e., concepts and programs developed within European urbanism that get picked up in the United States, such as new concepts of “urban mobility” or “environmental sustainability.” But the cosmo-



M ETROPOLITAN R ESEARCH | 119

adaptation, as the processes labeled by them manifest themselves in European cities in different forms. Though global neoliberalization processes have implanted market-oriented regulatory restructuring on both sides of the Atlantic, they have done so upon uneven institutional landscapes, in variegated ways.43 In spite of growing transnational tendencies of convergence, urban models cannot be disembedded from their local conditions of possibility. Hence, there remain important European- and German-specific features that result from such different constellations as the traditions of social democracy and the different positioning of cities within the respective institutional architecture of each nation.44 These phenomena, among others, erect barriers to the portability and adaptability of imported theories. Furthermore, distinctions need to be made between “fast-policy transfer”45 as opposed to “traveling theories,” since the conceptual categories driving the work of theorizing are not subject to the type of competition that make urban policymakers so vulnerable to the latest hype in the global circulation of policy models and “best practices.” As opposed to policymakers, researchers move in a realm where careful scrutiny, empirical tests, and analytical rigor matter in determining how best to explain the transformations of urban processes and structures, forms and functions.46

    politan version of the “metropolis” finds adherents only in a few culturally or historically oriented disciplines. 43 See Neil Brenner, Jamie Peck, and Nik Theodore, “Variegated Neoliberalization: Geographies, Modalities, Pathways,” Global Networks 10, no. 2 (2010). 44 European cities have more and closer connections with their central states than US cities do (see Hank K. Savitch and Paul Kantor, Cities in the International Market Place: The Political Economy of Urban Development in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton: 2002)). A far greater portion of their budget comes from national funds than in the US, where as a consequence the pressure to attract investors, high-income groups, and tourists—and to marginalize “undesirable” groups—is far stronger (Justus L. Uitermark and Jan Willem Duyvendak, “Civilising the City: Revanchist Urbanism in Rotterdam,” Urban Studies 45, no. 7 (2008): 1485–503, especially 1488). A reason for the stronger connection between urban areas and the central state in Germany is that a majority of the electoral population lives within urban agglomerations, and not, as in the US, outside of them. 45 See Jamie Peck, “Political Economies of Scale: Fast Policy, Interscalar Relations, and Neoliberal Workfare,” Economic Geography 78, no. 3: 331–60. 46 However, even here the phenomenon of the academic celebrity circuit, a form of intellectualism that translates academic concepts into adaptable policy formulations,



120 | M ARGIT M AYER

In this realm, the European adoption of the theoretical perspective opened up by the metropolitanization discourse makes good sense, not because the German federal government has declared more ordinary urbanized zones to be metropolitan regions, but because the normative cultural definition of the European “metropolis,” which derives from its importance during the nineteenth century and limits the designation to those distinct cities that generate a cultural surplus, runs the risk of excluding fundamental contemporary trends of regional restructuring and rescaling with all their attendant social and political problems from our research—and from metropolitan studies’ curricula. Our task is, therefore, to systematically identify, via comparative analysis, the influence of national features and differences on urban processes and problems, for example as Alan Harding has done in translating urban regime theory for Great Britain,47 so that we may develop a European reformulation of the empirical as well as theoretical perspectives on urban/metropolitan development. The conclusion to be drawn, then, from this overview of conceptual diffusion and transfer processes for the European metropolitan discussion is as follows. Underlying the manifold conceptual imports is the observation of increasingly convergent conditions and policies. On both sides of the Atlantic, globalization and economic restructuring have impacted urban development, triggering the dynamic expansion of city-regions beyond their political-administrative and bioregional boundaries. Neil Brenner has demonstrated that for Europe, metropolistanization has created: “(a) high value-added socioeconomic capacities, advanced infrastructures, industrial growth, inward investment, and labor flows [that] are increasingly concentrated within major metropolitan regions, and (b) territorial disparities between core urban regions and peripheral towns and regions [that] are significantly intensifying across the entire European economy.”48 The transformation of cities and city-regions into amorphous “inbetween cities”49 without clear morphological delineations such as the separation between suburbs and core cities, can productively be interpreted in the context of global economic restructuring as part of neoliberal state transformation and

    has been gaining influence, see G. McLennan, “Travelling with Vehicular Ideas: The Case of the Third Way,” Economy and Society 33, no. 4 (2004): 484–99. 47 Alan Harding, “North American Urban Political Economy, Urban Theory and British Research,” British Journal of Political Science 29 (1999): 673–98, especially 693. 48 Neil Brenner, New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford: 2004), 180. 49 Tom Sieverts, Cities Without Cities: An Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt (London: 2003).



M ETROPOLITAN R ESEARCH | 121

welfare retrenchment and as part of rescaling processes that have devolved many formerly higher-level state functions to local and regional levels (and there often toward extra-state, private as well as civil society, actors). These transformations have also intensified policies that emphasize urban entrepreneurialism and city marketing. This is occurring faster in the US but undeniably also on the European continent and has exacerbated (though not caused) new forms of sociospatial exclusion and disintegration. These characteristics and accompanying features of metropolitanization— urban decentralization, socio-spatial polarization, state rescaling, and administrative fragmentation—have been making themselves felt as pressing challenges for German urban regions as well as well as those in North America, raising a host of new and urgent political, social, and planning questions. The main concerns discussed in the literatures have been around the role of regional/metropolitan state structures in economic governance, issues of local democracy, and the tensions between social cohesion and economic development.50 Issues regarding social and technical infrastructure—such as the control of sprawl, transportation gridlock, and provision of water and sewage services—that stretch the policymaking capacities of politicians, experts, corporations, and activists across the urban region, have also been topics of research.51 As a result, metropolitan governance has received increasing attention. Initially, metropolitan governance simply meant creating new governmental structures at a larger scale to ease the coordination of municipal decision-making (elected representatives were compelled to work together by integrating municipal bureaucracies and pooling resources). However, now, metropolitan governance increasingly entails the invention of decision-making mechanisms not necessarily based on voting and comprehensive planning. Instead, large infra-

  50 C. Lefevre, “Metropolitan Government and Governance in Western Countries: A Critical Review,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 22, no. 1 (1998): 9–25. 51 See Timothy Moss, “Dissecting Institutions. Bestandteile einer institutionellen Konfiguration am Beispiel der Wasserwirtschaft,” ICAR Discussion Paper 7 (2005); Matthias Naumann and Jochen Monstadt, New Geographies of Infrastructure Systems: Spatial Science Perspectives and the Socio-Technical Change of Energy and Water Supply Systems in Germany, netWORKS-papers 10 (2005); Axel Stein and Robert Koch, “Strategien für eine integrierte Entwicklung von Siedlung und Verkehr. Ergebnisse einer Analyse zum Raum Dresden,” RaumPlanung 119: 77–81; Fritz Sager, “Metropolitan Institutions and Policy Coordination: The Integration of Land Use and Transport Policies in Swiss Urban Areas,” Governance 18, no. 2: 227–56.



122 | M ARGIT M AYER

structural projects, airport expansions, waterfront revitalizations, and big festivals and events are used to build cohesion and identity across the metropolitan region—and fame for political leaders. Making decisions about regional plans increasingly takes place in negotiations between public and private actors, via project-based coordination, and not along the traditional logic of representative democracy. Thus, metropolitan governance nowadays refers to both the process of consolidating a new political space at the metropolitan scale, which involves new governing instruments and interest-mediation mechanisms, and the process of consolidating the metropolis as a collective actor in global markets and international politics.52 The ability of metropolitan regions to effectively rescale the exercise of power varies depending on place-specific path-dependencies and national contexts, which calls for systematic intra- and transnational comparative research. While the traditional concept of the “metropolis” claims to be interested in identifying the contemporary features of cosmopolitanism,53 in fact, it is instrumentalized as a marketing concept in the serious game of strategic competition between cities as well as between academic programs. More urgently necessary than rehashing the traditional concept of the “metropolis” is furthering metropolitan research that seeks to aid the analysis of contemporary fragmentation and disintegration problems with their concomitant issues of inclusion and exclusion, as well as research that offers critical approaches to understanding processes of metropolitanization.

  52 See Daniel Kübler and Hubert Heinelt, eds., Metropolitan Governance in the 21st Century: Governing Capacity, Democracy and the Dynamics of Place (London: 2005). 53 For example, Zohlen states “the metropolis is the epitome of the new desire for urbanity,” [“Metropole als Inbegriff der neuen Urbanitätslust.”] Zohlen, “Metropole als Metapher,” 33.





Section 2: Environments and Imaginations





History, Theory, and the Metropolis T HOMAS B ENDER

I. The modern city is an obvious fact of contemporary life. Yet the closer one inquires into its workings, the more difficult it is to comprehend. The nature of the beast is difficult to specify, and that makes the scholarly pursuit of a theory of urban coherence unsatisfying. In fact such a quest distorts the city’s most fundamental character and social practices. It is a situation that invites a radical rethinking of implicit and explicit theories of urban life. And that raises the question of alternative theory and research methods. Such was the point of a refreshing recent book by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift. Their Cities: Reimagining the Urban (2002) opened up new space and new pathways for thinking about cities.1 My title notwithstanding, I fear that theory may be too elevated a signifier for what I aim to do here. I use it to suggest my concern to rethink at a conceptual level some of the problems, research strategies, and representational issues in the study of metropolitan life, of cities like New York and Berlin. Three concerns particularly underlie my reflections: the place of history in urban studies, the conceptualization of urban space, and the issue of actors and agency. All investigations of the contemporary metropolis must take account of its historical construction and transformations. However, by the use of two terms— “social life” and “site”—I signal the necessary interdisciplinarity in metropolitan studies. “Social life” points us toward the social sciences, particularly sociology and anthropology, while any discussion of “site” invites spatial analysis, or city planning, urban design, and geography. Yet I want to make a special case for the importance of history, for even in spatial analysis is history pertinent. As Henri

  1



Ash Amin, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge: 2002).

126 | T HOMAS B ENDER

Lefebvre has observed, much of what we interpret as spatial is but the “inscription of time in the world.”2 The rejection of homogenizing “master narratives” in recent historiography and the language and logic of “multiculturalism” together have weakened the presumed trajectory of urban history and heightened awareness of the internal differentiation that marks cities, making them harder to grasp as a whole. The boundaries of modern cities are also a problem. The vast extension of urban aggregations and notions of global connection have together made the boundary of cities and metropolitan areas difficult to define. The hard part of inquiring into the history and contemporary condition of cities and metropolitan life, then, is the work of clarifying the coordinates of our object of inquiry. Though we know better, we think of the city or metropolis as a “thing.” When we refer to a city we designate a place, a material object, and we assume a unified social whole, which implies bounded coherence. In recent years, sociocultural modes of historical analysis and studies of globalization have undermined both the implied unity of the metropolis and notions of a clear demarcation of an “inside” and an “outside.” If buildings and infrastructure mark the place, we need to pay equal attention to another aspect of the metropolis: its character as a historically specific site marked by complex, conflicting, multiscaled, and dense processes, relations, and interconnections. Probably, no one would deny these observations. Yet the classic general histories of cities present them as both things in themselves and as local representations of more extensive civilizations. Rarely do the grand narrative histories of Leonardo Benevolo, Lewis Mumford, and most recently Peter Hall explore the process and causes of internal change within an era or in the movement from one era or urban type to another. And they miss both multiple and asymmetric temporalities that inform metropolitan life. Problematically, in an almost Hegelian spirit, cities of different eras are implicitly presumed to have their own essence that informs their every aspect. Again, we might recall Lefebvre’s caution: neither modernity nor the metropolis has an “essence”; each is a historically contingent “situation” located in time as well as in a place.3 Walter Benjamin’s much-celebrated work shares these problems, and perhaps even reveals them with exceptional clarity. Probably no writer has been invoked more often by students of urban culture in the past quarter century. His enormously illuminating essays on history, memory, and criticism and his less

  2

Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, ed. and trans. Eleonore Kotman and Elizabeth

3

Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, 12.

Lebas (Oxford: 1996), 16.



H ISTORY, THEORY,

AND THE

M ETROPOLIS

| 127

formal impressions of various cities are filled with insight. But as an urban theorist or historian he is less helpful. The unfinished Arcades project—outlined in a preliminary way in his 1935 essay (really an unfunded grant proposal) “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” and partly developed in his study of Baudelaire and lyric poetry in the age of high capitalism—was assumed by many, including me, to point the way to studies of metropolitan history and culture. Now, the project has been published. It is not the answer but it brilliantly reveals the problem. In the shadow of this weighty and thick volume, not only the Paris project but the other cities of his great essays appear insular, and the rhetorical claim for the importance of Paris in the nineteenth century is no more than a literary trope. His great ambition, as he once put it, was “to conjoin a heightened graphicness to the realization of the Marxist method.”4 He had a grand theory of causation (Marxism) and from that an explanation (capitalism). But he also had an almost infinite number of images and little narratives that make up the complexity of Paris. He could not connect the small narratives to each other or consistently link them to his grand narrative. That is why it was not finished— and never would have been finished, even had he not suffered his tragic death. In the end, the Arcades project is a grand index and filing system. Brilliant though he was, he appears in the many pages of the Arcades files to be much like us: overwhelmed, not able to find the threads to pull it together. No historical narrative seemed adequate; no social theory could comprehend it.

II. I will not claim to have mastered the difficult challenges I have briefly sketched here. But with them in mind, I want to propose a number of focal issues that warrant rethinking and that might point to at least partial resolutions that will enrich our scholarly search for the metropolis. We must reconsider our relegation of history to the role of mere background for change or the structural circumstance that enables change. We need to recognize history as a possible actor. It is not just part of the dialectic of past and present that confers local meaning, since it can actively shape the future. Our implicit notion of normative wholeness hobbles our understanding. It turns our attention too often to the question of fragmentation and even dissolution. This way of thinking derives in part from our commonplace reification of

  4



Walter Benjamin, Convolute N2, 6, The Arcades Project, (Cambridge, MA: 1999)

128 | T HOMAS B ENDER

“the social,” whether in academic or popular discussion. We need to think more about processes of assemblage and re-assemblage of discrete social institutions, networks of persons, and the networks and technologies of material life. The reification of the city as a bounded thing obviously hampers our thinking about interconnection and interdependence in cities and among cities, and among city and country. It masks the dynamic to which Michael Peter Smith applies the apt if novel phrase “translocality.”5 Greater awareness of networks and connections (between humans and between humans and the non-human elements of social and natural phenomena) will point us, I think, to a closer focus on social practices in cities and the structures that frame them, both as limits and as collaborators. Such an ethnographic understanding of the city opens the way to complexity more effectively than representation, which was Benjamin’s concern and that of many contemporary scholars. We need a greatly heightened awareness of infrastructure as a connector of many aspects of urban social life—of infrastructure as a hinge linking the man-made to the natural environment in metropolitan regions. I might sum up these observations by saying that in our analysis of the metropolis, which is perhaps the most complex human and material aggregation ever realized on this planet, our analytical tools are too often monoplex or duplex (binaries) when we need a multiplex means of grasping the multiform metropolis. After a brief discussion of these several issues, I want to suggest importing a theory established outside of urban studies in the hope of opening new space for thinking about the metropolis. I have in mind “actor-network theory” (ANT). This theory is largely identified with Bruno Latour and his colleague Michel Callon, both at the École des Mines de Paris, as well as with John Law in Britain. All are associated with the “science studies” initiative of the past couple of decades. I would add Peter Galison, the historian of science at Harvard, who is probably not one of this “group” but his brilliant studies of physics nonetheless powerfully support one of the key positions I wish to import into urban studies. It may seem odd to import theories developed in studies of the history, sociology, and philosophy of science into urban studies, but the test is whether they turn out to be fruitful in better understanding the nature of the metropolis. And I might note that Latour has himself explored the method’s usefulness in understanding the complexity of urban life in a large, heavily illustrated book

  5

Michael Peter Smith, “Transnationalism and the City,” in The Urban Moment, ed. Robert Beauregard and Sophie Body-Gendrot (Thousand Oaks, CA: 1999), 119–39.



H ISTORY, THEORY,

AND THE

M ETROPOLIS

| 129

undertaken with a collaborator, Paris, ville invisible.6 The appeal of this set of ideas for me is their openness, especially their capacity to incorporate more urban actors, many of whom we conventionally and routinely exclude from our analyses. History is more than the stage upon which actors will create the future; it is (or can be) itself one of those actors. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is relevant here. “The habitus,” he argues, is a “product of history” that “produces individual and collective practices—more history. […] It ensures the active presence of past experiences.”7 New ideas and actions are not determined by the past, but the past is actively part of the formulation of the new. History can act by its limiting immobility, duration, as well as by being mobilized. As Patrick Joyce, building on Michel Foucault, has argued in the case of cities, resistance precedes and collaborates in the constitution of power.8 Or put differently, without resistance there is no power. Thus the inscriptions of history become facts on the ground, with the potential of resistance—thus making history a potential actor. History always carries the potential of resistance, and thus becoming an actor.9 As the urban heritage industry shows, history can act as an economic resource, aiding the transformation of cities into worlds of consumption for both residents and tourists. Historical materials (buildings and landscapes, artifacts reminiscent of famous people or events) as resources do not act in a literal or willing sense. But they deserve to be understood as collaborators with those who interpret and deploy them. Or to make the point by reversing the phrasing, we can say that without actual and specific historical materials, urban developers

  6

Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant, Paris, ville invisible (Paris: 1998). There has been surprisingly little notice or discussion of this book by urbanists. For some address to it, see Thomas Bender, “Reassembling the City: Networks and Imagination,” in Urban Assemblages, ed. Ignacio Farías and Thomas Bender (Milton Keynes, UK: 2010), 303–23.

7

Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Rice Nice (Stanford: 1990), 54.

8

Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: 2003), 185–86.

9

Joyce’s Rule of Freedom is a good example. For a richer examination in a more deeply textured society, see Smriti Srinivas, Landscapes of Urban Memory: Thye Saqcrid and the Civic in India’s High Tech City (Minneapolis: 2001), and Srinivas, “Cities of the Past and Cities of the Future: Theorizing the Indian Metropolis of Bangalore,” in Understanding the City, ed. John Eade and Christopher Mele (Oxford: 2002), 272.



130 | T HOMAS B ENDER

and heritage experts would be without a crucial partner. Not only is history a collaborator of developers, but fortunately it is even more often an ally of those wishing to restrain developers—historic preservation (along with environmental preservation) being the only institutionalized means of restraining developmentoriented city planning departments in United States cities. Thus history is domestic rather than foreign, as well as a contemporary participant in the work of defining and making the future. The sense we have of the city—from within it or at a distance—is in our heads and real to us. Contrary to what Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, California, there is a there there. But her literary denial actually sustained it as an entity endowed with wholeness and a specific bounded space. But this sense of urban wholes tends to mask the differences it contains. Actually, more often than not, notions of difference or diversity are to too weak a word for gross inequalities and contested terrains. Yet we embrace the literary constructions of cities as wholes, with a singular character, even if, as in the case of the Manchester of Friedrich Engels, deeply inscribed class division marks the wholeness. The whole city is an imagined collectivity, as Benedict Anderson has recently described the nation.10 The literary critic James Donald usefully introduces imagination to urban studies: To put it polemically, there is no such thing as the city. Rather, the city designates the space produced by the interaction of historically and geographically specific institutions, social relations of production and reproduction, practices of government, forms of media communication, and so forth. By calling this diversity “the city,” we ascribe to it a coherence or integrity. The city, then, is above all a representation. But what sort or representation? By analogy with the now familiar idea that the nation provides us with an “imagined community,” I would argue that the city constitutes an “imagined community.”11

Donald’s response is both correct—and too easy. “The city is,” as the Chicago sociologist Robert Park observed long ago in 1915, “a state of mind.”12 And that,

  10 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: 1983). 11 James Donald, “Metropolis: The City as Text,” in Social and Cultural Forms of Modernity, ed. Robert Bocock and Kenneth Thompson (Cambridge: 1992), 422. 12 Robert Park, “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment,” in The City, ed. Robert Park and Louis Wirth (Chicago: 1967 [1925]), 1.



H ISTORY, THEORY,

AND THE

M ETROPOLIS

| 131

as his colleague W. I. Thomas famously insisted, had consequences.13 But making that city of the mind is complex. Imagination does not arise arbitrarily or out of nothing. It is built upon history and experience. Here a recent critique (or extension) of Benedict Anderson’s theory of the origins of nationalism as an imagined community is pertinent. Andrés Reséndez, a historian of early nineteenth century Mexican nationalism, has argued that nationalism (and I would say the same is true for metropolitan culture) is constituted by a combination of partial and scattered but sometimes interconnected social practices of national (or, for me, metropolitan) scope that produce a density of institutions, connections, and local movement. One does not have to go to the movies, take a walk in Central Park or down Fifth Avenue, or go to an all-night dance club or delicatessen to imaginatively be a part of a city where that is done by someone. New Yorkers, or episodic users of the city, must practice these acts to sustain the imagined urban collectivity—the public culture of the city. Such an imaginary metropolis gives form to what is, on the ground, only partially interconnected and bounded. The disarticulated social practice of urban life and the imagined city are at once in collusion with and have tension between each other. If, as Lefebvre argues, the gift of the city is the production of itself as an “oeuvre,” then that work is ongoing—the joint product of practice and imagination.14 The imagination serves as metaphorical glue, ordering social elements, making social elements resemble society, suggesting a whole. The issue here is not one of a correspondence of representation and actual social relations but rather whether the imaginative construction of the city sustains a sense of social ordering.15 Imagination thus participates in the real. Put crudely, metropolitan culture is a benign deceit. That said, reification is the danger, for it masks as it unifies, thus leading us to misunderstand urban processes and lived experience. It sustains the presumption of the “thingness” of the city and it obscures significant differences such as class, race, gender, and other things.

  13 I refer here to Thomas’s famous observation, rooted in Chicago pragmatism: “If a situation is defined as real, it is real in its consequences.” Quoted in Lewis A. Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought (New York: 1971), 192. A good example is the brilliant analysis of the public discussion of violence in relation to violence in São Paulo in Teresa Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (Berkeley: 2000). 14 The notion of the city as an oeuvre runs through his urban writings. See Lefebvre, Writings on the City. 15 John Law, Organizing Modernity (Oxford: 1994), 25–26.



132 | T HOMAS B ENDER

One of the ironies of modern city planning—itself a product of the global circulation of urban ideas beginning more than a century ago—is that it in its comprehensiveness, internal logic, and cartographic representation it suggests the boundedness and isolation of the city. Whether one examines Ildefons Cerdà’s plan for Barcelona, Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s work in Paris, Otto Wagner’s vision for Vienna, or Daniel Burnham’s magnificent plan for Chicago, the clarification of city form suggests closure as well. Opening up the city to movement, even when the scope of that movement is enlarged to the region as in Wagner’s Vienna and especially Burnham’s Chicago, a coherent region is the focus, and translocal connections are shadows at best. This omission is supremely ironic, for it masks the foundation of the metropolitan economy that depended upon hinterland connections as well as international ones. We tend to have an all-too-clear image of cities with an interior and an exterior. The place is thus connected to a larger world, to an outside. The boundary and the internal singleness assumed in such thinking are both very weak on the ground. The city, unlike the nation-state, extends into the world, often imperceptively and through many highly particular paths and networks: the larger world not only enters the city but is a constant presence. Hence Michael Peter Smith’s very useful notion of “translocality.” There is no binary here. The global is not outside; it is both inside and outside, all the time.16 David Harvey’s important concept of the “time-space compression” has been quite pertinently rephrased by Doreen Massey as “the geographical stretching-out of social relations.”17 There is a tendency today to attribute a prized authenticity to the local. Something similar is attributed to the “everyday.” There is even a suggestion that the local is inherently an oppositional condition.18 While in particular cases this is surely true, it is not inherent. It depends upon particular circumstances and networks of resources, sometimes global in extent. Here I refer to the fascinating work of James Holston on the invigorating convergence of rights discourse promoted by global nongovernmental organizations and local democracy move-

  16 Doreen Massey, “Double Articulation: A Place in the World,” in Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question, ed. Angelika Bammer (Bloomington: 1994), 117. 17 See David Harvey, The Conditions of Postmodernity; An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, (Oxford: 1989); Doreen Massey, Power-Geometrics and the Politics of Space-Time (Heidelberg: 1999), 59. 18 One sees this even in the work of some exceptionally sophisticated analysts, including David Harvey, Henry Lefebvre, and Michel de Certeau.



H ISTORY, THEORY,

AND THE

M ETROPOLIS

| 133

ments in the cities of Brazil and elsewhere.19 Or to reverse “the flow,” so to speak, there is the incidence of members of disaporic communities intervening— often in decisive and sometimes reactionary ways—in the national politics of the city and nation of their family’s origin. To the extent that the city is materially unified, it is by way of its infrastructure. By design, most of the infrastructure upon which metropolitan life depends is hardly noticed, except when there is a systemic breakdown. But infrastructure is much more than passive background or undergirding of everyday life. Moreover, infrastructure, whether the city’s water supply or its participation in regional or national power grid, extends well beyond the municipal boundaries. New York City’s system of reservoirs and aqueducts extend hundreds of miles north into rural New York State. Building such systems and making them work is a remarkable achievement. The “bundles” of “materially networked, mediating infrastructures” of metropolitan areas have been called the “largest and most sophisticated technological artifacts ever devised by humans.”20 The hardly noticed but all-pervasive infrastructure serves (admittedly in varying degrees) the entire populations of cities but it also goes farther than this. It shapes experience. From the earliest forms of city life, but especially in the modern metropolis, the material facts of infrastructural networks have been, as Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin claim, “strongly involved in structuring and delineating experiences of urban culture” and thus contributing to the “structure of feeling” characteristic of metropolitan life.21 One can be more definite about this: authority is embedded in the material facts of the city—ranging from street layouts, location of natural features, infrastructure, and the like—that impose structuring on urban lives, offering possibilities as well as constituting constraints.22 Or, as David Harvey observed even more concretely: “Can I live in Los Angeles without becoming a frustrated motorist?”23 When infrastructure becomes a concern, it has become an actor. To use a simpler but no less serious example, consider stairs. For most people, this simple and pervasive technology

  19 James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (Princeton: 2008). 20 Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobility, and the Urban Condition (London: 2001), 10. 21 Ibid., 12. 22 John Rennie Short, “Three Urban Discourses,” in A Companion to the City, ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Oxford: 2000), 19. 23 David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” in The Emancipatory City? Paradoxes and Possibilities, ed. Loretta Lees (London: 2004), 237.



134 | T HOMAS B ENDER

facilitates movement, but for a person in a wheelchair, stairs are a difficulty, a concern that prompts and even forces problem solving.24 Harvey’s comment recalls the best analysis of urbanism that has been generated by the materials of Los Angeles’s history and form—and one that to the best of my recollection is largely ignored by the so-called Los Angeles School, perhaps because the author was having so much fun. I refer to Reyner Banham’s 1971 Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, which penetratingly and amusingly evokes the fusing of the natural environment, infrastructure, architecture, and lifestyle of Los Angeles.25 I want to argue—as Banham insinuates—that nature and infrastructure become active elements of urban life, and are not its mere background. Even if infrastructure is a product of human intention and designed by human actors, once it is on the ground, as we might say, it acquires new contextual meanings and can have unanticipated effects. A result thus becomes a cause. Surely there is a politics of infrastructure. It used to be the claim of advocates for non-partisan municipal governments in the United States that there is no Republican or Democratic way of building a sewer system. But of course there is, as we see more clearly in the age of the neoliberal privatization of infrastructure.26 But infrastructure can sometimes transcend quite serious politics. The complexity and interconnectivity of the infrastructure of metropolitan regions requires a degree of cooperation by engineers in politically divided cities, as in the case of Jerusalem and Cold War Berlin. Infrastructure connects the built environment, the social world of the city, and even the individual metropolitan to the natural environment of the metropolitan region. A favorite comment of historians of Victorian culture is to remark that the “privy,” that mark of liberal individuation and privacy for bodily functions, actually connected the individual with a network that embraced the collectivity and extended into the natural environment. The privacy of the privy, it turns out, was not entirely a room of one’s own.27 The natural environment is also a collaborator in the making of metropolitan life. Recently, I began a review of a book about the Hudson River with the following four sentences:

  24 Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3 (1999): 380. 25 Reyner Banham, The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Harmondsworth: 1971). 26 See Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism. 27 Joyce, The Rule of Freedom, 75.



H ISTORY, THEORY,

AND THE

M ETROPOLIS

| 135

The Hudson River, and the valley it defines, is a fact of nature. A region of sometimes astonishing beauty, it is also a site of human action, of history. To press a bit harder, it may fairly be considered an actor as well as a stage for history. Together the river and Governor DeWitt Clinton brought forth the Erie Canal. Completed in 1825, it made New York City the great metropolis of the Americas.28

I had pretty much expected the exceedingly rigorous British editors of the Times Literary Supplement to object to this assertion of collaboration between a river and a leading politician, rather than presenting the river as the object of his creative action. But it seems that the assertion passed the test of literary and historiographical rationality. The power of nature to shape the city’s physical form, social patterns, and political alignments was powerfully revealed. Perhaps after Katrina, both the hurricane itself and the years of politics since it, make the importance of this perspective almost self-evident. The devastation of New Orleans showed much human failure and perhaps even political perversity, but it also gives graphic testimony to a point made by Stephen Graham in the wake of Katrina: “The ‘natural’ world mingles inseparably with the urban world. Increasingly it is impossible to separate the natural world from the man-made one of cities, infrastructures, and technologies.”29 Space, too, can be active. Typically, space, like history, is either naively thought of as a stage, or in more critical inquiry as the product of power relations. But we might also understand it, once it is made and recognized, as potentially active. History and space, as already indicated, are not wholly alternative vectors for the lived experience of city life or the academic analysis of the city. They are usually entangled with each other. In Smriti Srinivas’s imaginative study of daily life in the layered spaces, what she calls “encrypted spaces,” of Bangalore, Landscapes of Urban Memory: Thye Saqcrid and the Civic in India’s High Tech City (2001), she reveals a cityscape rich in “spatial and ritual memories.” History becomes spatialized, and space reveals history. Thus, she argues, disenchantment remains incomplete in the development of Bangalore, and reenchantment is a part of the play of history, space, and social practices.30

  28 Thomas Bender, “River of War,” review, Times Literary Supplement (February 3, 2006): 32. 29 Stephen Graham, “Cities Under Siege: Katrina and the Politics of Metropolitan America,” Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences, SSRC, accessed May 27, 2010, http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Graham/. 30 Srinivas, “Cities,” 252–59, 272.



136 | T HOMAS B ENDER

III. I think that actor-network theory (ANT) offers important ways of thinking about urban complexity, motion, and connections. ANT could be especially useful in addressing questions about ordering and causation. It offers a significant refocusing of historical and sociological analysis of the city. My point is not to take the elaborated theory as a template to be used by urbanists. Rather, my aim explores the highly suggestive cluster of ideas that inform ANT and that might be worth developing in relation to the study of the modern city. The first large—and perhaps most fundamental—idea is the rejection of the “thingness” or necessary coherence of society. This undercuts large theories of society, focusing instead on partial social relations and ordering. Put differently, what conventional social science might call “the social” is a process, a contingent condition, not a thing. Neither is social order a thing; it is more accurately understood as a social ordering, contingent and always subject to reconfiguration. This theme marks ANT. It is and was intended to be a challenge to the burden of the long shadow of Émile Durkheim’s core concept of the “social fact.” Latour embraces and adapts social theories developed by Gabriel Tarde, Durkheim’s more senior rival whose ideas were marginalized by Durkheim’s success. While Durkheim’s sociology is concerned with stable social formations, Tarde emphasized that what we call “society” is always a provisional pattern associations.31 ANT is thus a theory heavy in gerunds. Social causation operates through particular associations, networks, interconnections, and interrelations of potential actors. Moreover, these multiply rapidly and take unexpected directions. Such an approach is roughly familiar to historians under the rubric and modern mantra of multi-causal explanations or “conjunctural explanations.” In fact, Latour considers historian William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991) a “masterpiece of ANT.” 32 Cronon did not have ANT in mind but as an environmental historian his history included nature as a significant actor. Like scholars working with ANT, Cronon includes forms and actors not common in historiography. In particular, the network of causes includes nonhuman actors. According to Latour, “Politics is no longer limited to humans and

  31 See Bruno Latour, “Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social,” in The Social in Question, ed. Patrick Joyce (London: 2002), 125. 32 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: 1991); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: 2005), 11.



H ISTORY, THEORY,

AND THE

M ETROPOLIS

| 137

incorporates the many issues to which they are attached.”33 Cities invite such expansion of notions of agency and contingency. It is not accidental that this form of explanation comes out of science studies. Thomas Kuhn’s famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) legitimated a historicist approach to scientific innovation. More recently, Peter Galison, the Harvard historian of science, has demonstrated the contribution of non-human causes in physics, namely the independent importance of instrumentation, which he sees as an actor that shapes the questions and answers in science.34 John Law moves this logic into the workshop of science with a close study of a particular laboratory. “The architecture, the machinery, and the social relations of the Lab all go together.” He insists that “they all perform and embody modes of ordering. They’re inextricably entwined.”35 The rethinking of the social inherent in ANT indirectly but importantly undercuts a common rhetoric of history and social theory: modernization theory’s progression from Gemeinschaft (community) to Gesellschaft (society), which has long hovered over (or under) American social science as a metanarrative, one quite congruent with much popular nostalgia.36 Urban history, under the influence of the Chicago School, has been especially vulnerable to unthinking incorporations of this metanarrative, with its logic of fragmentation and decline—or, alternatively, of development and progress. Better is the language of ANT, which focuses on assembly and reassembly. More than most urban histories, ANT is focused on practice and “actants”; it is less interested in issues of identity and meaning than contemporary history and socio-cultural analysis tends to be. There is an underlying ethnographic impulse focused on practice and change. The focus is on tracking the relations of potential linkages and transformation in complex networks of causation, tracking the relations of potential actors—and thus concerning itself with complex causal explanations. This approach not only undercuts the category of “the social,” but it escapes the geographical boundedness that has limited urban history, making “translocality” researchable. It leaves open for inspection a wide range of possible “heterogeneous elements” operating on different temporal and spatial scales. Such understandings are easily transferred to the study of cities. The research

  33 Bruno Latour, “From Real Politik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: 2005), 41. 34 Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: 1997). 35 Law, Organizing Modernity, 141. 36 Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (New Brunswick: 1978).



138 | T HOMAS B ENDER

rule is clear and simple: follow the actors in potentially causal networks— whether people, knowledges, things, or money—until a pattern of explanation either emerges or becomes implausible. So the main contribution of ANT is, at base, pretty simple: what historians would call multi-causality and heterogeneous chains of actors, including nonhuman ones. But there is also a problem, an ethical or moral problem. I refer to the apparent leveling of the power of all participants in the causal network.37 The politics of ANT have been attacked, and Latour has recently sought (without success, in my view) to address that challenge to his work.38 I am not sure why Latour and his colleagues have such difficulty with this criticism. My response may be too simple, but it seems to make sense. First, one might note that commonplace categories of “the social,” or capitalism, or even less grandly of class seem no less reductive of specific human responsibility. Closer ethnographic analysis is more likely to reveal specific responsible acts. Second, the multiplication of actors and vectors of causation seems to open more opportunities for political intervention and thus for political responsibility. As Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift point out in their 2004 essay, “The Emancipating City?,” the modern city is “so continuously in movement” and so bountiful in “unexpected interactions” that it is rich in “resources for continuing political intervention.”39 Actor-network theory seems to point our analysis and politics in a particular direction, one I believe to be useful as well as humble and ethically sound. It supports an inclusive, practical, incremental approach to scholarship and politics that brings together act, causation, and responsibility. There is one more thing to be added. Without developing the ideas available there, Latour concludes his political defense of ANT with reference to John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problem (1988), Dewey’s only work in political theory.40 As a pragmatist, which is to say a consequentialist, Dewey judged both ideas and politics for their consequences. For him, what Latour calls “matters of concern” arise when state or private actions produce harm to third parties. The public in this view comes into being as the ad hoc response of victims and their allies. Latour is not far from this when he suggests that parliaments are supple-

  37 In its most severe form, this theory tends to merge the human and non-human, declining to acknowledge the autonomous individual as distinct from a chair. I am not going that far. 38 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 261. 39 Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, “The Emancipatory City?” in The Emancipatory City? Paradoxes and Possibilities, ed. Loretta Lees (London: 2004), 232. 40 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problem (Athens, Ohio: 1988 [1927]).



H ISTORY, THEORY,

AND THE

M ETROPOLIS

| 139

mented by “other assemblages” or provisional publics.41 ANT would add nonhuman responsibles (whether hurricanes, environmental degradation, or freeways and other infrastructure that enforces class division and racial segregation) to the capitalists and governments Dewey had in mind. I doubt Dewey would object to this expansion of causation and political judgment. The human consequences were always of greater concern to him than origins and motive. And I think that is a reasonable platform for both scholarship and politics.

  41 Latour, “From the Real Politik,” 41.





An Endless Flow of Machines to Serve the City: Infrastructural Assemblages and the Quest for the Metropolis S TEFAN H ÖHNE But the principle behind all technology is to demonstrate that a technical element remains abstract, entirely undetermined, as long as one does not relate it to an assemblage it presupposes. —GILLES DELEUZE AND FÉLIX GUATTARI1

In October 2008, when tourists and residents of Dubai City left their newly constructed luxury hotels or apartment complexes and headed down for the emirate's fabled beaches, they were confronted with a disturbing scene: miles of shoreline covered with the stinking contents of septic tanks.2 Although Dubai is one of the most developed settlements in the world and has one of the fastest and most advanced high-speed digital communication networks, it has no public sewage system to speak of. Instead of sewage flowing through pipes to a treatment plant within the city, thousands of trucks with filled septic tanks leave the city every day. They head for the desert to Dubai’s only overcrowded treatment plant, resulting in miles of queues and more than ten hours waiting per load

  1

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: 2004), 397.

2

Wissam Keyrouz, “Smelly Effluent Mars Affluent Dubai’s Beaches,” November 7, 2008,

http://www.news.com.au/travel/news/smelly-effluent-mars-affluent-dubais-

beaches/story-e6frfq80-1111117963383.



142 | STEFAN H ÖHNE

cycle. Drivers, paid by the load, are thus highly tempted to drop their cargo somewhere in the desert, or dump it down a stormwater drain where it eventually ends up on the cities beaches. Besides threatening to damage Dubai's image as a successful model of ultramodern, capitalist urban development in the dawn of the twenty-first century, this phenomenon also reveals a paradox. Dubai can build the world's tallest tower and transform a desert into a vast agglomeration of extensive residential settlements and luxury hotels—tying up a lot of the region’s surplus capital. It has, however, not constructed the public sewer works it needs, resulting in unhygienic and hazardous conditions and massive costs of rectification for the public sector. How, one might ask, could this have happened? If urban planners did not simply forget to implement these infrastructures, what else was going on here? In trying to approach this question, we have to examine the historical dynamics of both infrastructural development and the way these systems have been theorized in disciplines like urban planning and urban studies. First and foremost, the case of Dubai highlights not only the new modes of how the public sector is retreating from urban development. It also demonstrates a willful ignorance of the classic premise of urban planning concerning the importance of urban infrastructure. As taught to legions of urban planning students, water supply and sewer systems are the bottom of the pyramid and provide the basis for settlement. Mirroring the spatial configuration of a classically planned city, above the sewage system lies the transportation network (for instance roads or railways) and finally, on top of this lies electric lines, gas pipes, and highspeed communication lines.3 This rule apparently does not hold true anymore—neither in the rapidly expanding contemporary cities of the Global South nor in the metropolises of the Western world. All over the globe and mostly away from the public eye, the crisis of the functionality and role of infrastructure deepens. In the fastest growing megacities of developing countries, infrastructure systems only exist in older, more established parts of the megacities, as well as in the enclaves and citadels of the privileged. Their slums and shantytowns almost never possess a working infrastructure—like access to fresh water or waste disposal—resulting in catastrophic living conditions.4 In the Western metropolises like Paris, London, or New York, the ailing underground tubes and pipes installed many decades ago are decaying and cause countless, and sometimes quite spectacular, malfunctions. One example is the 2003 explosion of an eighty-year-old gas pipe close to

  3

Alex Marshall, Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities (New York: 2006).

4

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: 2007).



A N E NDLESS FLOW | 143

New York’s Grand Central Terminal, which emitted a force so strong that heavy iron manholes shot up several meters in the air.5 Perceived as a symptom of the catastrophic conditions of the outdated and poorly maintained infrastructure systems in Western metropolises, it led urban scholars to see it as yet another piece of evidence of a “global crisis of the city.”6 Despite being widely marginalized or neglected in both urban politics as well as urban studies, events like these recently generated interest in the material components of the urban fabric. Moreover, alongside shifting our focus to urban infrastructure, scholars might also be able to rethink a broader range of issues related to the city and its role in structuring everyday practices. In this text, I put forward an understanding of cities, and especially of metropolises, as complex, dense, and heterogeneous agglomerations of infrastructure that have a highly constitutive force on the practices of its populations. In unfolding this argument and addressing some of the key roles of urban infrastructures, this essay will proceed in several steps. I first shortly sketch how the machinic aspects of the social have been framed (or neglected) in social and cultural studies in the past. Second, after summing up recent approaches in theorizing material elements of the city, I suggest conceptualizing infrastructures as machinic assemblages in the sense of Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari and Manuel De Landa. Third, I discuss how infrastructural assemblages establish complex regimes that link them to urban nature, politics, economics, and social formations and that briefly connect them to the rather recent development of “mobile digitalization.” Finally, my concluding remarks outline how addressing urban infrastructures can provide key impulses for urban studies in general and particularly regarding the question of what the terms metropolis and metropolitanism might refer to. Given the complexity of the subject as well as the various theories for approaching them, these thoughts can only be laid out here in a rather cursory and fragmentary way. Despite having to simplify many aspects, I nevertheless aim to emphasize the potential of researching infrastructures and to highlight some of the groundbreaking studies that have been undertaken in recent years.

  5

Andrian Kreye and Petra Steinberger, “Die Zukunft verfault,” Süddeutsche Zeitung,

6

Ibid. My translation.

July 20, 2007.



144 | STEFAN H ÖHNE

I. T HE N EGLECT

OF I NFRASTRUCTURE IN

U RBAN T HEORY

Classical perspectives in disciplines like sociology, history, or cultural studies lack a strong theoretical and methodological approach to address the role of infrastructure in the urban sphere—a circumstance perpetuated in the field of urban studies. The problems already start with the history of the term infrastructure itself. As the German historian Dirk van Laak points out, the concept originally derives from the era of the implementation of the railways in the nineteenth century.7 First seen in France in 1875, it was used to describe railroad beds and later also for other immobile components that allowed mobility. Only from 1950 onwards was it used by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the context of military logistics and economic integration and later expanded into discourses in the field of development aid. It eventually became part of the vocabulary of political economy and therefore found application in the respective academic fields of economics, political studies, and urban planning. However, the term is more imprecise and ambiguous than it may seem. For example, in many cases it is pretty difficult to actually distinguish “urban architecture” and “infrastructure.” Moreover it sometimes also refers to social services like hospitals and schools, while in other cases the term “symbolic infrastructures” is applied to memorials or museums. Therefore, as the economist Walter Buhr wearily states, no comprehensive definition of the term can be given.8 For the purpose of my subsequent remarks, I will start from the definition given by Christopher G. Boone and Ali Modarres: “We define urban infrastructure as the network of services (other than public buildings) that allows the circulation of people, materials, and information within the city.”9 Regardless of the obvious importance of infrastructure for the urban condition emphasized in this definition, it is at least remarkable that, for nearly a century, infrastructure remained rather peripheral in urban theory. It seems that the functionality of infrastructures appeared wholly commonsensical and anything but problematic to most urban scholars.10 Moreover, addressing their role

  7

Dirk van Laak, “Infra-Strukturgeschichte,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27 (2001).

8

Walter Buhr, “What is Infrastructure?,” Volkswirtschaftliche Diskussionsbeiträge 107,

9

Christopher G. Boone and Ali Modarres, City and Environment (Philadelphia: 2006),

no. 03 (2003). http://www.uni-siegen.de/fb5/vwl/repec/sie/papers/107-03.pdf. 96. 10 Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3 (1999): 377–91.



A N E NDLESS FLOW | 145

in shaping the city was not perceived as necessary in order to gain a better understanding of urban sociability. The increasing orientation toward the sociocultural phenomena of deconstruction and representation along with the rise of the cultural turn in the past decades of the twentieth century helped especially to foster an anti-technical bias that had already accompanied the social and cultural studies since their formation in the decades around 1900. Texts by Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber, for example, show a bias toward what the German theorist Wolfgang Eßbach called an “anti-technical attitude” that tends to neglect or at least to downplay the role of artifacts in the social sphere.11 Why did these classic scholars insist that infrastructures and other artifacts were less significant for understanding urbanity by not asking questions such as how and to what extent is urban space illuminated at night or which segments of the urban population have access to water, electricity, or transportation? Following Eßbach’s arguments, this marginalization of the built environment in the theoretical groundwork of the discipline had multiple reasons. The experience of an expanding mechanization and aestheticization of life around 1900, especially in the growing metropolises of the Western world, was perceived as potentially unsettling to the nascent discipline of sociology. In the sociological classics, society emerges out of the horizon of religion, which was the early form of sociability and believed to be constitutive for explaining its contemporary forms. In emphasizing concepts like “culture,” “meaning,” and “social systems,” early sociologists aimed to establish their own methodological approach toward modern society in competition with alternative worldviews, for example, with the emerging fields of engineering and aesthetics. In most cases, foundational sociological texts evince a general mistrust and suspicion toward the role of objects and machines that culminated in concepts like “reification” or “commodity.” This set the course very early on not only for the social and cultural studies in general, but also for their attempts to explain the forms of social organization in the metropolises of the West. When addressing architectural or infrastructural forms, if at all, it was under the premise of their character of expressing, manifesting, or representing the social, in short, as social realities of a subordinated order.12

  11 Wolfgang Eßbach, “Antitechnische und antiästhetische Haltungen in der soziologischen Theorie,” in Technologien als Diskurse, ed. Andreas Lösch (Heidelberg: 2001), 123–36. 12 Heike Delitz, Gebaute Gesellschaft – Architektur als Medium des Sozialen (Frankfurt/M.: 2010).



146 | STEFAN H ÖHNE

On the contrary, I argue that instead of analyzing these systems under their symbolic moments of how society expresses its inequalities and social stratifications in infrastructures, we rather have to understand them as the very mode of operation of the social itself. Therefore, in attempts to focus on how infrastructure creates, forms, and maintains sociability, we need to rely on other (and maybe newer) concepts.13 If, for example, we conceptualize infrastructures as a constitutive “media of integration” as Dirk van Laak proposes,14 new and potentially fruitful perspectives on the material components of the metropolis can be opened up that go way beyond granting them a subordinate status in the social realm.

II. S OCIO -M ACHINIC ASSEMBLAGES THE U RBAN C ONDITION

AND

In recent years, the role of infrastructures in urban studies has been subject to an increasing interest—a phenomenon not the least of all due to events that drew the alleged plausibility and implicitness of how infrastructural systems seem to work into question, as the example of Dubai illustrates. Exemplifying the assumption that things only enter public discourses when they become increasingly questionable and problematic, and traditional modes of framing them no longer seem to be adequate, metropolitan infrastructures became a focus of urban scholars from a wide array of perspectives. These include questions of how infrastructures help to discipline, exclude, or include certain parts of urban population; how they are becoming increasingly militarized and privatized; and in what way they participate in creating or modifying a public realm or our understanding of nature.15 Moreover, there seems to be a growing interest in how

  13 Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London: 2007). 14 van Laak, “Infra-Strukturgeschichte,” 368. 15 See for example: Bruno Latour, Aramis or the Love of Technology (Cambridge: 1996); Dirk van Laak, Imperiale Infrastruktur. Deutsche Planungen für die Erschließung Afrikas 1880–1960 (Paderborn: 2004); Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?,” in The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: 1986), 19–39; Robert Fishman, The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: 1987); Dorothee Brantz, “The Natural Space of Modernity: A Transatlantic Perspective on (Urban) Environmental History,” in Historians and Nature: Comparative Approaches to Environmental History, ed. Ursula Lehmkuhl and Hermann Wellenreuther (New York: 2007), 195–225; Deborah Cohen, “Containing Insecurity:



A N E NDLESS FLOW | 147

and to what extent these systems shape urban practices, bodies, and “structures of feeling,”16 as well as modes of perception and subjectivity17—issues I will discuss more extensively below. This new interest is fueled by a massive reconsideration of the role of materiality in the social and cultural sphere—most prominently addressed in the writings of the French philosopher Bruno Latour and actor-network theory (ANT).18 Although ANT recently became highly influential in social and cultural studies, in the realm of urban studies, it is still widely neglected. Nevertheless, the 2010 publication of the volume Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies, edited by Ignacio Farías and Thomas Bender, has shown how promising this perspective is for addressing the interrelations between the urban condition and its materialities.19 One of the tome’s key assumptions is the concept of symmetry, meaning an equal treatment of both human and non-human actors in its theoretical approach toward urban phenomena. In the following, I will draw on these findings while also proposing an understanding of infrastructure that takes a slightly different angle: that of assemblage theory. While many assumptions of ANT derive from the concept of assemblage that was originally developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ANT quickly became a methodology in its own right. In expanding and altering many of its basic hypotheses, predominantly to better theoretically frame how knowledge is produced in laboratory situations, it also abandoned many original key elements. I aim to show that understanding metropolitan infrastructures as socio-technical assemblages in the original meaning of Deleuze/Guattari provides a useful framework for addressing the multifaceted impact they have on the urban everyday. Moreover, assemblage theory also follows the imperative of symmetry and intersects at a number of points with ANT and with the work of Farías and

    Logistic Space, U.S. Port Cities and the ‘War on Terror,’” in Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails, ed. Stephen Graham (New York: 2010), 69–84. 16 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, (Oxford: 1977). 17 As groundbreaking studies for this approach can surely count: Donald Reid, Paris Sewer and Sewermen: Realities and Representations (Cambridge: 1991). Or Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant (Cambridge: 1988) or Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: 1995). 18 John Law and John Hassard, Actor Network Theory and After (Oxford: 1999). 19 Ignacio Farías and Thomas Bender, eds., Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies (New York: 2010).



148 | STEFAN H ÖHNE

Bender. But first, let me briefly sketch out the main characteristics of assemblages as developed in Deleuze/Guattari’s collaborative work in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). What are assemblages? First and foremost, assemblages are a contingent collection of very heterogeneous elements. They can bring together, for example, artifacts, symbols, discourses, bodies, nature, and politics—all elements that are normally separated in academic research. These assemblages are of course not arbitrary. They always produce and create something new. As J. Wise states, “We don’t know what an assemblage is until we find out what it can do, that is how it functions.”20 Moreover, assemblages are characterized by their ability to form a territory as well as by having an expressive element that forms their identity. The assemblages’ territories, however, should not so much be understood as a simple physical space, but rather as a set of space-related practices— acts that need to be actualized and institutionalized to become durable and unfold their power.21 Therefore, assemblages themselves are not so much static entities than they are processes. They are temporary and can change or dissolve. Elements can disconnect or become part of other assemblages, altering the functionality of the original assemblage. In short, they are always subject to a specific historical dynamic. This is conceptualized in the two main dynamics of assemblages: the way they territorialize or deterritorialize, as well as their processes of coding and decoding in discourses, bureaucracies, or jurisdictional frameworks. These dynamics bind the technical machines of the assemblage to its other parts, thereby allowing the assemblage to work. To quote Deleuze/Guattari: “It is the machine that is primary in relation to the technical element, not the technical machine, itself a collection of elements, but the social or collective machine, the machinic assemblage that determines what is a technical element at a given moment, what is its usage, extension, comprehension, etc.” 22 If we follow this approach, this means that urban infrastructures are not things that can be isolated from their contexts—their specific territories, practices, and discourses. Instead, they are interwoven into a complex net of people, politics, and other infrastructures. The philosopher Manuel De Landa, one of the very few theorists who aims at introducing assemblage theory into social studies,

  20 J. Macgregor Wise, “Assemblage,” in Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, ed. Charles J. Strivale (Montreal: 2005), 78. 21 Andrea Mubi Brighenti, “On Territorology,” Theory, Culture & Society 27, no. 1 (2010): 52–72. 22 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 398.



A N E NDLESS FLOW | 149

states: “Social entities like cities, for example, composed of entire populations of persons, networks and organizations, can hardly be conceptualized without a physical infrastructure of buildings, streets and various conducts for the circulation of matter and energy, defined in part by their spatial relations to one another.” 23 It is this relational quality of infrastructural assemblages and their ability of establishing and interweaving territories that to a large extent constitutes the spatial dimension of the metropolis. While many urban infrastructures do not have geography in a classical sense, they nevertheless establish and homogenize territories while producing specific ranges of coverage. Think for example of infrastructures of wireless communication or urban transit. Moreover, if, as Dirk van Laak claims, infrastructures are media of integration, we have to understand that this concept of integration is twofold. On the one side, urban populations are integrated or excluded within the metropolis via machinic assemblages. On the other side, people integrate infrastructures into urban fabrics via practices and tie them to other infrastructures. This is realized in many ways, like via artifacts, body techniques, laws, rules, discourses, and perceptions. Therefore, it becomes apparent that we need to expand the scope of what the term infrastructure refers to. In light of assemblage theory (as well as ANT), the “networks of services” that Boone and Modarres define as infrastructures have to include more than its pure material elements of cables, tubes, or fibers. They must also take into account the discourses, bureaucracies, territories, subjects, and practices that are interwoven with them. All of these elements form an infrastructural assemblage. Keeping this in mind, if we want to understand what a metropolis is (or what it can do), it leads us on a wrong track to understand infrastructures as merely having some sort of impact, thereby rendering infrastructures as external and separate to the metropolis itself. Despite the etymology of the term, we have to understand the vast “meshworks” of infrastructural assemblages not just as the basis or foundation of a metropolis but also as what actually constitutes it.24 As urban machineries inform every fabric of the metropolis, they also structure nearly every cultural practice of its population, from the moment we get up, eat, wash, and go to work until we set the alarm clock at night. They shape our habits and economics of work and leisure, our perceptions and bodies, and our affects and desire. They shape the way we realize friendships and family and the way we realize love relations and sexuality.

  23 Manuel De Landa, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: 2006), 94. 24 Ibid.



150 | STEFAN H ÖHNE

Understanding cities as populations of assemblages means that we also have to decenter the object of urban studies and to dismiss the idea that we are dealing with a coherent, well-defined entity.25 A metropolis is not a coherent object but a specific population of promiscuous assemblages, thus constantly in the mode of becoming. Each metropolis consists of a specific group of large, dense, and heterogeneous mechanospheres. Or as Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift put it: “A set of constantly evolving systems or networks, machinic assemblages which intermix categories like the biological, technical, social, economic, and so on, with the boundaries of meaning and practice between the categories always shifting.”26 Understanding infrastructures in this way might not only offer a new historical perspective on infrastructure, what Dirk van Laak coined as “infrastructural history,” but also open up a wider field of urban infrastructuralism that could enrich narratives of the geneses and sociocultural dynamics of what we call metropolises.

III. E LEMENTS OF U RBAN I NFRASTRUCTURAL ASSEMBLAGES In order to unravel these multifaceted entanglements constituted in urban infrastructural assemblages, I will first address some key aspects for understanding how they compose what we call a metropolis—the way they entangle nature, politics, social order, and the bodies of its populations as well as their fragility. As I will subsequently demonstrate in the case of mobile digitalization, all of these aspects are vital in how urban assemblages unfold. Nature From an anthropological and environmental perspective, urban infrastructural assemblages serve as a mediator that relates to both nature and culture in a city. This mediation, however, is far from well balanced: “Infrastructure makes life possible in cities, but at costs to the natural environment.”27 In their function of relieving the population from many burdens, infrastructures allow on the one hand for a mode of abstraction and leveling of environmental influences and differences as well as social relations. This function as mediator, on the other

  25 Farías and Bender, Urban Assemblages. 26 Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge: 2002), 78. 27 Boone and Modarres, City and Environment, 95.



A N E NDLESS FLOW | 151

hand, brings about new constraints and dependencies. The implementation of infrastructure so radically changed our relations to nature that it seems increasingly implausible to understand infrastructure as a realm outside of culture or the social. This becomes especially obvious when we look deeper into urban disasters that have been predominantly framed as natural: from the fires that burned down large parts of San Francisco on the morning of April 18, 1906 after an earthquake disrupted many gas lines to the 2005 flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, which was mainly caused by an infrastructural failure of the levees. Attributing these incidents solely to natural causes seems to miss the point. Nature, and especially nature in cities, is anything but separable from or even outside of its social, cultural, and economic realms. Instead, we have to perceive nature and its resources, like many other aspects, as part of infrastructural assemblages and therefore as part of the social. As historian Dorothee Brantz has emphasized, this holds especially true for large cities, which should rather be understood as an “integrated realm where natural and built environments interact to create a space of symbiosis rather than difference, where nature is integrated rather than emptied out.”28 This integration, one might add, was already achieved in its modern form in the nineteenth century via establishing large technological systems that allowed for new forms and dimensions of connectivity and symbiosis of nature and built environment. Especially since this time, emergent technologies became a part of many metropolitan assemblages, drastically transforming their territories and codes at a record-breaking pace.29 While elevators lifted cities upward, increasing density as buildings became taller, public transportation pushed cities outwards, causing

  28 Brantz, “The Natural Space of Modernity,” 209. 29 Of course this only marks one step in a long history of infrastructural development. The transformation and incorporation of natural recourses via infrastructures mark the very beginning of sedentarization and agglomerating of humans around 10,000 BC. The implementation of water systems, agriculture, or permanent architecture that provided better protection from natural hazards also brought about the forced settlement or at least restriction of movements of nomadic groups that do not establish infrastructures other than temporary wells. Following Deleuze/Guattari, this characteristic of nomadic cultures is not an act of lower civilization but a conscious refusal of what infrastructural implementation is necessarily tied to: the emergence and development of governmental hegemony including the accumulation of recourses and institutionalization of social control. See: André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech (Cambridge: 1993); Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.



152 | STEFAN H ÖHNE

urban sprawl and the beginning of suburbanization. Especially around 1900, people in metropolises like Paris, London, New York, Boston, and, Berlin witnessed unprecedented activity that perforated their soils and tore open their streets to implement massive infrastructural networks. With the installations of technical assemblages and machineries like canalization systems and underground transit, they became the most thoroughly engineered spatial agglomerations in the history of mankind. This development not only attempted to successfully relate nature, technology, and culture, it also required the development of a specific set of political practices—ways of governing not over but through the infrastructures of the emerging machinic metropolis.30 Politics and Power Of course, metropolitan infrastructural assemblages have always been a key device in including and excluding urban populations. As their assemblages unfold, the material elements of infrastructure are intrinsically connected to public discourses and political regulations. Focusing on these connections allows us to see how these machineries incorporate political ideologies, or, to paraphrase Tom Bender, that there are Democratic and Republican sewer systems.31 Throughout history, the realization of infrastructural projects has also been tied to the evolution of territorial power: from aqueducts and transportation networks in the early metropolises of Babylon and Byzantium to contemporary megaprojects of urban renewal like Navi Mumbai in India, the world's largest planned city. In the twentieth century, infrastructures have become the main governmental assets besides social and military investments. Especially between World War I and the 1970s, infrastructural implementation and improvement was a central concern of governmental actors in both Europe and North America who were attempting to realize the modern ideal to standardize, integrate, and monopolize urban infrastructures.32 In the nineteenth century, these technologies already started to become sociopolitical devices that inserted themselves in between the sovereign and the everyday person and subsequently became part of both.33 The governmental strategy of addressing social questions via infrastructural

  30 Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: 2003). 31 See Thomas Bender, “History, Theory and the Metropolis,” in this volume. 32 For a detailed discussion see: James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: 1999). 33 van Laak, “Infra-Strukturgeschichte.”



A N E NDLESS FLOW | 153

implementations and thereby framing them under the premises of social engineering was enforced and differentiated since the beginning of twentieth century, despite changing political regimes. Especially in European metropolises, the ideology of realizing the “provisions for existence” (Daseinsfürsorge) became hegemonic in this era. This ideology aimed not only to pacify the working classes but also to assure the preservation and fostering of a productive work force with consumer power in a Fordist economy. That this top-down infrastructural integration not only tended to establish monopolies but also to incorporate everybody becomes especially apparent through a German law, enacted in the early twentieth century, which mandated that every citizen must be affiliated with infrastructural services (Anschluss- und Benutzungszwang). Even today, it dictates the legal compulsion of being connected to networks of water supply, sewage, waste management, and community heating, thereby establishing a territorial infrastructural regime that reveals a strong utilitarian ideology. However, the late 1970s, in many aspects a crucial turning point in this development, led to a reconsideration of the state role in infrastructural provisions. This was mainly caused by growing financial problems, deindustrialization, and the reorganization of the economy toward flexibilization, the pluralization of consumerism, and the rise of the tertiary sector (aspects usually subsumed under the label of a “post-Fordist urban economy.”)34 Together with a rising awareness of environmental concerns as well as of the limits of growth and resources, this new economic model brought about a retreat of the state in many fields, including in the provision of metropolitan infrastructures. In many cases, this was enforced by a financial crisis or the bankruptcy of Western metropolitan governments. Subsequently, private investors, who until this point had mainly been contractors and agents in realizing urban infrastructural projects under governmental regulations, were increasingly emancipated from this role. As (neo)liberal forces gained momentum, mistrust grew toward state-subsidized infrastructural developments with their intended or tolerated monopolistic structures under the suspicion of distorting competition and hindering growth. Through processes of deregulation and liberalization, the private sector became the driving force of urban infrastructural development. By pursuing their own agendas of profit maximization, in many aspects this new regime was contra-

  34 For a detailed discussion see: Ash Amin, Post-Fordism: A Reader (London: 1994) and Margit Mayer, “Urban Governance in the Post-Fordist City,” in Managing Cities: The New Urban Context, ed. Patsy Healey, Stuart Cameron, Simin Davoudi, Stephen Graham, Ali Madani-Pour (1995): 231–49.



154 | STEFAN H ÖHNE

dictory to the governmental ideal of providing basic services to its population, as the example of Dubai City vividly shows. As Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin argue in their groundbreaking book Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition,35 this resulted in a collapse of the integrative ideal of networked urban infrastructures, with manifold consequences. Here, I can only cursorily outline some of the key findings of this rich and essential study. Following Graham and Marvin, the crisis of urban infrastructure and the withdrawal of network cross-subsidies around the 1970s resulted in the enforced physical decentralization of the fabrics of Western metropolises, forming poly-nucleated structures and unbundling urban landscapes. This splintering became manifest in secessionary networked spaces and new sociospatial divides like fortress spaces and hyper-ghettos, emphasizing not only the political but also social efficacy of infrastructures. Social Order In his 1986 essay “Do Artifacts Have Politics?,” Langdon Winner states that while we tend to think of infrastructures as neutral tools, their political function is inherent insofar as they always produce, maintain, or alter specific social orders.36 Examples of how infrastructural arrangements have political effects of maintaining the status quo in urban regimes can be found throughout history. Just to point some out, in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann restructured Paris, one of the main reasons for implementing the broad thoroughfares and boulevards was to prevent any recurrence of street fighting and the building of barricades that had occurred during the revolution of 1848. This strategy of constructing huge spaces and plazas in city centers to defuse civil uprisings also has many examples in the metropolises of the twentieth century: from Moscow and Mexico City to the vast North American university campuses reordered after the uprisings around 1968. Another example is the racial segregation in South Africa and the United States, where non-whites were denied not only civil rights like voting, but also equal access to infrastructural services like public transportation and water supply. During this time, seating in public transportation or drinking fountains

  35 Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures; Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London: 2001). 36 Winner, “Do Artifacts have Politics?”



A N E NDLESS FLOW | 155

permanently actualized racial discrimination in the urban every day, manifesting and enmeshing both infrastructural and social order. In forming assemblages, infrastructures and social regulations mutually construct and maintain each other. This process, however, in many ways results in unforeseen effects. Thus, infrastructural politics are not simply a political ideology cast in concrete and steel but produce rather hidden consequences not intended in the first place, while nevertheless being highly influential. A good example is the highly gendered construction of urban infrastructural networks, especially in mobility regimes. As Graham and Marvin point out: “Because much of the public transport laid out by modern infrastructural planning was designed around the needs of full-time, largely male, workers commuting to a city centre, services rarely met women’s needs, limiting them to a more spatially restricted job market.”37 Not only did and do women generally have far more limited access to cars but their multiple roles and duties often meant (mean) that they also had (have) shorter and multipurpose mobility patterns. Thus, many had to use off-peak and unreliable public transportation, an often exhausting and resource-consuming struggle. In countless other ways, the implicit masculine bias of these assemblages reinforced the social position and status of women in Western metropolises. These examples illustrate how infrastructural assemblages realize core functions of social organization and stratification as they divide, distribute, and collect social spheres. In doing this, they not only organize social stratification, determine the inside and outside of the social, and manifest public and private realms, but also establish and maintain subject formations. Conflicts over who has access to which infrastructures and under what circumstances have always been crucial in the dynamics of metropolitan development. The responses to these conflicts, however, have historically varied greatly. In short, especially since the late twentieth century, we can diagnose a trend toward individualization of access. Despite the fact that ascriptions of nationality and origin are still crucial or sometimes even enforced, the individual recourses of social, cultural, and especially economic capital become increasingly decisive. Along this line, to renounce the usage of specific infrastructures becomes an attribute of social distinction in a truly Bourdieuian sense,38 examples of this being the refusal of drinking public tap water or using mobile and Internet-based communication and services in the 1990s. Furthermore, the use of public transportation in most areas

  37 Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism, 128. 38 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge: 1984).



156 | STEFAN H ÖHNE

of the US is highly stigmatized as a signifier for belonging to the lower classes. Adopting Loïc Wacquant’s concept of territorial stigmatization,39 one could frame such phenomena as infrastructural stigmatization. This demonstrates how assemblages of infrastructures enforce codes and territories aligned with specific subject formations along lines of race, gender, or class, especially in metropolitan contexts. Bodies In composing and framing specific subject formations, infrastructures also interpellate and structure the bodily practices of the urban population. This becomes especially apparent when considering the immense impact of the sewer systems on the everyday life of those inhabiting Western metropolises like Paris, London, or New York in the nineteenth century. Sewers implemented a new self-awareness of the body alongside a new hygienic regime, as well as massively changed concepts of public and private space and its usages, as Donald Reid has shown.40 From this point on, the cleaning and display of the exposed body was assigned to private spaces instead of public baths. Also sewer systems altered structures and affects of sexuality and shame and led to new perceptions of purity and disgust, rendering primary bodily functions as something to be hidden. If they suddenly return to public visibility, for example on a Dubai beach, they provoke massive nausea, revealing the disciplinary powers of infrastructural assemblages. Another example of this is in the exclusion of ill or abnormal bodies in urban public transportation. Even though recently some transit systems are making efforts to include blind and deaf people or people in wheelchairs, they nevertheless aim to categorize and rationalize passengers’ bodies as they regulate movements and perceptions in their goal of creating an easily controllable environment that makes certain practices impossible. Moreover, it seems that all infrastructural assemblages, be it networks of water supply, transportation, or digital communication, also contain a concept of infection, a threat commonly addressed through the exclusion of abnormal and suspicious elements.41 Infrastructural assemblages shape bodies and bodily practice, and vice versa. One exam-

  39 Loïc Wacquant, “Territoriale Stigmatisierung im Zeitalter fortgeschrittener Margin alität,” Das Argument 271 (2007): 399–409. 40 Reid, Paris Sewer and Sewermen. See also ibid. 41 For an anthropological approach toward infection and pollution see: Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: 2002).



A N E NDLESS FLOW | 157

ple, given in a recent study by Simon Marvin and Will Medd,42 shows how many contemporary metropolitan sewer systems face a new and until now widely disregarded problem. With the increasingly obese bodies of urban spaces, sewer systems are increasingly clogged by discarded fat. While this sounds like a banal and marginal phenomenon, it will cause massive and severe difficulties in the future. It also points to an aspect that has not yet been addressed in this essay that is of key importance in the understanding of metropolitan infrastructures: their fragility. Disruption, Fragility, and Subversion Up to this point, I have mainly sketched out how infrastructural assemblages territorialize and codify the metropolis in consolidating its natural elements, political hegemonies, economics, and social orders, as well as the everyday subjectivities and bodily practices of its dwellers. Yet, this is just one side of the coin. Constituting assemblages, infrastructures have to be understood as dynamic processes rather than as static entities. As such, they not only establish themselves along the axes of territorialization and codification, but also alter or even dissolve as their elements become recoded or deterritorialized. It is these processes of destabilization—like failure, temporary appropriation, and attacks—that are central to the question of what infrastructural assemblages can do. Most urban infrastructures constitute networks of mostly enormous proportions with complex economic, political, and bureaucratic systems attached and can therefore be characterized as what Thomas P. Hughes calls “large technological systems” (LTS).43 As such, they tend to stabilize their functionality and adapt to new situations rather slowly. After having a prominent role in public discourse during their implementation, they moreover tend to become invisible and black-boxed. While some infrastructures become iconic symbols of power or technological achievement, in most cases, users are not conscious of the complex logistics and technological processes that allow these systems to function and that make their everyday routines possible. Following Hughes, once these assemblages are established and their functionality becomes unambiguous; they are perceived as normalized and natural at least for those who are allowed to use

  42 Simon Marvin and Will Medd, “Clogged Cities: Sclerotic Infrastructure,” in Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails, ed. Stephen Graham (New York: 2010), 85– 97. 43 Thomas Parke Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus (New York: 1998).



158 | STEFAN H ÖHNE

them. Only when they break down or become dysfunctional do they reappear in political discourse.44 The perspective on how infrastructural assemblages are disrupted reveal some of their core characteristics, as the most recently published edited volume by Stephen Graham entitled Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails (2010) also shows.45 Despite demonstrating the conditions and effects of infrastructural failure such as blackouts, however, to what extent infrastructural assemblages undergo deterritorialization and decoding differs widely. They can be “hacked” or altered without losing their capability to circulate information, people, or goods. Furthermore, there are also the countless little appropriations of infrastructural technology, from fare beating, water tapping, and graffiti to digital file sharing and illegal parking. While they do not leading to a complete breakdown, they nevertheless create permanent dynamics and flux of infrastructural assemblages. These conflicts allow for the constant modification and renegotiation of the accessibility and use of the systems. As cunning tactics in the sense of Michel De Certeau,46 they look for the blind spots of socio-technical regimes to implement or alter codes while aiming to establish their own temporal territories, thus provoking strategic reactions from its operators. This especially holds true for the subversive practices of a rather more political kind. The disciplinary function of infrastructures frequently makes them an aim of civil disobedience, especially in an urban context. Besides politically motivated iconoclasm or vandalism (for example of closed-circuit television systems), metropolitan infrastructures have been a frequent aim of terrorist attacks, as on the subway systems of Tokyo (1995), London (2005), or most recently Moscow (2010). During war times, they are also often the preferred

  44 What might be underexposed by Hughes here, is that in daily life, people actually seem to talk a lot about infrastructure, especially in urban settings. From traffic announcements on the radio to complaints about slow Internet connections are, poor mobile reception or the subway being delayed or overcrowded. This everyday talk, and while not exactly establishing a critical discourse on the political or social implications of infrastructure, it nevertheless serves an important purpose. In constantly normalizing the defects and little irregularities of the machinic environment, these utterances can be understood as a form of maintenance or repair in the sense of Erving Goffman. They serve the purpose of sense making, as we constantly reassure ourselves of the world around us, thus stabilizing it. See: Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: 1959). 45 Graham, Disrupted Cities. 46 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: 1988).



A N E NDLESS FLOW | 159

targets of military action or become militarized, as highways serve as landing strips or subway stations become transformed into bunkers. Especially in the last decade, under what has being coined as the “war on terror,” urban infrastructures have become increasingly militarized through implementing new digital surveillance techniques.47 Following Deborah Cohen, to implement these new security regimes, urban hegemonies widely build on fears and anxieties of infrastructural breakdown.48 As mentioned above, these assemblages are not only fragile in regard to their social, political, and cultural dimensions, but also in their relation to their “natural” environment and their dependence on other infrastructures. Alan Weisman reminds us that without the power supply that keeps the 753 water pumps in Manhattan’s underground running, half an hour of rain would be enough to flood its subway system to such an extent that it would break down.49 The intense interweaving of contemporary metropolitan infrastructural assemblages means that the disruption of one system most likely results in “cascading failure,”50 thus multiplying damage. Urban Assemblages of Mobile Digitalization Having sketched out these aspects of infrastructural assemblages and their historical dynamics, I briefly want to highlight one recent development that is becoming increasingly powerful in the context of metropolitan life and that exemplifies the intertwining character of infrastructures: mobile digitalization. In the past years, the rise of digital networks has become a highly challenging and influential device in the urban everyday. Already over four decades old, digital networks are far from being such a new technology. On the level of the individ-

  47 Stephen Graham, ed., Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics (Chichester: 2004). 48 Cohen, “Containing Insecurity.” Moreover, the anticipation of the collapse of metropolitan infrastructures is also a central element of the imaginary of its dwellers. It is acted out in countless products of the cultural industry, like in the famous Die Hard film series. It is also manifested in urban myths and phantasms, from the monstrous alligators in New York City’s sewer system to the government’s insertion of mindaltering drugs in public water. See: Williams, Notes on the Underground. 49 Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (New York: 2007). 50 Richard G. Little, “Managing the Risk of Cascading Failure in Complex Urban Infrastructures,” in Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails, ed. Stephen Graham (New York: 2010), 27–40.



160 | STEFAN H ÖHNE

ual consumer, however, the socio-technical assemblages that unfold around it are rather recent and still in full force. Just like the Western metropolises have become mechanic in the past century, they are becoming increasingly digitalized. Of course, digital networks have already begun to radically transform urban fabrics in the past decades, as for example allowing for the emergence of home offices that in many ways have decentralized urban agglomerations and produced what Robert Fishman calls “technoburbs.”51 As variations of “edge cities,”52 “technoburbs” refers to the growing slice of suburbia centered around high-tech industrial parks and nearby retail malls, as well as cultural, entertainment, and educational complexes that compound problems of citizen detachment and a sense of anti-urbanism. The implementation of these digital infrastructures in many ways did not, however, result in the forming of assemblages that led to the end of dense urban agglomerations, as many urban scholars predicted over the last decades. Instead, they seem to be highly compatible with existing metropolitan networks, enforcing the already-strong network character of contemporary metropolises.53 Many infrastructural assemblages aim to accelerate their flows and rhythms—be it in the realm of transportation, information, or communication. The focal point of this development is the establishment of real time, a characteristic almost intrinsic to digital networks, especially when their access becomes mobile. In the near future, digital technologies like portable devises, social networks, and augmented reality will have an even stronger impact on our perception and understanding of the metropolis. As these technologies are incorporated into new assemblages that form new codes and territories, new forms of exclusion and inclusion as well as urban practices unfold. Many of these new practices are altering and marginalizing classic urban cultural techniques and modes of perception, like for example Walter Benjamin’s famous art of getting lost. A portable GPS will put an end to the classical idea of the metropolis as a labyrinth. The new subject types that manifest in these digital assemblages are theorized under what urban scholars have coined “cyborg urbanization.”54 Like all infrastructural implementations, they both relieve specific groups of urbanites from many burdens and constraints, while also doubtlessly enabling unaccus-

  51 Fishman, The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. 52 Joël Garreau, Edge City: Life on The New Frontier (New York: 1991). 53 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age; Economy, Society, and Culture (Chichester: 2009). 54 Farías and Bender, Urban Assemblages. Also Rob Shields, “Flanerie for Cyborgs,” Theory Culture & Society 23, no. 7–8 (2006): 209–20.



A N E NDLESS FLOW | 161

tomed forms of hegemony and dependence. In the ongoing push toward the mobilization and an unbroken connection to digital networks, new forms of controlling and disciplining urban populations are being established. Already it is becoming more and more difficult and subversive to be offline and off the grid, therefore provoking new insurgency tactics and forms of resistance. Access to these technologies is not only class related and serves a mode of distinction, as “the very lifeblood of digital capitalism,”55 it also enables new economic regimes that bring about advanced forms in the capitalist logics of exclusion and exploittation.

IV. T OWARD AN U NDERSTANDING OF U RBAN I NFRASTRUCTURALISM Having highlighted some of the multiple relations and the historical dynamic of metropolitan infrastructural assemblages, I hope to have shown the importance of this perspective in the task of understanding what a metropolis is and that studying these aspects is far from dull and boring. Instead, they provide a promising vantage point to address the very core of urban conditions. In the following, I want to point out some consequences for the theoretical framing of these phenomena for the field of urban studies. First of all, we must reconsider many classic assumptions about the role of infrastructures in the urban context. In many grounding works on the role and importance of infrastructures undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s, infrastructures were conceptualized as being a basic service to the population—a view still dominant in urban studies. Nowadays, however, infrastructures are far from being common goods. Even the word “public” of public infrastructures seems to be less than adequate in light of the ongoing privatization and pluralization of these systems. Instead, as specific modes of integration (and this means inclusion as well as exclusion), this mode has become increasingly personalized. If Deleuze/ Guattari emphasize the productive force of assemblages in composing frameworks of subjectivity, reconstructing how they historically emerge and dissolve can offer fruitful insights about the impact of infrastructures on the everyday in specific metropolises. Second, if we reconsider the definition that infrastructures enable flows (e.g., of people, goods, or information), we must be careful to not simply bestow fluidity and mobility with positive connotations while perceiving immobility as a sign

  55 Graham, Disrupted Cities, 1.



162 | STEFAN H ÖHNE

of exclusion and marginalization. As Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift remind us, this bias is very strong in the academic field, especially in cultural studies.56 It tends to overlook the doctrines at the very core of (neo)liberal ideology of being mobile, flexible, and connected, as for example realized in mobile digitalizetion.57 In recent scholarship that argues along the lines of what Henri Lefebvre,58 Peter Marcuse,59 and David Harvey60 have termed “the right to the city,” it is not only “the right to stay put”61 that is of key concern, but also the question of access to urban infrastructure. As van Laak reminds us, in the context of international development aid, poverty is nowadays also predominantly defined as the lack of a minimum of infrastructure, like clean drinking water, mobility systems, or the existence of a sewer system. Even so, in a broader perspective, neither denying nor forcing a population to be connected to infrastructural services appears to be appropriate for realizing a livable and “just” metropolis. That infrastructural regimes are more and more decoupled from political control and democratic decision making complicates this fact. For an increasing number of scholars and activists, however, the transformation and increasing importance of infrastructure in processes of segmentation in the cities seems to be too significant to leave them to economists and technocrats. Third, while urban theory has slowly started to address the importance of infrastructures, pioneered by the authors discussed above, the question of its object remains problematic since the founding of the discipline. However, critically engaging with some classic studies in this field in the light of these new developments might provide some insight. In 1938, Louis Wirth, one of the founding fathers of urban studies, famously addressed the question of how to define the urban lifestyle.62 While of course tending to downplay the built components of

  56 Amin and Thrift, Reimagining the Urban. 57 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (New York: 2005). 58 Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities (Chichester: 1996). 59 Peter Marcuse, “From Critical Urban Theory to the Right to the City,” City 13, no. 2 (2009): 185–97. 60 David Harvey, “The Right to The City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27, no. 4 (2003): 939–41; David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (Athens, GA: 2009). 61 Kathe Newman and Elvin K. Wyly, “The Right To Stay Put, Revisited: Gentrification and Resistance to Displacement in New York City,” Urban Studies 43, no. 1 (2006): 23–57. 62 Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” The American Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (July 1938): 1–24.



A N E NDLESS FLOW | 163

the city in favor of an urban ecology approach, he defines four elements as key in defining a city: size, density, permanence, and heterogeneity. Despite also being criticized, Wirth’s approach has been very influential.63 Even though his four criteria were developed to address the human population of cities, we can actually use them in the task of addressing questions of the machinic metropolis and the role of urban infrastructures. As these vast socio-technical meshworks juxtapose nature, politics, people, and materialities, they not only establish specific forms of density, but also a certain kind of thickness. While each type of infrastructural assemblage adds new spaces, rhythms, and temporalities to the city, these various strata must be connected to each other to allow for their specific functionalities to unfold. This results in multilayered and interdependent spatial configurations, whereby various infrastructural territories and codings become interwoven into the thick fabrics of urban life. If we understand the history of urban development as a history of infrastructural implementation and usage, urban infrastructures could actually deliver one possible answer to the ongoing debate on the status of the urban. One could ask the question whether to a large extent it isn’t the large, dense, permanent, and heterogeneous accumulation of infrastructures that make a metropolis? While it might overstretch the argument to claim that an agglomeration of human settlement only deserves to be called a metropolis if it actually has a metro system, there is an element of plausibility here. Perhaps we hesitate calling Dubai City a metropolis precisely because it lacks the vast, compressed, diverse, and always-available infrastructural assemblages so apparent in cities like London, Tokyo, or New York. If we follow Wirth’s argument that the term “urbanism” refers to both a specific configuration of built environments as well as to a genuine “way of life,” maybe this also holds true for the concept of “metropolitanism,” which this volume aims to explore. If the term “metropolitanism” can be useful to describe the large populations of infrastructural assemblages that allow for the massive and around-the-clock circulation of people, goods, and information, we should ask: what implications does this have on the daily practices and perceptions of its dwellers? Just to give one example, it is evident that infrastructures both supersede and enable forms of face-to-face social contact and interaction. Following this argument, metropolitanism might be a specific “way of life”—sets of practices, modes of perceptions, and cultural techniques closely related to the possibilities

  63 Claude S. Fischer, “‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’: A Review and an Agenda,” Sociological Methods Research 1, no. 2 (1972): 187–242.



164 | STEFAN H ÖHNE

and constraints of urban infrastructure. The characteristics of these modes of everyday life, however, have to be characterized in their specific historical dynamic, time, and space; they are obviously distinct in Paris of the middle of the nineteenth century or New York City in the late capitalist era at the end of the second millennium. Therefore, anthropologist Robert Rothenberg’s definition of metropolitanism as a predominantly white, capitalist, and colonial ideology of the nineteenth century refers to a specific form of how metropolitanism has played out.64 While nevertheless true to a certain extent, the way infrastructural assemblages structure metropolitan conditions could also take very different shapes and forms in the future. To trace and spot these infrastructural assemblages is anything but a sideshow of academic inquiry into the multiple phenomena of urban living. It rather leads into the very core of what we call urban studies.

  64 Robert Rotenberg, “Metropolitanism and the Transformation of Urban Space in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Metropoles,” American Anthropologist 103, no. 1 (2001): 7–15.





Planning Modernism: Growing the Organic City in the 20th Century H AROLD L. P LATT

I.

I NTRODUCTION : S EEING THE M ETROPOLIS

The history of city planning demands a mode of inquiry that simultaneously encompasses many points of view. To understand urban change during the twentieth century requires the inclusion of the conflicting visions of the planners, policymakers, and the grassroots. Or as the British scholar Alison Ravitz explains, “Once the focus is shifted from conscious planning to the urban environment, it is necessary and inevitable to consider technology, property, people, and mechanisms of control, as well as ideas.” For some reformers and planners, the urban renewal bulldozer in the United States represented necessary surgery during the 1950–1960s to save the city from the spreading cancer of slums and blight. But for others, it meant “Negro removal,” ethnic cleansing, and class exclusion. Both views must be taken into account to explain the subsequent social geography of the metropolis.1 Consequently, this history of modern planning is about seeing. It is about seeing the city as both material space and symbolic place in peoples’ imaginations. It is about looking out at the city from bedroom windows, neighborhood street corners, and downtown plazas. Its about “seeing like a state,” looking down from architectural studios, planning offices, city halls, and other centers of

  1

Alison Ravetz, Remaking Cities: Contradictions of the Recent Urban Environment (London: 1980), 14, for the quotation. For an introduction to the urban renewal in the US, see E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing (South Bend, IN: 2004); and Michael W. Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: 2005).



166 | H AROLD L. PLATT

power. Urban space is not just a neutral container—a physical thing—it is also a non-Euclidean notion of a place of human activity. The history of the city in the twentieth century is also about seeing the global in the local and the other way around. Equally important here is not losing sight of the nation state as a powerful filter or lens mediating between the two. Ecological perspectives on urban planning add yet more ways of seeing, from microscopic images of disease organisms in water supplies to satellite pictures of air pollution above sprawling metropolitan regions. Looking from different points of view, the city takes on multiple shapes and layers of meaning at the same time. In the United States and Western Europe, moreover, ideological consensus behind modernism or the “international style” of architecture and design promoted advocacy of a single model of the future, an “organic city.” An East-West, transatlantic comparison of these highly industrialized and urbanized countries goes a long way in identifying the ways in which this utopian image was refracted through the lens of national political cultures and institutions to project different outcomes.2 The origins of urban planning in the 1890s deserve attention first because of the remarkable continuity of the organic-city model before, during, and after World War II. Although its influence on policymakers and the general public grew steadily before 1945, its consolidation into the “international style” was confined to an elite circle of intellectuals, led by Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret). In large part, the shared class and cultural perspectives of these architects, utopians, and social critics explains the emergence of a consensus behind the ideal of an organic city. This extraordinary unity not only created a powerful picture of the future, it also led its advocates to dismiss alternative visions of the relationship between nature, place, and society. Further insulated from the grassroots after the war in centralized bureaucracies, the planners turned a blind eye to the view from the street corner.3

  2

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: 1998) for the quoted phrase. Also see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: 1973); Janet L. Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Cities (Minneapolis: 1999); and Theodor G. Wyeld and Allan Andrew, “The Virtual City: Perspectives on the Dystrophic Cybercity,” Journal of Architecture 11, no. 5 (2006): 613–20.

3

Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow - An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: 1996).



P LANNING M ODERNISM

II. T HE O RIGINS

OF THE

| 167

O RGANIC C ITY , 1890–1914

Starting the story of planning with an American, Frank Lloyd Wright, underscores the transatlantic context of the project to create the organic city. The focus here will be on the beliefs of Wright and other urban visionaries about nature, science, and society rather than their aesthetic values, which have already been minutely dissected by art historians. The ways that these designers of modernity understood the natural world through science—especially biology and sociology—played a major role in shaping their plans for the built environment. An examination of these ideas also provides a key to unlock their very different, even contradictory uses of organic metaphors of the city. Wright, for example, gained his view of nature from real- life experience growing up on a farm in the Midwest. In contrast, Europeans like Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe saw science through a philosophical lens as an abstract expression of universal laws. Nonetheless, they were typical in paying homage to the American as the first modernist.4 Wright served as a bridge that carried the Europeans from traditions of historicism in city building to something truly original, an “organic architecture.” In 1909, Wright arrived from Chicago to promote a two-volume edition of his plans and drawings that had just been published in Germany and are known as the “Wasmuth Portfolio.” Work stopped when it arrived at the studio of Berlin’s avant-garde Peter Behrens, where Mies and Gropius were apprentices. Another young, aspiring architect from Switzerland, Le Corbusier, worked there too; he bought a copy. In Vienna, Richard Neutra was so inspired by it that he moved to Chicago in order to learn nature-based design directly from the master.5

  4

For a clear statement of his intellectual heritage, see Frank Lloyd Wright, The Natural House (New York: 1954). For a biography, see Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century - Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier (New York: 1977), 91–162. For insight on the European planners, see Peder Anker, “The Bauhaus of Nature,” Modernism/Modernity 12, no 2 (2005): 229–51; Judi Loach, “Le Corbusier and the Creative Use of Mathematics,” British Journal of the History of Science 31 (1998): 185–215; and Vittoria Di Palma, “Architecture and the Organic Metaphor,” Journal of Architecture 11, no. 4 (2006): 385–90.

5

Frank Lloyd Wright, Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe, 2 vols. (Berlin: 1910). It has been completely reproduced as, Wikipedia, s.v. “Wasmuth Portfolio,” accessed August 3, 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasmuth_Portfolio. (For a moving testimonial on Wright’s revolutionary impact, see Mies’ memoir thirty years later: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, “Frank Lloyd Wright,” in Mies Van Der Rohe, ed. Philip Johnson



168 | H AROLD L. PLATT

The American was the proverbial right man at the right time and place to open the path from old to new for several reasons. Besides a super-sized ego, he was able to bring the germinal ideas of his mentor, Louis Sullivan, to full bloom. Wright’s “Li[e]ber Meister” was a transitional figure because his futuristic pronouncement that “form follows function,” was offset by a backward-looking obsession with ornamentation. In contrast, his student’s simple cubist designs appealed to contemporary aesthetic values, while his homespun transcendentalism resonated with German idealism. If Wright provided the vision to help the Europeans find their way across to the modernist shore, they were not lacking in prior efforts to get there. The search for ways to counterbalance the harmful effects of industrialization on the city had been underway for at least a half century. For proto-modernists, Wright’s portfolio supplied what psychologists call an “aha experience,” an epiphany that suddenly snaps previously scattered pieces of a picture into focus. For Wright, architecture and planning was based on nature because his immediate environmental surroundings served as the starting place for his ideas about its relationship to buildings and people. “I had an idea,” he recalled, “that the planes parallel to the earth in buildings identify themselves with the ground. [...] I had an idea that every house in that low region should begin on the ground, not in it as they then began, with damp cellars.[...] I began to see a building primarily not as a cave but as broad shelter in the open, related to vista; vista without and vista within.”6 Wright believed that he had integrated Sullivan’s art-nouveau style of naturalistic ornamentation into the structure of the building itself. “Here came a new sense of building on American soil,” he exclaimed “that could grow building forms not only true to function but expressive far beyond mere function in the realm of the human spirit.” The result of this simplifying and synthesizing was what Wright meant by “organic architecture.” “Conceive now,” he explained, “that an entire building might grow up out of conditions as a plant grows up out of soil and yet be free to be itself, to ‘live its own life’ according to Man’s Nature.[...] I now propose an ideal for the architecture of the machine age, for the ideal American building. Let it grow up in that image. The tree.”7

    and Museum of Modern Art (New York: 1978 [1947]), 200–201. Also see Detlef Mertins, “Living in a Jungle: Mies, Organic Architecture, and the Art of City Building,” in Mies in America, ed. Phyllis Lambert (New York: 2001), 590–641. 6

Frank Lloyd Wright, The Natural House (New York: 1954), 16. Second italics added.

7

Ibid., 16–17, 21, 46 (original italics) respectively for the quotations. All but the last quotation was originally published in 1936 in the Architect’s Journal of London. The



P LANNING M ODERNISM

| 169

Wright appeared in Europe at the peak of a ferment of urban reform that had been brewing on both sides of the Atlantic. Percolating through this assault on the problems of the industrial city was a growing belief in environmental determinism; that is, that changes in the physical world could cause changes in social behavior. Although this strategy spawned a broad spectrum of reform proposals for improving urban conditions, housing emerged as the one issue that attracted the most attention. “Whatever the specific strategy,” historian Paul Boyer notes, “the underlying conviction remained constant: the behavior and morality of the urban masses could surely be influenced for the better by changing or upgrading their housing. Here was a fundamental beginning point for the positive environmentalism of the Progressive years.”8 Perhaps the second great common cause was urban sanitation and public health. Armed with a powerful new science, the champions of germ theories, like the advocates of cleaning up the slums, also believed that a humane and healthy city required a total reengineering of the built environment. The result was a radical shift in point of view from street-level accounts of the dangers of the mob to more distant, scientific studies of urban conditions. The reform strategies of the Progressives helped focus the attention of the nascent profession of planning on physical space and finished blueprints of idealized landscapes.9

    last quotation was originally from his 1943 Autobiography. While these statements are more concise than his earlier work, they are not different in spirit. In the Wasmuth Portfolio, Wright defines an “organic architecture”: “By knowledge of nature in this sense alone are [...] guiding principles to be established. Ideals gained within these limitations are never lost, and an artist may defy ‘education.’ If he is really for nature in this sense, he may be a ‘rebel against his time and its laws but never lawless.’” Frank Lloyd Wright, Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe, vol. 1 (Berlin: 1910), 5; as quoted in full digital text that can be found on the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriot Library site, http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/FL Wright-jp2. 8

Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge: 1978), 235, for the quotation. For a comprehensive survey, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in the Progressive Age (Cambridge: 1998). Also see John W. Cole and Eric R Wolf, The Hidden Frontier; Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley (New York: 1974).

9

C. Bernhardt and G. Massard-Guilbaud, eds., The Modern Demon: Pollution in Urban and Industrial European Societies (Clermont-Ferrand: 2002) and Dieter Schott, Bill Luckin, and Genevieve Massard-Guilbaud, eds., Resources of the City - Contributions to an Environmental History of Modern Europe (Aldershot: 2005). On links between



170 | H AROLD L. PLATT

This turn from the moral environmentalism of the Victorian Era to the “positive” or social environmental determinism at the turn of the century was one of several sources nourishing the birth of a modern form of urban planning. Architects and civil engineers were the closest, established professions to be able to claim expert authority in these matters, but many would-be urban reformers drew on traditions of social utopianism for legitimacy. Chicago’s Daniel Burnham is a good example of a skilled architect who in 1891 went from designing a World’s Fair to ever-larger urban renewal projects, culminating in the comprehensive Chicago Plan of 1909. In contrast, the creator of the “garden city” idea, London’s Ebenezer Howard, had no formal training and was an official court reporter by trade. But he was also a dedicated radical who wanted to reconfigure nature in order to impose a socialism of co-operative behavior on its inhabitants. Unfortunately for Howard, the flexibility of his idea for a de-concentrated city of suburbs would allow others to refashion it to fit almost any political ideology.10 Another important fountainhead of modern architecture and design sprung from a general uprising of the art world against the past. Like Sullivan’s decorative motifs, art-nouveau styles at the turn of the century represented a transitional phase in this shift in aesthetic values. Architectural manifestations cropped up everywhere, including Rene McIntosh’s Glasgow, Antonio Gaudí’s Barcelona, Otto Wagner’s Vienna, Victor Horta’s Brussels, and Hector Guimard’s Paris. And like Wright—the self-proclaimed “rebel”—a rising generation of architects followed up on Behrens’ experiments in stripping off the ornamentation to give primary expression to the functionalism of a building’s design. Neutra’s first inspiration, Adolf Loos, and Rotterdam’s J. P. P. Oud would soon lead Euro-

    these reformers and would-be urban planners, see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: 1973), 215–307; Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in the Progressive Age (Cambridge: 1998); Nigel Taylor, Urban Planning Theory since 1945 (London: 1998); Anthony Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City - Germany, Britain, the United States and France 1780–1914 (New York: 1981); and Paul Emmons, “Embodying Networks: Bubble Diagrams and the Image of Modern Organicism,” Journal of Architecture 11, no. 4 (2006): 441–61. 10 Thomas S. Hines, Burnham of Chicago: Architect and Planner (Chicago: 1978); Fishman, Urban Utopias, 23–90; Stephen V. Ward, ed., The Garden City -Past, Present and Future (London: 1992); Murray Bookchin, The Limits of the City (New York: 1974); and Stanley Buder, Visionaries and Planners: The Garden City Movement and the Modern Community (New York: 1990).



P LANNING M ODERNISM

| 171

peans toward the new aesthetic, de Stijl (the style), of cube-shaped forms made from glass, steel, and concrete.11 The crowning event in the formation of a modern vision of an organic city was the 1910 Town Planning Conference and Exhibition. Organized by Raymond Unwin, England’s foremost garden city architect-planner, the London meeting brought together the leaders of urbanism throughout the Atlantic world. According to planning historian Mervyn Miller, “Neither before nor since had town-planning enjoyed such prestige.” Wright was a no-show but just about everyone else was there, including German garden city designers, French traffic engineers, Daniel Burnham, and Patrick Geddes, Scotland’s evolutionary biologist and regionalist. Collectively, the ideas presented at the meeting helped institutionalize urban planning as a separate profession with a “scientific” point of view on people, place, and space. The various versions of the organic city presented at the conference were founded on shared assumptions of environmental determinism. The final mastery of nature would allow the planners to achieve a complete overhaul of the city into dispersed, human-scale communities of health, comfort, and beauty.12 During the interwar years, urban planning would become bifocal, splitting into two distinct, albeit analogous visions of the organic city. Both versions of an ideal environment and society were deeply rooted in the transatlantic cultural values of the bourgeois classes. The garden city model of Howard and Wright expressed a profound cultural bias against the city. Their plans for a better life emptied most of the city’s inhabitants and factories from historic cores and relocated them in satellite settlements surrounded by greenbelts. They called for the containment of the city and the dispersal of its population and industry over vast, metropolitan regions. American and British planners championed garden suburbs composed of self-contained “neighborhood units” to maximize family stability and natural health for both the middle and the working classes. 13 The alternative, “radiant city” model of Le Corbusier would articulate a continental culture of urbanism. It reflected Europe’s great cities, which had created

  11 Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House (New York: 1981), 10–20. 12 Mervyn Miller, Raymond Unwin: Garden Cities and Town Planning (London: 1992), 139, for the quotation; ibid., 139–60, for the meeting. 13 For the United States, Los Angeles is a good example. Essential is Marc A Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders the American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning (New York: 1987); Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles - Planning the Twentieth Century Metropolis (Baltimore: 1997); and Mike Davis, The City of Quartz (New York: 1990).



172 | H AROLD L. PLATT

spatial and social hierarchies radiating from their historic centers. His designs for a new way of life concentrated the better classes downtown in tower block apartments, which he called “machines for living,” surrounded by great open, green spaces and speeding highways. Raising his skyscrapers on pillars or “pilotis,” he promised would, “allow us to lay out at the very foot of the buildings an uninterrupted series of playgrounds. A worker comes home, he puts on his gym suit [and] he finds his team or his instructor. [...] Soccer fields, tennis and basketball courts, children’s playgrounds follow each other on the boulevard between the setbacks of the garden dwelling units.” Like their garden city counterparts, the continent’s leading modernists like Le Corbusier would also plan greenbelt suburbs and industrial parks for the working classes. Home ownership and dispersed settlement were designed to maximize family and labor stability.14 The shared cultural perspectives of the international group attending the town planning conference in 1910 far outweighed their differences over physical design. Most important, perhaps, both visions of the Machine Age promised that total environmental metamorphosis would bring about social harmony and a rising standard of living for all. Both also were comprehensive, demanding a “clean sweep” of the built environment and absolute control over nature. Moreover, both versions of modernism segregated land use into hierarchies of residential, commercial, and industrial zones, connected by high-speed transport. The nuclear, middle-class family represented the ideal household whether living in a high-rise flat or in a suburban bungalow. Finally, modernists on both sides of the aesthetic divide shared an optimistic faith in science and technology to underwrite a sustained economic expansion.15 By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, then, a new profession had taken shape around two different, albeit compatible visions of an organic city. Adopting an identity as neutral experts, the first generation of urban planners believed that they could put science in the service of art to redraw the basic relationship between nature, the built environment, and society. The ultimate utility of this

  14 Le Corbusier, Precisions, 103, for the quotation. For Europe, see Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow and H. Meller, Towns, Plans and Society in Modern Britain (Cambridge: 1997). 15 Alison Ravetz, Remaking Cities: Contradictions of the Recent Urban Environment (London: 1980), 23, passim, for the concept of the “clean sweep.” For insight on the power of perspective, see James C. Scott, “Authoritarian High Modernism,” in Readings in Planning Theory, ed. Scott Campbell and Susan S Fainstein, 2nd. ed. (Malden, MA: 2003), 125–41.



P LANNING M ODERNISM

| 173

model of planning was its open-endedness that gave expression to an incredibly broad spectrum of visionary cities of tomorrow. It could mean everything from Wright’s inspirational portfolio images based on natural settings and materials to Le Corbusier’s more abstract perceptions of a self-contained and self-regulating system that unfolds from within—a living cyborg. The all-encompassing quality of this planning model helped give its designers an attitude of total control. As Le Corbusier would soon command, “The plan must rule.”16

III. T HE C RYSTALLIZATION OF M ODERNISM , 1914–1945 For the Western world, the Great War represented a definitive break between everything old and the modern. Especially in shell-shocked Europe, the Machine Age arrived with a vengeance, as articulated by its dada, surrealist, and expressionist artists. For its avant-garde architects, too, reaction to the war’s devastation meant utter revulsion of the past, especially the aristocracy, hierarchy, and paternalism, which they blamed for causing the catastrophe. The modernists rejected the entire tradition of historical building styles and town planning designs. Typical was Le Corbusier’s denunciation of one of his most important pre-war influences, Camillio Sitte. In the 1890s, the Vienna architect had been the first modern champion of looking at the city from the viewpoint of the pedestrian: one street and one plaza at a time. But following World War I, Le Corbusier condemned Sitte’s now “insidious pleas in the direction of the picturesque in town planning [because] they were based on the past, and in fact WERE the past.” Now, he was determined to “destroy” the street and the anarchistic street life that Sitte idealized. In the Machine Age, to the contrary, the speeding motorcar had to rule the road.17

  16 Vittoria Di Palma, “Architecture and the Organic Metaphor,” Journal of Architecture 11, no. 4 (2006): 386, for the quotation, and Mari Hvattum, “‘Unfolding from Within’: Modern Architecture and the Dream of Organic Totality,” Journal of Architecture 11, no. 4 (2006): 497–509, and the other articles that follow in this special issue. Also see Matthew Gandy, “Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29 (2005): 26–49. 17 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning [Urbanisme] (London: 1929), xxv, for quotation. Also see Camillo Sitte, City Planning According to Artistic Principles, trans. George R. Collins and Cristiane Crasemann Collins (London: 1965 [1889]). For insight on the links between technology, modern art, and architecture, see



174 | H AROLD L. PLATT

During the interwar years, a neophyte profession of university-certified planners translated an increasingly unified version of modernism into formal zoning and building codes. On both sides of the Atlantic, private developers and financial institutions were in the vanguard of this kind of reform legislation to set minimum construction standards, institutionalize decision-making on land-use regulations, and enforce restrictive real-estate covenants of spatial segregation by class, race, and ethnicity/religion. Although the planners made large strides in gaining status and employment as professional experts, political and economic instability following the war meant that their footprint on the city remained extremely small, limited to pilot projects, temporary exhibitions, and individual residential commissions.18 According to critic Michael Sorkin, the Anglo-American preference for the garden city model was rooted in a cultural ethos of nature as “wild,” albeit picturesque landscapes. An anti-urban prejudice was deeply embedded in this suburban ideal of home and yard in a rustic neighborhood setting. During the interwar period, European exports of garden city ideas for urban containment were consumed with enthusiasm by Americans like Lewis Mumford and his fellow members of the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA). Drawing heavily on Geddes, Mumford broadcast ideas about environmental determinism, social evolution, and regional ecology to much larger audiences. While locked out of the centers of power, the RPAA was able to design a few prototype communities, including Radburn, N. J., and the greenbelt towns erected during the New Deal. The US government also sponsored an important experiment in regional planning, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).19

    Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures for 1938–1939 (Cambridge: 1941); Richard Guy Wilson, Dianne H. Pilgrim, Dickran Tashjian, and Brooklyn Museum, eds., The Machine Age in America, 1918–1941 (New York: 1986); and Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York: 1994). 18 See above, note 2; and Marc A. Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders the American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning (New York: 1987). 19 Michael Sorkin, foreword to The Modern City Revisited, ed. Thomas Deckker (London: 2000), ix–xii; Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: 1973); and Morton White and Lucia White, The Intellectual Versus the City, From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (Cambridge: 1962). Until 2006, Radburn was governed by a closed board of directors. For additional background on the RPAA, see Carl Sussman, ed., Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of the Regional Planning Association of America (Cambridge: 1976) and Robert Wojlowicz,



P LANNING M ODERNISM

| 175

In addition, the European export of ideas helped the American reformer Clarence Perry give scientific precision to the “neighborhood unit.” Perry was a social worker who advocated recreational activities as the antidote to the alienation and chaos of urban life. To promote mental and physical health, he became involved in programs to open schoolyards after hours, build community centers, and layout plans for recreational parks. In the mid-twenties, he joined the eminent urban planner, British émigré Tom Adams, in drawing a comprehensive study, the Regional Plan of New York and its Environs. Sponsored by his employer, the Russell Sage Foundation, it allowed Perry to transform Raymond Unwin’s work into an ideal garden suburb to save the American family. He envisioned a village-like community of homes, surrounded like a “living cell” with a protective physical membrane and limited access to its inner arteries of residential streets. In the nucleus stood community centers such as schools and health clinics amidst a mini-greenbelt of parks and playfields. An adjacent shopping mall added the final ingredient to this socially exclusive landscape of leisure, health, and consumption. Perry’s “neighborhood unit” became popular at home and aboard among the planning elite. In large part, its growing status as the prototype of the suburban subdivision/estate derived from its amoeba-like flexibly, its ability to be plugged into larger metropolitan frameworks of residential development and highway construction.20 Moreover, the neighborhood unit’s attraction stemmed from its ability to tap into anti-urban fears of crime and disease as well as to offer solutions. It was

    Lewis Mumford and American Modernism: Eutopian Theories for Architecture and Urban Planning (Cambridge: 1996). On the TVA as failed regional planning see Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life (New York: 1984). 20 Clarence Arthur Perry, Housing for the Machine Age (New York: 1939), 23, for the quotation; ibid., 54 for a diagram of neighborhood units of various sizes (based on density of population) sited in a larger metropolitan highway planning map. For his original formulation, Clarence Arthur Perry, “A Neighborhood Unit,” in Regional Plan of New York and its Environs: Volume 7; Neighborhood and Community Planning (New York: 1929), 30–35. Also see Dirk Schubert, “The Neighborhood Paradigm: From Garden Cities to Gated Communities,” in Urban Planning in a Changing World: The Twentieth Century Experience, ed. Robert Freestone (London: 2000), 118–38; Howard J. Gillette Jr., “The Evolution of Neighborhood Planning: From the Progressive Era to the 1940s,” Journal of Urban History 9 (1983): 421–44; and Robert Fishman, “The Metropolitan Tradition in American Planning,” in The American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy (Washington, D.C.: 2000), 65–88.



176 | H AROLD L. PLATT

designed with a physical barrier in mind. Walls and security gates would keep undesirables out, while restrictive covenants would enforce class, racial, and ethnic/religion homogeneity within. The appeal of this protective shell reflected widespread perceptions among Americans of evil threatening house and family from the slums at the city center. In Perry’s mind, for instance, its pathological environment of alienation and overcrowding conjured up a nightmare of “crimes, insanity, suicides!”21 Of course, the same national and international context of upheaval, depression, and war restricted the adoption of the alternative, radiant city version of modernism. During these hard-pressed times, few new garden suburbs or skyscraper towers were built on either side of the Atlantic. Nonetheless, Le Corbusier and other champions of the international style of design-based architecture and planning were as committed as their garden city counterparts to relocating people to healthy homes situated within open green spaces. For example, he designed long, narrow skyscrapers to ensure that each residential unit enjoyed a maximum amount of fresh air and interior sunlight. His two-story prototype apartment came equipped with a large patio garden. On the top, he imagined roof gardens and playfields. At ground level of his “green city,” he assigned eightyfive percent of land use to open space. And like his garden city protagonists, Le Corbusier believed that home ownership in the suburbs for the working classes would be the most effective means to tame and dilute the power of labor. Unlike garden city planners, however, he wanted to erase all sentimental memories of the historic fabric of the city, bulldozing it under a high-tech, vertical machine— the radiant city—that would arise in its place.22 In 1927, this revolt against the past reached a climax in Europe at the Weissenhofsiedlung Werkbund Exposition. Organized by an under-employed Mies van der Rohe, the architectural fair on the outskirts of Stuttgart, Germany brought together leading apostles of modernism from all over the continent, including Le Corbusier, Oud, Gropius, Victor Bourgeois, and Otto and Max Taut. They built thirty-three residential buildings in a village-like setting. Drawing about a half-million visitors, the exposition suggested a unity of aesthetic values in spite of the idiosyncratic fashions of each architects’ work.

  21 Clarence Arthur Perry, Housing for the Machine Age (New York: 1939), 23, for the quotation. Also see Dirk Schubert and Robert Freestone, “The Neighourhood Paradigm: From Garden Cities to Gated Communities,” in Urban Planning in a Changing World: The Twentieth Century Experience, ed. Robert Freestone (London: 2000), 118–38. 22 Fishman, Urban Utopias, 188–212.



P LANNING M ODERNISM

| 177

The following year, several of them founded the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) and appointed Siegfried Giedion to be its secretary-general. The Swiss historian of architecture helped them write a fiery declaration exclaiming, “‘Building’ is an elementary activity of man intimately linked with evolution and the development of human life. The destiny of architecture is to express the orientation of the age. Works of architecture can spring only from the present time.[...] Thus architecture must be set free from the sterilizing grip of the academies that are concerned with preserving the formulas of the past.” Over the next five years, this proposal would become translated into a formal set of principles. Written by Le Corbusier for the most part, The Athens Charter would represent the manifesto of modernism. It would also secure his reputation as the most influential architect/planner of the century. The Stuttgart expo served to forge not only a united front among the planning elite, but also a coherent vision of the organic city to present to the outside world. Among the visitors to this seminal demonstration project were a British architectural writer, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and a rich American art patron, Philip Johnson. In 1932, they would simultaneously coin the term “international style.” Johnson, moreover, would play a crucial role as an importer of European ideas to the United States when he mounted an exhibit on this architecture at the prestigious Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City. Six years later, he again promoted modernism in a show devoted to German Bauhaus architecture and design. He also helped install two of its leaders, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies, in leading American schools of architecture. These European émigrés in turn, would bring others; Gropius, for example, brought Giedion to Harvard, where his inaugural lectures would be published as the highly influential, Space, Time and Architecture (1941). Like their fellow architect-planners in the garden city camp, however, the champions of the international style made an extremely limited imprint on the urban fabric during the interwar years.23

  23 CIAM, “The La Sarraz Declaration,” in Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads (Cambridge, MA: 1970 [1928]), for the quotation; and Eric Paul Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (Cambridge, MA: 2000); Megan Arendt, “CIAM,” http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~arendt/topic_ 7.html; and Le Corbusier, The Athens Charter (New York: 1973). Also see Sokratis Georgiadis, Sigfried Giedion: An Intellectual Biography (Edinburgh: 1993). On importing the Bauhaus, Philip Johnson and New York Museum of Modern Art, Mies van der Rohe, 3rd. revised ed. (New York: 1978 [1947]); Wolf Tegethoff, “From Obscurity to Maturity: Mies van der Rohe’s Breakthrough to Modernism,” in Mies



178 | H AROLD L. PLATT

Nonetheless, the crystallization of a shared consensus underlying the normative values of both versions of modernism before the outbreak of war in 1939 would set the foundations for its rise like a phoenix from the rubble. According to Sorkin, the strict geometrical patterns in Le Corbusier’s plans reflected a cultural ethos of nature as a formal garden, like the closely manicured grounds of Versailles. “Modernity invented nature,” Sorkin carps, “and at the minute of its creation moved to civilise it. Nature was born alienated [...].”24

IV. P LANNING P ERSPECTIVES AND S YSTEM T HEORY

ON

E COLOGICAL S CIENCE

More significant, Sorkin shines a spotlight on the importance of examining contemporary understandings of concepts like evolution, ecology, and “organic,” especially as it was applied to metaphors of the city as a living thing. Despite the modernists’ rejection of the past, they adopted long-standing traditions of looking at the city as a natural system. What was new was the interrelated use of science as authority for their urban designs and the comprehensive scope of their clean-sweep plans for social engineering the environment. Both were linked to fast-paced changes in biology and medicine, including the establishment of a separate branch of study in the 1930s, called “ecosystems.” The rise of systems thinking during the interwar years had significant effects on the planning elites’ understanding of organic metaphors of the city. In the pre-Darwinian era, urban reformers had usually described it as a closed, self-contained living thing like the human body. The city’s spreading infrastructure of roads, pipes, and wires became a common metaphorical analogy to the metabolism of the body’s circulatory systems.25

    van der Rohe: Critical Essays, ed. Franz Schulze (New York: 1989), 28–94; and Wolfe, Bauhaus to Our House, 45–65. Shortly after the war, Johnson would sponsor a similar tribute to Mies at the museum before enrolling as one of Gropius’ students. See William Jordy, Donald Fleming, and Bernard Bailyn, “The Aftermath of the Bauhaus in America: Gropius, Mies, and Breuer,” in The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960, ed. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge: 1969), 485–543. 24 Sorkin, foreword to Modern City, ix–xii (x), for the quotation. 25 Mertins, “Living in a Jungle,” 594, for the quotation; ibid., 590–641; and Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London: 1963), 16–17. Also see Maria Kaika, City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City (New York: 2005).



P LANNING M ODERNISM

| 179

The new life sciences posited that the form and function of nature was far more complicated and interdependent than previously envisioned, but their paradigms were ultimately more reassuring than ever before of “restoring the organic.” Ecologists demonstrated their optimism by showing how sand dunes and forests had built-in mechanisms of self-regulation that inherently sought a state of equilibrium. And ecosystem theorists displayed statistical models that promised to turn the chaos of nature or its man-made metaphor, the city, into the order of mathematical formulas. For the acolytes of the international style, nature was seen either in functional terms as a commodity or in philosophical terms as an embodiment of abstract, universal laws. In 1928, Mies stated: We have to become master of the unbridled [natural] forces of our time and build them into a new order, an order that gives life free room to move (Spielraum) for its unfolding. [...] We do not need less but more technology. [...] We do not need less science, but a science that is more spiritual; not less, but a more mature economic energy. All that will only become possible when man asserts himself in objective nature and relates it to himself. [...] It must be possible to solve the task of controlling nature and yet create simultaneously a new freedom.26

The European modernists found that spirituality in the theorems of Euclidian geometry and the “golden sections” and “golden numbers” of classic architectture. For instance, historian Judi Loach has studied Le Corbusier’s fascination with mathematics. “Although Le Corbusier’s architectural work would change radically over the course of his long career,” she found, “his fundamental desire to found it upon universal principles—thus ensuring that they would surpass the constraints of temporal and geographical specificities alike—remains constant.” It is not insignificant that Paul Emmons found Le Corbusier to be the first architect-planner to adopt the ecosystem biologists’ method of drawing bubble diagrams when he used them to illustrate the lectures he gave while visiting Brazil and Argentina in 1929.27 Four years later in The Athens’ Charter, Le Corbusier gave full expression to his visionary plans for urban life in the Machine Age. The old had to be plowed under because “chaos has entered the cities.” Like the Progressives, he too saw

  26 Mies van der Rohe, as quoted in Mertins, “Living in a Jungle,” 605. 27 Jordy, Fleming, and Bailyn, “The Aftermath of the Bauhaus,” 489, for the first quotation; Paul Emmons, “Embodying Networks: Bubble Diagrams and the Image of Modern Organicism,” Journal of Architecture 11, no. 4 (2006): 441–61.



180 | H AROLD L. PLATT

bad housing as the primary problem. “Dwellings give families poor shelter,” he complained, “corrupting their inner lives.[...] The evil is universal, expressed in the cities by an overcrowding that drives them into disorder.” But against this basic need for human shelter, Le Corbusier put even greater emphasis on the scientific perfection of aesthetic design. He reiterated from The Radiant City (1935) his belief that “architecture is the art above all others which achieves a state of platonic grandeur, mathematical order, speculation, the perception of harmony that lies in emotional relationships.” In his aptly named memoir of his trip to South America, Precisions, he told his audience: “Everything is geometrical to our eyes (biology exists only as organization, and this is something that the mind understands only after study.) Architectural composition is geometric, an event primarily of a visual nature.” But in finding this purification of nature in scientific theory, the planning elite lost touch with the environmental settings and social circumstances of their projects. They lost sight of the social relationships that are an integral part of the production of urban space. The adherents of the international style extended a mechanical model of physical space into the realm of human life. Members of the Bauhaus group, for example, landed in London in the mid-1930s before decamping again for the US a couple of years later. Finding refuge in a communal cluster of apartments, they fell under the influence of the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley. Gropius, Marcel Breuer, László Moholy-Nagy, and others émigrés were preconditioned by their objectification of the natural world to become ready converts to Huxley’s science of ecology.28 While the ultimate goal of building a harmonious and hygienic urban society remained the same, now the morphology and metabolism of living things became archetypes for redrawing their models of utopia. The new vision of scientific architecture and planning, Moholy-Nagy explained, “on its highest plane will be called upon to remove the old conflict between organic and artificial, between open and closed, between country and city.” Visions of the organic city, moreover, were portrayed as finished places that had reached a harmonious state of equilibrium. Although the perspectives of ecology had great potential to help reach this lofty goal of holistic unity, the modernists instead reformulated the living into the mechanical.

  28 Le Corbusier, Athens, 49, for the first two quotations; Le Corbusier, The Radiant City (London: 1933), 117, for the third quotation; Le Corbusier, Precisions, 72, for the final quotation; and Peder Anker, “The Bauhaus of Nature,” Modernism/Modernity 12, no 2 (2005): 229–51.



P LANNING M ODERNISM

| 181

The modernists’ scientific objectification of nature can be seen clearly in radiant city layouts for the eighty-five percent of the land reserved for green space. The pure emptiness in Le Corbusier’s original drawings ironically betray an eerie urban landscape devoid of people. From his God-like perspective hovering above the city, he not only destroyed the street as he planned. System approaches “seeing like a state,” also had the unintended consequence of killing off the quintessential urban experience, the daily intercourse of people in the microworlds of the street- corner newsstands and the shops in between. But the urban planner was pursuing a different vision of the organic city as a selfregulating, cybernetic system. For him, the answer was reduced to a simple formula: “The city that achieves speed, achieves success.”29 Le Corbusier saw the planner’s skill at reductionism to be a virtue because, as he noted: “History shows us the tendency of the mind toward simplicity. Simplicity is the result of judgment, of choice, it is the sign of mastery.” This is exactly what James C. Scott, another critic of modernism, means when he accuses the architect-planner of “seeing like an [authoritarian] state.” “The [geometric] order in question,” he claims, “is most evident, not at the street level, but rather from above and from outside.[...] The symmetry is grasped from a representation or from the vantage point of a helicopter hovering far above the ground; in short, a God’s-eye view, or the view of an absolute ruler.” In projecting what they claimed were scientifically objective visions of the built environment, the modernists lost sight of the unique, socio-spatial context of each urban community lying beneath their utopian overlays.30 This line of argument is reinforced by the modernists’ plans for reconstruction during World War II. Consider the scheme of Norway’s preeminent architect-planner Eliel Saarinen. His “organic decentralization” makes a mockery of metaphors of the city as a natural system in the terminology of science. His visionary blueprints expose a mental decoupling of abstract ideals of physical space from actual places of human habitation. For example, Saarinen uses medical jargon to diagnosis the city’s dysfunctional metabolic functions. “The city-planner must realize,” he implores, “that an inadequate street circulation affects the urban body as unfortunately as poor blood circulation affects the human body.[...] And in this respect the planner must first of all open adequate

  29 Le Corbusier as quoted in Fishman, Urban Utopias, 191. Quote originally from Urbanisme (Paris: 1925), 177. 30 Le Corbusier, Precisions, 80, for the first quotation and Scott, Seeing Like a State, 57, for the second quotation.



182 | H AROLD L. PLATT

arteries so that both the city and the population can spread themselves toward the country—toward air, light, and nature.” However, the urban “doctor’s” call for major surgery to carve up the patient into geometric segments separated by open spaces was just the opposite of biologic metabolism. If anything, the disorderly suburban sprawl of free market mechanisms that he implored suggested a much more natural process of growth like bacteria and virus colonies. Furthermore, his proposal to put superhighways down the middle of the open spaces seems completely at odds with their intended purposes as greenbelts of fresh air, recreational activity, and spiritual renewal. Echoing Le Corbusier, Saarinen recited his mantra of speed that “the decentralized city retains sufficient concentration of activity by increased velocity.”31 During the interwar years, the Americanized version of the organic city offered a stark contrast to the rising star of the international style. The work of Richard Neutra demonstrated that modernist alternatives to its design-based architecture and planning could achieve Maholy-Nagy’s holy grail of unity between the built and the natural environments. In 1928, the Austrian transplant to Los Angeles designed the first European-style modernist structure in the United States. Cut into a steep hillside, the Lovell House has a framework of exposed steel beams and cables that set it apart from the more textured, earthy facades of his mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright. “His philosophy of design,” according to his biographer also “grew out of his interest in the biological sciences.”32 Despite Neutra’s exceptional success, nature-based ways of seeing were overshadowed by the ascendancy of the international style. By the time it arrived on the cultural scene in the United States during the late thirties as fashionably avant-garde, it was already “old” in Europe. The Stuttgart expo of 1927 had long come and gone. But for the style-setters in New York City, the MOMA shows mounted by Philip Johnson were received with enthusiasm as ideal visions of the built environment of the future. Respects were always paid to Wright, although he was now portrayed as a nearly forgotten founding father of the organic city from the pre-war era. Reduced to a has-been, Wright, Neutra, and other naturebased planners were no match for the international style, which stood poised to sweep aside all alternative visions of the city of tomorrow. As its leading theorists settled into academic ivory towers during the war years, their design-based

  31 Eliel Saarinen, The City – Its Growth, Its Decay, Its Future (Cambridge, MA: 1943), 149, 216, for the first and second quotations, respectively; ibid., 200–66. 32 Esther McCoy, Richard Neutra (New York: 1960), 8. Also see Richard Joseph Neutra, Building with Nature (New York: 1971) and Richard Joseph Neutra, Survival Through Design (New York: 1954).



P LANNING M ODERNISM

| 183

ways of seeing became more ingrained in system thinking that would dominate postwar, rebuilding plans and Cold War politics.

V. T RIUMPH

OF

M ODERNISM , 1945–65

In what James C. Scott calls the reign of “high modernism,” the international style represented a “muscle-bound” version of technological modernization during the Cold War. While survivors of three decades of war and upheaval would be forgiven for losing faith in progress, the victory of the Allies actually had the opposite effect of bolstering belief in the power of science and technology to achieve ultimate control over the forces of nature. The final defeat of the Axis powers was greeted as the dawn of a new day of hope. The promise of realizing dreams deferred for a quarter-century stirred war-weary societies around the world to rally behind the planner’s models of the city of the future. The year 1945—the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War—is remarkable because it represents the urban planners’ special moment. The postwar generation looked to their national governments to lead them to prosperity as they had to victory. Policymakers applied current Keynesian theories to create Fordist production and mass consumption. Two of their most powerful tools were underwriting the cost of new housing and public works such as highway construction and slum clearance. Across Europe and the Americas, they put the planners in charge of a massive project to reconstruct and renew the cities. They drew ultramodern pictures of an organic city designed in the “international style” of architecture. While its leaders disagreed on many questions of aesthetic values, they shared a much more important mindset of assumptions about society, the built environment, and nature. This collective vision gave them tremendous self-confidence in themselves and their finished blueprints of the future metropolis.33 For the next twenty years, this imaginary of “high modernism” became a template for imposing Le Corbusier-like makeovers with tower blocks, industrial

  33 James C. Scott, “Authoritarian High Modernism,” in Readings in Planning Theory, ed. Scott Campbell and Susan S Fainstein, 2nd. ed. (Malden, MA: 2003), 125–41; Helen A. Harrison, Joseph P. Cusker, and Queens Museum, Dawn of a New Day: The New York World's Fair, 1939/40 (New York: 1980). For the best illustrator of the ultramodern city of the future, see Hugh Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow (New York: 1929) and John King, “The Draftsman [Hugh Ferriss],” Dwell 8 (2008): 118– 24.



184 | H AROLD L. PLATT

parks, and garden suburbs strung together by high-speed motorways. Whether bulldozing old neighborhoods in the center or raising new towns at the edge, civic leaders everywhere echoed the Frenchman’s pronouncement: “The plan must rule.” For the profession’s leaders such as Le Corbusier, Eliel Saarinen, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius, of course, these were heady years of vindication and media-star status. What needs to be explained is why policymakers across the Atlantic world suddenly decided in 1945 to hand over so much power to such a relatively small, inbred group of academics.34 As the Cold War heated up between 1945 and 1950, countries in the “Western Block” used modernism in their international propaganda campaigns as icons of technological progress and economic success. For reasons of national selfinterest, they engaged in what I am going to call the “modernization race.” Like the “arms race” and the “space race,” urban environments rebuilt into places of soaring skyscrapers and zooming highways became potent symbols in the psychological gamesmanship between capitalism and communism. Each escalation in ideological tensions brought a corresponding rise in the stakes of the modernization race. The bipolar struggle for world domination kept pushing the planning elite closer to the pinnacles of international power and money. The Cold War also boosted the prestige of two closely related academic disciplines that further solidified the planners’ credibility among policymakers.

  34 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, 179, for the quotation. Also see the Le Corbusier, Athens. An architectural critic in a recent article reasonably posits that “Le Corbusier remains a transcendent force[...] [h]e is indisputably the most influential architect of the past century.” See Nicolai Ouroussoff, “A Triumph that’s Almost Le Corbusier’s,” New York Times, July 30, 2006, sect. 2, p. 1, for the quotation. For a biography, see Fishman, Urban Utopias, 163–264. For a global topography of the diffusion of ideas, see Steven V. Ward, “Re-examining the International Diffusion of Planning,” in Urban Planning in a Changing World: The Twentieth Century Experience, ed. Robert Freestone (London: 2000), 40–60. For standard histories of urban planning, see Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow and Mel Scott, American City Planning Since 1890 (Berkeley: 1969). For more critical perspectives, see Leonie Sandercock, Cosmopolis II - Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century (New York: 2003); and Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver, “The History of Planning History,” in Planning the Twentieth-Century City, ed. Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver (Baltimore: 1996), 1–36. William Jordy defines modernism as “This [essence] lay in a comprehensive objectivity charged with optimism about the possibility of creating a humane physical environment consonant with and expressive of modern technology.” See Jordy, Fleming, and Bailyn, “The Aftermath of the Bauhaus,” 488.



P LANNING M ODERNISM

| 185

These two branches of systems theory divide the artificial and the natural into cybernetics and ecology. During World War II, military leaders had learned that better computers and their underlying mathematical theorems were not just needed to run the modern machines of war. They had become essential necessities of national defense, especially in the new age of the atomic bomb.35 The fighting may have stopped on the battlefield in 1945, but the US, the USSR, and other countries continued to shower money on academic experts in such previously obscure fields of study as communications, information, and games theory in addition to operations research, virtual simulations, and robotics. In the life sciences, similar programs of enriched support for ecosystems research and population studies also brought rapid advances in analogous mathematical and computer models. In this sense of “seeing like a state,” the career officers of the military and the civil service were themselves increasingly coming from the ranks of these academic disciplines. Gains in system approaches bolstered the professional planners’ claims of scientific neutrality for their ever more comprehensive, clean-sweep designs of metropolitan regions. Just as biologists could conduct experiments with increasing precision on open systems like freshwater ponds and hardwood forests, urban planners presumed that they too were getting better at manipulating physical space and the behavior of its inhabitants. In the boom times of the postwar period, they never paused to question the social assumptions and ethical values that formed the underpinnings of their environmental determinism. Seeing like a state, the proponents of modernism all drew the same roadmap of technological modernization as the only way to get to the organic city.36 Modernism became a complicated exchange of influences back and forth across the Atlantic in many other ways as well. Ironies of Cold War politics abound in this exporting and importing of urban planning ideas between Europe and the Americas. Consider how Bauhaus émigrés Gropius and Mies were German “exports” to the United States during the 1930s, but their architectural

  35 On the modernization race from the east side of the “Iron Curtain,” see Jeffry Diefendorf and Cordula Grewe, “Skyscrapers and Healthy Cities: Walter Gropius and Martin Wagner between Germany and America,” in From Manhattan to Mainhattan: Architecture and Style as Transatlantic Dialogue, 1920–1970, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Supplement No. 2, ed. Christof Muach (Washington, D.C.: 2005), 29–50 and Christoph Bernhardt, “Planning Urbanization and Urban Growth in the Socialist Period: The Case of East German New Towns, 1945–1989,” Journal of Urban History 32 (2005): 104–19. 36 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State.



186 | H AROLD L. PLATT

values became American “imports” when they helped remake postwar West Berlin into a showcase of capitalism. The 1963 landmark Europa-Center—a skyscraper and shopping mall—was designed and developed by Germans but in a studied way to project an American style of life. Or consider the Brazilians Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. They not only planned the world’s most complete Le Corbusier-like city of Brasilia for their native country, but also designed several significant buildings in Europe. For example, Niemeyer’s French Communist Party Headquarters in Paris became an instant icon of the most avantgarde aesthetics of modern design.37 The planners presented comprehensive models of metropolitan regions with built-in feedback mechanisms that appeared to naturalize the man-made into an organic “city of flows.” The water that comes automatically out of our taps, for example, is an imaginary of something “natural” in part because of a largely hidden infrastructure of filtration, purification, pumps, and pipes. The planners believed they could manage the flow of people on the highways like water through a pipe to reach Le Corbusier’s utopia of metabolic balance between residential, commercial, and recreational space. By offering to “make the visible invisible,” the planners handed policymakers a potent means of social control without political accountability. For the leaders of the Cold War, the planner’s vision of an organic city of technological modernization, social harmony, and environmental equilibrium proved to be irresistible.38 Urban growth machines were redeveloping central business districts and raising new town suburbs, but they were also draining the resources out of entire communities in the rings in between. Obliterating the lines between de jure and de facto segregation, postwar planning of the organic city, as historian Marshall Berman notes, represented the triumph of ecological theories of racial/ethnic succession and neighborhood decline. Moving from one redlined community to the next, a cycle of “block busting” and “panic selling” followed a set pattern towards widespread property foreclosures and abandonments, arsons-for-hire, building demolitions, and empty lots. Left behind in these landscapes of despair were credit-starved communities with high unemployment and crime rates, bad public schools and health facilities, and danger on the streets.

  37 Alexander Sedlmaier, “Berlin’s Europa-Center (1963–1965),” in From Manhattan to Mainhattan, 65–86; Oscar Niemeyer, Oscar Niemeyer, 1st ed. (Milan: 1975); and Thomas Deckker, “Brasilia: City Versus Landscape,” in The Modern City Revisited, ed. Thomas Deckker (London: 2000), 167–94. 38 See Maria Kaika, City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City (New York: 2005), 49, passim.



P LANNING M ODERNISM

| 187

Yet within the larger context of the Cold War, two strands of this international discourse on capitalism had especially important bearings on urban planning. While neither technological nor environmental critiques were novel, their supporters grew exponentially with each shocking news flash of another human-made, unnatural disaster. In 1964, Jacques Ellul explained that our “technological society” suffered from a shortsightedness that created two new problems for every one it attempted to solve. These unintended consequences would become increasingly catastrophic as long as we continued to have blind faith in the technological fix. In the same year, Herbert Marcuse explored the psychological affects of modernism, coming to a similar conclusion about the narrowing of visions to a monolithic, “one dimensional man.” In another blockbuster of that year, Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan showed how television and other electronic communications systems could be used to bring about such a totalitarian world of Big Brother. To reverse the reductionism of seeing like a state, these and other critics of runaway technology underscored the need for more holistic planning approaches to the problems of contemporary urban society.39 At the same time, populist demands for self-determination and neighborhood empowerment boosted the credibility of the critics of modernism. For over a decade, the skeptics of technological modernization had been sharpening their attacks from general assaults on capitalism to focused advocacy of specific city plans and environmental policies. Consider that their most corrosive cynic, Jane Jacobs, got involved in the mid-fifties, when New York’s all-powerful planner, Robert Moses, proposed to bulldoze an expressway through her beloved Greenwich Village neighborhood. But these voices of dissent had mostly fallen on deaf ears within the planning profession and mass media until the frightening cry, “Burn, Baby, Burn,” pierced through the comforting white noise of construction cranes and cement mixers. The downfall of modernism came, June Manning Thomas observes, “when urban civil disorder and advocacy planning blew the

  39 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: 1982); Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: 1964); Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: 1964); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media; the Extensions of Man (New York: 1964); and Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village; An Inventory of Some of the Current Spastic Situations That Could Be Eliminated by More Feed Forward (New York: 1968). Also see Murray Bookchin, Our Synthetic Environment (New York: 1962) and William Kuhns, The Post-Industrial Prophets: Interpretations of Technology (New York: 1971).



188 | H AROLD L. PLATT

old methods of value-neutral planning to pieces.” Taking its place, according to the historian of planning education, would be a new “pluralist era.”40 The critics gained public support because their explanations of current events blended ideas about modernization and consumerism into a powerful, holistic account of capitalism and its environmental consequences. To the contrary, both the planners’ political standing and their theoretical model of the organic city collapsed like a house of cards. A string of unnatural, natural catastrophes seemed to make permanent their reversal of fortunes. Sealing their fall from grace were the hammer blows of offshore oil spills, killer smog, toxic lands, polluted waters, dead birds, and radioactive fallout in the children’s milk.41 Although the explosion in the streets of Los Angeles caused an implosion of the planning profession, it did not result in a complete break with an urban ideal of the international style of design and architecture. Triggering a crisis of theory and practice, the revolt of the cities split planners into hostile camps. Many sought to vindicate modernism by redoubling the search for value-free, scientific methods of comprehensive physical planning. The problem was not an Olympian point of view, these reformers believed, but simply a blurred focus that continuous advances in system theory and computer modeling would clarify. They asked the profession to strive harder to bring about the next stage of urban evolution, a “cybernetic city” of flows.

  40 June Manning Thomas, “Educating Planners: Unified Diversity for Social Action,” in Readings in Planning Theory, ed. Scott Campbell and Susan S Fainstein, 2nd. ed. (Malden, MA: 2003), 363, for the quotation. On funding, see Chunglin Kwa, “Representations of Nature Mediating between Ecology and Science Policy: The Case of the International Biological Programme,” Social Studies of Science 17 (1987): 413–42. 41 For an introduction, see John Robert McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth–Century World (New York: 2000); Peter A. Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times (Berkeley: 1998); Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, Harold L. Platt, and Dieter Schott, eds., Cities and Catastrophes: Coping with Emergency in European History/Villes Et Catastrophes: Réactions Face À L'urgence Dans L'histoire Européenne (Frankfurt/M.: 2002); Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: 1993); Raymond H. Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany: Prophets and Pioneers, 1871–1971 (Bloomington: 1992); Elim Papadakis, The Green Movement in West Germany (London: 1984); and Michael Bess, The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernization in France, 1960– 2000 (Chicago: 2003).



P LANNING M ODERNISM

| 189

Others acknowledged a need for new paradigms of planning that incorporated ethical dimensions of social and environmental justice. Moreover, they believed the profession should make a related shift in roles from physical designers to community advocates. They needed to reposition themselves within a democratic process of policy formation as facilitators between the place-based organizations at the grassroots and the power brokers at the top levels of government and business. Claiming that social and cultural values were inherently embedded in the production of urban space, the reform critics sought to devolve control over planning to local communities.42 In this debate, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) became the most influential critique of modern planning precisely because Jane Jacobs aimed at the heart of its organic metaphors of the city. In a brilliant inversion of its biological determinism, her title challenged its core assumption that cities have a life cycle like plants and animals. These metaphors supposed that neighborhoods are born, grow, and inevitably, die. In the interwar years, sociologists from the University of Chicago had recast Patrick Geddes’ Cities in Evolution (1915) in terms of the new science of ecosystems. Robert Parks and Ernest Burgess drew heavily on one of its pioneers, Frederic Clements, who proposed that plant communities underwent stages of succession, equilibrium, climax, and aging. They believed they saw an analogous Darwinian process in the rise and fall of residential districts. Moving from center to periphery, “concentric zones” of land followed a set course from upward bound, new neighborhoods to deteriorating slums on the way down. Confounding cause and effect, the social scientists blamed “undesirable” racial and ethnic groups for urban decline. Like invasive weeds, their “infestation” of homogenous communities of good citizens upset the natural equilibrium and turned them into breeding grounds of disease, vice, and crime. To stop this pathological “blight” from spreading like cancer, the inescapable conclusion was clean-sweep demolition and dispersal of degenerate populations.43

  42 My interpretation of planning history draws heavily on Taylor, Urban Planning Theory. For postmodernist perspectives, see Erik Swyngedouw, “The City as Hybrid: On Nature, Society and Cyborg Urbanization,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 7 (1996): 65–80; Matthew Gandy, “Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29 (2005): 26–49; and Maria Kaika, City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City (New York: 2005). 43 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: 1961); Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to



190 | H AROLD L. PLATT

But as the book title provocatively teased, Jacobs argued that the planners had gotten it all backwards. She took them to task for looking through the wrong end of the analytical lens. Their so-called “urban renewal” projects were not surgically removing cancerous tumors but cutting out the heart and soul of the city. Seeing like a state, they were blind to the true urban experience of street corner society. Like Le Corbusier, they had become impatient motorists behind the wheel rather than the flâneur or wandering pedestrian. From the sidewalk, the spaces between the buildings are the sites of authentic and spontaneous human intercourse: the urban spectacle. She chided them to get out of their cars and start walking the city.44 More important, Jacobs proposed that they reverse course in their thinking from neighborhood demolition to community conservation. As Marshall Berman confirms, “The tragic irony of modernist urbanism is that its triumph[...] helped to destroy the very urban life it hoped to set free.” The leaders of grassroots organizations pointed the finger of blame directly at the planners for the intolerable conditions of everyday life in the slums, ghettos, barrios, bidonvilles, colonias populares, and favelas of cities around the would. The planners’ applications of the University of Chicago’s so-called “ecological model” of urbanization, the protesters charged, had created a self-fulfilling prophecy of neighborhood succession and decline.45

    the Study of Civics (London: 1915); Robert Ezra Park, Ernest Watson Burgess, Roderick Duncan McKenzie, and Louis Wirth, The City (Chicago: 1925); Donald Worster, Nature's Economy - A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: 1994); Sharon E. Kingsland, The Evolution of American Ecology, 1890–2000 (Baltimore: 2005); and Jennifer S. Light, The Nature of Cities: Ecological Visions and the American Urban Professions, 1920–1960 (Baltimore: 2009). 44 Jacobs, Great American Cities; Berman, All That Is Solid. On the book, Nigel Taylor believes that “indeed, her book remains arguably the most important planning theory text published since the end of the Second World War.” See Taylor, Urban Planning Theory, 46, for the quotation. Also see William Foote Whyte, Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum (Chicago: 1943); Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: 1970 [1967]); Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: 1995); and Jan Gehl, Life between Buildings Using Public Space (New York: 1987). 45 Berman, All That Is Solid, 169, for the quotation. For a broad view, see Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: 2006). On France’s bidonvilles, see Nicholas Bullock, “Developing Prototypes for France's Mass Housing Programme, 1949–53,” Planning Perspectives 22 (2007): 5–28; Cathie Lloyd and Hazel Waters, “France: One Culture,



P LANNING M ODERNISM

| 191

Indeed, in August 1965, the urban planners would suffer a stunning fall from grace that equaled the rapidity of their rise to power twenty years earlier. The explosion of the Watts section of Los Angeles, California would trigger a global chain-reaction of eco-protests ranging from stopping urban renewal bulldozers to nuclear power plants. These populist revolts against the planners would also spark an intellectual implosion of the foundations of high modernism. The longstanding weight of cultural critics such as Herbert Marcuse, Jane Jacobs, and Jacques Ellul finally broke through the insular walls of the academic elites, isolated like Renaissance princes in the safety of their ivory towers.46 The one-two punch of the uprising of the urban underclasses and the rise of the eco-protesters finally shattered the postwar consensus of the planning profession. “The emergence of the view that town planning was a value-laden, political process therefore raised not so much the question of what the town planner’s area of specialist expertise should be, but, more fundamentally, the question of whether town planning involved any such expertise at all,” according to Nigel Taylor. Its single vision of tomorrow, the organic city, had helped usher in a remarkable period of expanding power and prestige. But standing united to the outside world had stifled dissent from within. Now suffering a loss of confidence, the profession broke into opposing camps that reflected the larger cultural and ideological polarization of civil society. On the one hand, defenders of modernism like Robert Ventura would attempt to coop Jane Jacob’s street corner society. Turning Le Corbusier upside down, he would declare that “contradiction and complexity in architecture” was a good thing.47 On the other hand, opponents of the international style would challenge virtually every aspect of the profession’s modes of analysis, methods, and

    One People?,” Race and Class 32, no. 3 (1991): 49–65; and Godula Castles and Stephen Castles, “Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in France,” Race and Class 12, no. 3 (1971): 303–15. As a case study of Latin America, Teresa Pires do Rio Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (Berkeley: 2000); and Lúcia Sá, Life in the Megalopolis: Mexico City and São Paulo (Milton Park: 2007). 46 On Watts, see Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville: 1995) and note 38 above. Also see William Hollingsworth Whyte, ed., The Exploding Metropolis (Berkeley: 1993 [1958]). 47 Nigel Taylor, “Anglo-American Town Planning Theory since 1945: Three Significant Developments but No Paradigm Shifts,” Planning Perspectives 14, no. 4 (1999): 334, for the quotation; and Robert Venturi and New York Museum of Modern Art, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: 1966).



192 | H AROLD L. PLATT

values. Should it be concerned with urban functions like water supply and transportation systems, or physical design and architecture? Practitioner-turnedcommunity activists like Robert Goodman imagined a future “after the planners.” Although they were well intentioned, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology dropout conceded, they had become tools of a “repressive social structure, which is biased against the people their plans are suppose to serve.” He proposed new roles for the profession as advocates of a “guerrilla architecture” that would evolve out of a democratic process of neighborhood empowerment and local self-determination.48

VI. T HE ASCENDANCY OF S YSTEMS P LANNING , 1968–1980 While the residents of Watts were witnessing a living hell of arson, anarchy, and armies in the streets during the hot summer of 1965, the followers of French Nouvelle Vague/New Wave were safe inside cool movie theaters watching a different kind of imaginary dystopia. Filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard encapsulated all of the anxieties of the middle classes that had been accumulating since the start of the Cold War in a science-fiction parable, Alphaville (1965). Viewers’ suspicions were confirmed that the modernization race was on a path leading to a frightening future of a robot-like existence. An intergalactic policeman, Lemmy Caution, is sent on a mission to assassinate the totalitarian ruler of this cyborg world, a sentient computer named Alpha 60. In spite of being set in a distant time, all of Alphaville’s visual and historical references are set in the present, down to the detective’s obligatory trench coat. Godard used locations in the streets and interiors of Paris to frame his cautionary tale of technological dictatorship. Entering a gated, city of walls in a Ford Galaxie, the secret agent from the “Outlands” has to pass through several checkpoints on a long highway from the periphery to the center. In the end, the all-seeing machine—the enemy of nature, especially human nature—is slain by the emotional power of poetry.49

  48 Robert Goodman, After the Planners (New York: 1972), 12, 187, for the quotation and the quoted phrase, respectively. 49 Colin Jones, Paris: Biography of a City (New York: 2005), 448–56; Steven L. Goldman, “Images of Technology in Popular Films: Discussion and Filmography,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 14 (1989): 275–301. For additional insight, see Matthew Gandy, “Urban Visions,” Journal of Urban History 26 (2000): 368–79.



P LANNING M ODERNISM

| 193

Three years later, the swelling malaise of postwar society would burst and spread into massive strikes and protests throughout Europe. In many respects, the demonstrators, who marched on some of those very same streets as Lemmy Caution, were on the same mission. “With the largest strikes in French history,” cultural historian Kristin Ross posits, “May ‘68 would bring all the problems and dissatisfactions surrounding the French lurch into modernization to the light of day. It was the event that marked the political end of the accelerated transition into Fordism: a protest against the Fordist hierarchies of the factories and the exaggerated statism that had controlled French modernization.”50 Too many “fast cars and clean bodies” too fast had created a “future shock” that Godard visualized so perfectly by using a film noir style. Alphaville’s onlocation shots in modernist structures expressed a common revulsion against the urban renewal plans underway in the city. For Parisians, Le Corbusier inspired architecture such as the monster Maine-Montparnasse skyscraper in the center, the gigantic tower block grands ensembles housing projects in the suburbs, and the jammed highways in between had became the everyday signs of runaway technology. One of these public housing sites, Sarcelles, became a national symbol of the modernization race on a crash course. Dissolving the line between science fiction and reality, its landscape of alienation gave birth to a new social disease named “Sarcellitis,” which was “characterized by juvenile delinquency, bored housewives, nervous breakdowns, and a rocketing suicide rate,” according to city biographer Colin Jones.51 In a Cold War context, the revolt against the planners was just one of the most visible manifestations of a more general crisis of modernity itself. Indeed, scholar Stephen Toulmin suggests, “The cultural changes that began around 1965 were (it seemed to me) cutting into our traditions more deeply than was

  50 Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, 3–4, for the quotation. Also see Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: 1970); Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth, eds., 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977 (New York: 2008); Manuel Castells, “Urban Renewal and Social Conflict in Paris,” Social Science Information 11, no. 2 (1972): 93–124; Bess, The Light-Green Society; Larry Busbea, Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960–1970 (Cambridge, MA: 2007); and Theodor G. Wyeld and Allan Andrew, “The Virtual City: Perspectives on the Dystrophic Cybercity,” Journal of Architecture 11, no. 5 (2006): 613–20. 51 Colin Jones, Paris: Biography of a City (New York: 2005), 449 for the quotation; ibid., 448–56; Larry Busbea, Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960–1970 (Cambridge, MA: 2007), 108–37; and Norma Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 1878–1978 (New Haven: 1977), 232–78.



194 | H AROLD L. PLATT

widely appreciated.” He proposes this moment as the birth date of “post-modernity,” a movement to reconnect society and nature in what he describes as a new ecology of pre-Renaissance humanism. In his view, the rise of the planners had taken place simultaneously with the disintegration of their ideological foundations in the Enlightenment’s rationalist paradigm of progress. “The highly visible counter-culture of the 1960s,” Toulmin surmises, “was not essentially a youth culture: the intellectual, psychological, and artistic material for the new movement had been there for fifty years, waiting for a generation to see the point and seize the day.”52 At the risk of reductionism to a simple dichotomy, then, looking at the crossroads of urban modernism as a choice between two divergent paths helps clarify the crisis of planning theory and practice. On one side, the saviors of modernism retained an optimistic faith in technology to free the human spirit by constructing a safe, healthy, and uplifting environment for individual self-fulfillment. They envisioned a benevolent cybernetic city of energy and population flows. On the other side, the prophets of post-modernism believed that these worthy goals could be achieved only by first dismantling the hierarchies of power and wealth that had been created in the pursuit of just such a “technological society” of Fordist production and mass consumption. They laid out plans to get to an alternative, eco-city of insurgent citizenship.53 To be sure, the profession reacted to the collapse of the postwar consensus behind a single route to the organic city in a knee-jerk fashion, pumping out a flurry of detour maps heading in virtually every direction. Yet, only the most

  52 Stephen Edelston Toulmin, Cosmopolis - The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: 1990), ix, 161, for the quotations, respectively. Also see Ulrich Beck, Risk Society - Towards a New Modernity (Newbury Park, CA: 1992). 53 In the summary of the Club of Rome’s limits to growth, the authors proclaim: “The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential.” See Donella H. Meadows et. al., The Limits to Growth: Abstract Established by Eduard Pestel; A Report to the Club of Rome (1972). Available from www.clubofrome.org/docs/limits.rtf. Also see James Holston, “Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship,” in Making the Invisible World Visible: A Multicultural Planning History, ed. Leonie Sandercock (Berkeley: 1998), 37–56; Konstanitinos Chatzis, “Cyborg Urbanization: Review Essay,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25, no. 4 (2001): 906–11; and Matthew Gandy, “Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29 (2005): 26–49.



P LANNING M ODERNISM

| 195

positive spin by June Manning Thomas can create a moment of belief that this shotgun blast announced the inauguration of a “pluralist era” in Jane Jacob’s sense of a celebration of diversity. On the contrary, the profession fractured into several antagonistic and mutually exclusive camps that continue to have fundamental disagreements about the ways of seeing the future of the city. 54 Planners chose their path at the crossroads of the 1970s depending upon whether they applied the methodological perspectives of physical planning or social reform as the starting point of analysis. The factions that sought to save the rationalist paradigm of modernism with more science and technology retreated behind an academic curtain of theoretical abstraction. By entirely denying Jacob’s questions about human values and the quality of everyday life, planning theory could be stripped down to a logical, step-by-step process of decisionmaking. Shutting out the real urban crisis in the streets, they pursued the traffic experts’ attempts to build computer simulations of reality. From the architecture of city-sized megastructures to the engineering of regional and global scale growth machines, they reduced planning to a set of quantitative scenarios. Their faith in the computer to predict the future like a fortuneteller’s crystal ball became the new Holy Grail in the search for the ultimate technological fix. “The idea of cybernetic control,” Nigel Taylor explains, “has[...] been associated by [Anthony] Giddens and others with modes of thinking and action characteristic of ‘modernism.’ I suggest that the systems and rational process theories of planning, taken together, represented a kind of high water-mark of modernist optimism in the postwar era, and in this they shared something in common with the earlier postwar view of planning.”55

  54 Compare Thomas, “Educating Planners,” 356–75; and Taylor, Urban Planning Theory. Also see Alison Ravetz, Remaking Cities: Contradictions of the Recent Urban Environment (London: 1980); Gordon Emanuel Cherry, Town Planning in Britain since 1900: The Rise and Fall of the Planning Ideal, Making Contemporary Britain (Oxford: 1996); and Peter Hall, Urban and Regional Planning, 3rd ed., (London: 1992). 55 Taylor, Urban Planning Theory, 60, for the quotation, and Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber (Cambridge: 1971). Also see Robert Lilienfeld, The Rise of Systems Theory: An Ideological Analysis (New York: 1978); Jennifer S. Light, The Nature of Cities: Ecological Visions and the American Urban Professions, 1920–1960 (Baltimore: 2009); and Sharon E. Kingsland, Modeling Nature: Episodes in the His-



196 | H AROLD L. PLATT

The saviors of modernism replaced the iconic, albeit static images of Burnham and Le Corbusier with interactive computer models of entire metropolitan regions. Failing to prevent suburban sprawl or renew more than a patchwork of the city, the guardians of tradition now complained that their plans had not been comprehensive enough. Urban containment was to be achieved by re-channeling new development to regional centers. Perhaps the ultimate expression of the ascendancy of technocratic, neoliberal approaches to urban planning was the construction of a real “Alphaville” in 1974 on the outskirts of São Paulo, Brazil. Whether from an overdose of hubris or a deficiency of irony, the private developers adopted Godard’s film title as the name of their self-contained mini-world. Void of public space, it is a fortress city with layer upon layer of security, and walls within walls of exclusive access to its various residential enclaves, commercial offices, and recreational venues. In 2011, Alphaville’s police force had over a thousand armed men who guard the walls containing over 2,300 businesses and 35,000 residents in fourteen separate villages. Many residents work here in addition to 150,000 commuters from the “Outlands,” who have to pass through a series of checkpoints on limited access toll roads into the citadel. Since opening, its tremendous success has been demonstrated not only in these numbers but also in the way that its builder, Alphaville Urbanismo, has been able to stamp out duplicates—complete gated communities throughout the country and the world.56 Alphaville is a perfect expression of the ascendancy of technocratic, neoliberal approaches to urban planning during the seventies. It represents the postsixties trend of everyday life toward social fragmentation into disconnected private worlds. This mini-city of walls within walls reflects the postmodern condition of polycentric enclaves of metropolitan space and segregated geographies of social inequality. Pulling out the lens on the Brazilian megalopolis, Lúcia Sá observes, “Perhaps this provisional portrait, made up of incomplete parts,

    tory of Population Ecology, 2nd ed., Science and Its Conceptual Foundations (Chicago: 1995). 56 Wikipedia, s.v. “Alphaville, São Paulo,” accessed January 24, 2010, http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville,_S%C3%A3o_Paulo; and Christopher Lindner, “Architecture and the Economics of Violence: Sao Paulo as a Case Study,” in Globalization, Violence, and the Visual Culture of Cities, ed. Richard J. Williams (London: 2010), 17–31. Also see do Rio Caldeira, City of Walls; Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, eds., Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism (New York: 2007); and Barbara Weinstein, “Presidential Address: Developing Inequality,” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 1–18.



P LANNING M ODERNISM

| 197

mirrored, incommunicable and multiplying each other to infinity, in the end might be the only viable realism for the São Paulo of our time.”57 The commodification of residential space into private neighborhoods like Alphaville also illustrates the ways in which the post-sixties crosscurrents of the global and the local became new, hybrid forms of urban space and culture. The marketing of gated communities or “common interest developments” (CIDs) worldwide reveals the production of a full line of consumer packages that were tailored to fit national fashions and laws. While some were advertised by playing on fears of the “other,” many appealed in positive terms of individual desires for social prestige, improved amenities, better administration, and the good life within a retirement, golf, or arts community.58 Rather than a privatization or secession of urban space, CIDs are the kind of public-private partnerships that came to epitomize the restructuring of the economy of cities, especially after the 1973–1974 energy crisis and oil embargo. Local governments collected property taxes but were relieved from infrastructure costs and service provision in exchange for putting control of public space in private hands. In addition to residential developments, other more or less privatized security zones included enclosed shopping malls and fortified office towers. Governance in the CIDs ranged from insider, company management in the tradition of Ebenezer Howard’s garden city to more democratic councils of property/homeowners’ associations. Coming full circle, some CIDs became municipal governments in order to gain access to public funds without losing

  57 Sá, Life in the Megalopolis, 32, for the quotation. Also see Derek Parkman Pardue, “Blackness and Periphery: A Retelling of Marginality in Hip-Hop Culture of Sao Paulo, Brazil,” (University of Illinois: 2004). Making the same point as Sá from different perspectives are several scholars, including cultural historian, Justin A. Read, “Obverse Colonization: Sao Paulo, Global Urbanization and the Poetics of the Latin American City,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 15 (2006): 281–300; planning historian Robert Fishman, “Global Suburbs,” (paper presented at the First Biennial Conference of the Urban History Association, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, September 2002); and political historian William Sites, “Global City, American City: Theories of Globalization and Approaches to Urban History,” Journal of Urban History 29 (2003): 222–46. 58 For an introduction to gated cities, see Edward James Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder, Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States (Washington, D.C.: 1997); Fishman, “Global Suburbs”; and Georg Glasze, Chris Webster, and Klaus Frantz, Private Cities: Global and Local Perspectives (London: 2006).



198 | H AROLD L. PLATT

control over their exclusionary land use policies or internal security and property regulations.59 The postwar planning systems of the First World were not so much closed down as undermined. In the UK, for example, “Enterprise Zones” and “Urban Development Corporations” subverted the central authority. These New Right projects forced the experts in local planning departments to form partnerships with the private sector in order to finance urban growth. For the great majority of the ten-fold increase in trained professionals since 1945, who had found jobs in these public offices, day-to-day practice remained rooted in the physical planning of patches of space. They were far removed from the academic theories of rational systems and controls. But in the post-embargo era of deep cuts in funding for urban public works, these planning bureaucrats became ever more dependent on private developers and their financial backers.60 The First World nations also used their leverage with international money funds to pressure indebted, Third World nations like Mexico and Brazil to dismantle their systems of protective import barriers and government management of basic industries. Under a Cold War cloak of anti-communism, dictatorships in these countries forced a restructuring of large manufacturing and public utility sectors that have had permanent impacts on the quality of daily life for the urban working classes. They suffered disproportionately from the uneven process of recovery the followed in the 1980s and 1990s. Those at the bottom experienced the greatest hardships from the closing of big factories and small businesses, blue-collar job losses and homeowner foreclosures, and rising crime and declining neighborhoods. Similar repercussions from the global shockwave of the oil embargo were felt in inner city areas of the First World that had grown up along side of the mass production industries. Global economic restructuring brought severe hardship to them, whether the South Central/Watts section of Los Angeles, the Brix-

  59 See Davis, City of Quartz; John M. Findlay, Magiclands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940 (Berkeley: 1992); and Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park - The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: 1992). 60 Andy Thornley, Urban Planning under Thatcherism: The Challenge of the Market (London: 1991); Brian D. Jacobs, Fractured Cities: Capitalism, Community, and Empowerment in Britain and America (London: 1992); Peter Hall, Urban and Regional Planning, 3rd ed. (London: 1992); D. Hardy, From New Towns to Green Politics: Campaigning for Town and Country Planning 1946–1990 (London: 1991); and Derek Walker, The Architecture and Planning of Milton Keynes (London: 1982).



P LANNING M ODERNISM

| 199

ton neighborhood of London, or the Alma Gare district of Roubaix. “Social polarization was intensified,” according to scholar Brian D. Jacobs, “by the stark contrast between the condition of the underclass and the prosperity of those who had benefited from the ‘enterprise culture.’”61 Although the backlash of the New Right overwhelmed the uprising of the New Left, the protesters could at least declare a small victory in the planners’ fall from grace. The two political poles shared an anti-statist perspective. As Peter Hall succinctly reports, “belief in the wisdom of the technocratic philosopher-planners had been shattered.”62 While the conservatives renewed their faith in the enterprising spirit of free markets, the progressives reaffirmed their

  61 Brian D. Jacobs, Fractured Cities: Capitalism, Community, and Empowerment in Britain and America (London: 1992), 15–16, for the quotation; Mercedes Gonzalez de la Rocha, “From the Resources of Poverty to the Poverty of Resources? The Erosion of a Survival Model,” Latin American Perspectives 28 (2001): 72–100; and Michael James Miller, The Representation of Place: Urban Planning and Protest in France and Great Britain, 1950–1980 (Aldershot: 2003). For impacts on cities in the First World, see Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford: 2000); Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: 1998); Frank Moulaert, Arantxa Rodríguez, and E. Swyngedouw, eds., The Globalized City: Economic Restructuring and Social Polarization in European Cities, Oxford Geographical and Environmental Studies (Oxford: 2003). For globalization in Latin America, see Thomas Angotti, Metropolis 2000: Planning, Poverty, and Politics, Development and Underdevelopment (London: 1993); Robert K. Home, “Outside De Soto's Bell Jar: Colonial/Postcolonial Land Law and the Exclusion of the Peri-Urban Poor,” in Demystifying the Mystery of Capital: Land Tenure and Poverty in Africa and the Caribbean, ed. Robert K. Home and Hilary Lim (London: 2004), 11–30; Diana Alarcon-Gonzalez and Terry Mckinley, “The Adverse Effects of Structural Adjustment on Working Women in Mexico,” Latin American Perspectives 26 (1999): 103–17; William Robinson, “Latin America in the Age of Inequality: Confronting the New ‘Utopia,’” International Studies Review 1 (1999): 41–67; Bryan R. Roberts and Alejandro Portes, “Coping with the Free Market Cities: Collective Action in Six Latin American Cities at the End of the Twentieth Century,” Latin American Research Review 41 (2006): 57–83; and Barbara Weinstein, “Presidential Address: Developing Inequality,” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 1–18. 62 Peter Hall, Urban and Regional Planning, 3rd ed. (London: 1992), 149, for the quotation.



200 | H AROLD L. PLATT

reliance on local communities to act as self-propelled, democratic engines of social and urban reform. From this point of view, the path to an eco-city had to begin with the empowerment of the grassroots to tear down the “pentagons of power” that had built a one-dimensional society of mindless materialism. These hierarchies of class, ethnic/racial, and gender inequality, the advocates of post-modernity charged, bore primary responsibility for the interrelated global crises of the city, runaway technology, and the environment. Like the rational systems planners, those moving through the crossroads toward a post-modernist vision of an ecocity explored its branches and boundaries during the remainder of the recession decade. For instance, a transnational group of Neo-Marxist geographers led by David Harvey, Henri Lebfebvre, and Manuel Castells examined the ways in which social relationships were expressed in the production of urban space and environmental inequalities. Others, like critics Andre Gorz and Murray Bookchin, followed the logic of capitalist accumulation to arrive in the end at Alphaville, where “eco-fascist technocrats” rule over enslaved societies of brainwashed consumers. And on the opposite edges of the deep ecology movement, mystics revived a Pantheism that turned “Mother Earth” into a sentient, living Goddess named “Gaia.”63 Even more seductive was the message of landscape architect Ian McHarg because it appealed not only to environmental reformers of all ages but to private developers as well. In 1969, his hypnotic mantra—“design with nature”—represented a hybrid of the garden city of Ebenezer Howard and the regional survey of his mentor and fellow countryman, Patrick Geddes. The expatriate had been trained at Harvard and installed at the University of Pennsylvania, where he became friends with Lewis Mumford. In 1971, the self-proclaimed “steward of

  63 Murray Bookchin, The Limits of the City (New York: 1974); André Gorz, Ecology as Politics (Boston: 1980); Manuel Castells, City, Class, and Power (London: 1978); Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements, California Series in Urban Development (Berkeley: 1983); Henri Lefebvre, La Révolution Urbaine, Collection Idées (Paris: 1970); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: 1991); David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (London: 1973); David Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore, MD: 1985); and James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth (New York: 1988).



P LANNING M ODERNISM

| 201

the biosphere” was hired by Texas oil baron and land developer George Mitchell to build a new town in partnership with the federal government. 64 The Woodlands was located on 17,000 acres/6,900 hectares of piney forestland thirty miles outside of Houston. For McHarg, nature-based design meant “the place of nature in man’s world, my search for a way of looking and a way of doing—a simple plan for man in nature.” For example, he turned the site’s biggest environmental disadvantages of tropical storms and poor drainage into highly desirable recreational amenities. Rather than install an expensive network of underground sewers, he exploited the natural topography of bayous to create a greenbelt of meandering streams, golf courses, bikes trails, and walking paths. These open spaces cover about one quarter of the site, linking enclaves of suburban homes, villages of mixed housing and shops, and industrial parks nestled in the pines. The Woodland’s staged development to almost 56,000 people in 2000 is perhaps the best measure of the response to McHarg’s call-to-arms for the preservation of the environment.65 But the limits of human efforts to redesign nature are painfully evident in what has become a widely praised and copied model of controlled or smart urban growth. Although the view from the street is framed from inside a forest, McHarg’s well-intentioned plan has caused irreparable damage to its ecosystem when seen from the perspective of a space-flying satellite. Making ingenious use of LAND-SAT images, Diane C. Bates has shown that a tipping point in this

  64 Ian L. McHarg and American Museum of Natural History, Design with Nature (Garden City, NY: 1969); Greg Hise, “Whiter the Region? Periods and Periodicity in Planning History,” Journal of Planning History 8, no. 4 (2009): 295–307; Helen Meller, Patrick Geddes - Social Evolutionist and City Planner (London: 1990); Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Suburban Alchemy: 1960s New Towns and the Transformation of the American Dream (Columbus: 2001); James M. Rubenstein, The French New Towns (Baltimore: 1978); and Mark Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns: Social Change and Urban Dispersal in Post-War England (Manchester: 1998). 65 McHarg and American Museum of Natural History, Design with Nature, 5, 1, for the first and second quotations respectively; George T. Morgan Jr. and John O. King, The Woodlands: New Community Development, 1964–1983 (College Station, TX: 1978), 49–50; Ann Forsyth, “Ian McHarg’s Woodlands: A Second Look,” Planning 69 (2003): 10–13; and Wikipedia, s.v. “The Woodlands,” accessed September 7, 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woodlands,_Texas. Also see Roger Biles, “The Rise and Fall of Soul City: Planning, Politics, and Race in Recent America,” Journal of Planning History 4 (2005): 52–72.



202 | H AROLD L. PLATT

unforeseen direction was reached when just fifteen percent of the watershed was made over. “At the regional level,” the historical geographer found, “masterplanned communities [like the Woodlands] allow a more privileged fraction of the region’s residents to enjoy an aesthetically pleasing environment, while the region as a whole suffers from the systematic degradation of the area’s forests.”66 Urban planning moved through the crossroads of modernism toward the ascendancy of systems planning. In a post-1968 world of urban social movements with neither ideological consensus nor political patronage to protect them, the planning profession took refuge behind their computer programs of a cybernetic city of flows. Their input-output models and graphic simulations of the future became the roadmaps of the way forward to break out of the stranglehold of stagflation on economic development. Their veneer of mathematical science gave academics and practitioners alike a new shield of apolitical expertise to defend themselves in the highly contested terrain of the public sphere. During such uncertain times of social unrest and economic restructuring, business and government leaders came to rely upon the computer programs of the planners in their own search to find ways to maximize the cost-benefit ratio of the severely reduced amounts of investment capital available to them.

VII. C ONCLUSIONS : C ITY OF F LOWS , C ITY OF C ITIZENS , 1980–2000 S Despite a wide range of new approaches to planning, they all shared an underlying metaphorical concept of the city as an organic system. Moreover, they all retained an unstated assumption of environmental determinism: physical planning could influence social behavior. Traditional analogies between the metabolism and morphology of the human body were freely intermixed with more dynamic models of open ecosystems. This new spectrum of multifaceted visions of the organic city was refracted for the most part through a lens of technology acting as a mediator between nature and society. The extent of its use was directly related to the level of centralized control embedded in the planning process. Seeing like a state, the systems planners welcomed the revival of the

  66 Diane C. Bates, “Urban Sprawl and the Piney Woods: Deforestation in the San Jacinto Watershed,” in Energy Metropolis: An Environmental History of Houston and the Gulf Coast, ed. Martin V. Melosi and Joel A. Tarr (Pittsburgh: 2007), 183, for the quotation.



P LANNING M ODERNISM

| 203

urban growth machines in the West during the 1980s to put their new computer models of rational self-interest into practice. They could now keep account of more and more real-time changes in the flows of urban life such as shopping patterns, traffic bottlenecks, land- use trends, and air quality. For the post-modernists too, the devolution of power during the reign of neoliberalism was seen as an opportunity to put advocacy planning into practice. Perfecting the techniques of the community-based organization (CBO), they mobilized neighborhood residents into the service of “gorilla architecture.” Of course, the “suburban warriors” of the New Right also kept their battalions on the battlefields of politics and policy formation. Urban popular movements became not only ubiquitous, but they also evolved in novel ways into transnational virtual communities. They formed information networks through the “worldwide web” and cultural cross-fertilizations such ghetto hip-hop, which resonated throughout the Black Atlantic. Grassroots activists ranged from “little old ladies from Pasadena [California]” fighting not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) crusades to up-in-arms mothers from São Paulo favelas inspired by liberation theology to demand their “rights to the city.”67

  67 Goodman, After the Planners, 187, for the phrase “gorilla architecture”; M. Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring and the Urban-Regional Process (Oxford: 1989); Scott Campbell, “Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities? Urban Planning and the Contradictions of Sustainable Development,” in Readings in Planning Theory, ed. Scott Campbell and Susan S Fainstein, 2nd. ed. (Malden, MA: 2003), 435–58; Eran Ben-Joseph, “Commentary: Designing Codes: Trends in Cities, Planning and Development,” Urban Studies 46, no. 12 (2009): 2691–702; Peter Marcuse, “Depoliticizing Globalization: From Neo-Marxist to Network Society of Manuel Castells,” in Understanding the City: Contemporary and Future Perspectives, ed. John Eade and Christopher Mele (Oxford: 2002), 131– 58; Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: 2001); Arturo Escobar and Sonia E. Alvarez, eds., The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategy, and Democracy (Boulder: 1992); Lucio Kowarick, ed., Social Struggles and the City: The Case of Sao Paulo (New York: 1994); Susan Eckstein and Manuel A. Garretón Merino, Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements (Berkeley: 2001); Goetz Frank Ottmann, Lost for Words? Brazilian Liberationism in the 1990s (Pittsburgh, PA: 2002); Jessica Budds, Paulo Teixeria, and SEHAB, “Ensuring the Right to the City: Pro-Poor Housing, Urban Development and Tenure Legalization in Sao Paulo, Brazil,” Environment and Urbanization 17 (2005): 89–113; Richard Stahler-Sholk, Harry E. Vanden, and Geln David Kuecker, “Globalizing Resistance: The New Poli-



204 | H AROLD L. PLATT

Equally emblematic of the new era was the inescapable dependence of public planning bureaucracies, private development groups, and CBOs on each other to turn visions of the future into shapes on the ground. While the urban growth machines sputtered back to life in the West, the communist regimes in the East expired, bringing the Cold War to an end. The following year in 1990, US President George H. Bush proclaimed a “new world order,” ushering in a restructuring of capitalism on a truly global scale. Under this regime of public-privatecommunity partnerships, a remarkable diversity of planning outcomes was produced for various sized patches of metropolitan regions. One way to survey this spectrum of contemporary prototypes is to cut across from the modernists’ route to the organic city to the diverging path of the post-modernists. Depending on one’s point of view—from seeing like a state to hanging out at the street corner—the plans are painted in various shades of green.68 On one side stands the perfect Alphaville, where the cybernetic mechanisms of behavioral control have become both omnipresent and invisible. In Seaside, Florida, early champions of a “new urbanism” embedded a rigidly prescribed social order of the neighborhood community in a “neotraditional” design of suburban nostalgia. On the other side is the do-it-yourself architecture of Teddy Cruz on the transnational borderland between San Diego and Tijuana. His experiments with two-story, platform frames represent a plan of democratic empowerment because they demand each homeowner/entrepreneur to make creative use of his/her patch of physical space. In between these small-scale utopias, I will briefly examine four iconic illustrations of much larger urban and metropolitan planning prototypes that span from the “’toon towns of cocoon citizenship” to the “mongrel cities” of citizen insurgency.69

    tics of Social Movements in Latin America,” Latin American Perspectives 34 (2007): 5–16; James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (Princeton: 2008); and David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” in The Emancipatory City: Paradoxes and Possibilities, ed. Loretta Lees (London: 2004), 236–39. On popular culture, see Sá, Life in the Megalopolis; and Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose, eds., Microphone Fiends: Youth Music & Youth Culture (New York: 1994). On liberation theology, see Ottmann, Lost for Words?; and Jamie Elizabeth Jacobs, “Community Participation, the Environment, and Democracy: Brazil in Comparative Perspective,” Latin American Politics and Society 44 (2002): 59–88. 68 George H. Bush, “‘Towards a New World Order,’ An Address to a Joint Session of Congress,” September 11, 1990. 69 William B. Fulton, The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles (Baltimore: 2001 [1997]), chapter 13, for the first quotation, and Leonie



P LANNING M ODERNISM

| 205

Like the Woodlands, Seaside is a privately owned master-planned community for the upper income investor. Built in 1979, its designers Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk merged Jane Jacob’s street corner society with Ian McHarg’s mantra of design with nature. What they came up with was a remake of Clarence Perry’s vision of the neighborhood unit through a light green lens. And like its American original, Radburn, New Jersey, the Florida resort community was under the total control of its developers. Governed by a management company, they make all decisions, right down to the color of the house paint and the place to park the family car. In a savvy 1998 update of Godard’s Alphaville, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show was shot on-location in Seaside. It tells the fable of Truman Brubank, who had lived his whole life on a self-contained movie set without knowing he was inside this cocoon. The evil mastermind of this dystopian world is not a mad computer but a media producer. When glitches in the reality-TV show burst the make-believe bubble, a true picture of the world is suddenly exposed to our unwitting victim-hero. Realizing that his whole life has been staged, Truman cries out in terror, “Somebody help me, I'm being spontaneous!”70 If the Seaside model of the gated-community resembles a Hollywood fantasy of a romantic bygone era, then the Santa Fe district of Mexico City represents a textbook case of the futurist’s plans for a mega-sized city of walls. After the catastrophic earthquake of 1985 reduced the historic El Centro business district to rubble, the government joined with private partners to erect a brand new head-

    Sandercock, Cosmopolis II - Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century (New York: 2003), for the second quotation. 70 See Andres Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth Speck, and Jeff Duany, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: 2000); Jim Lewis, “Battle for Biloxi,” New York Times Magazine, May 21, 2006, 100–108; and Michael Leccese, Kathleen McCormick, and Congress for the New Urbanism, Charter of the New Urbanism (New York: 2000). For a European parallel see Planners European Council of Town, New Charter of Athens 1998 (Athens: 1998). Also see, Ivonne Audirac and Anne H. Shermyen, “An Evaluation of Neotraditional Design's Social Prescription: Postmodern Placebo or Remedy for Suburban Malaise?,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 13, no. 13 (1994): 161–73; Ajay M. Garde, "New Urbanism as Sustainable Growth? A Supply Side Story and Its Implication for Public Policy," Journal of Planning Education and Research 24 (2004): 154–70; Emily Talen, "The Problem of Community in Planning," Journal of Planning Literature 15 (2000): 171–83; and Barbara Jenkins, "The Dialectics of Design," Space and Culture 9 (2006): 195–209.



206 | H AROLD L. PLATT

quarters of international trade on more geologically stable ground. A remote site on the southwest rim of the Valley was chosen because its parallel lines of barrancos or steep canyons act like motes that limit access across them to a few guarded, transportation corridors. All motor vehicles must pass through layers of security checkpoints to get to any destination. Planned to preclude public space and public transit, Santa Fe keeps every visitor, as well as its 100,000-plus office and service workers, under constant surveillance of closed-circuit television. Previously used to dump garbage, a closely packed row of office towers began rising on the ridges in the same style of “fortress architecture” described by Mike Davis in post-Watts Los Angeles. Then came five-star hotels, sushi bars, discos, and Fed Ex for its multinational jet set of corporate managers. Next in the production line was a three-level shopping mall with global brand names that has grown like a tapeworm into the largest Mecca of consumerism in Latin America. Finally, a megastructure with ten condo towers has appeared, each marketed by different “starchitects” and celebrity interior designers. The master plan of this high security zone is the work of the Jerde Partnership of Los Angeles, which created other theme parks such as Universal’s “Citywalk” in LA and the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. For the exclusive enjoyment of the residents of “The Santa Fe City,” the ground level of landscaped and recreational spaces is three stories up, sitting on top of a monolithic parking structure that doubles as a medieval castle keep. Prospective buyers are assured that all their possible needs can be met without having to leave “The City” ever again.71 On a metropolitan scale, Curitiba, Brazil, has been held up by the systems planners as the global exemplar of a smart growth machine of sustainable development. The chief designer of this neoliberal version of an eco-city was an urban planner, Jaime Lerner. In 1971, the military regime gave him dictatorial power over the city and its 250,000 inhabitants. He rejected the economic elites’ demand for LA-style freeways, which would feed into a central cluster of skyscrapers. Instead, Lerner forced them into a government-business partnership, while also luring masses of ordinary residents to participate in his Plano Diretor/ Master Plan. For example, he offered incentives such as free bus tickets, subsidized housing, and educational programs on public health and neighborhood conservation.72

  71 CICSA, City Santa Fe, sales brochure (n.d. [2007]). This section is based on personal observations over the past several years. 72 Clara Elena Irazabal, “Curitiba and Portland: Architecture, City-Making, and Urban Governance in the Era of Globalization,” (PhD diss., University of California Berkeley, 2002), 112–71.



P LANNING M ODERNISM

| 207

Envisioning a light green metropolis, Lerner turned the downtown into a pedestrian mall that showcases the beautiful art-nouveau facades of its turn-of-the century buildings. Restricting auto access, he installed an innovative system of long, articulated buses that operate like fixed-rail streetcars running in the middle of arterial roads leading from the center to the periphery. Zoning and building codes channeled new housing construction along these routes. In preexisting favelas, where the streets are too narrow for refuge trucks, residents earn bus passes and food packages when they bring their bags of garbage to a collection center. Although the empowerment of these communities resulting from officially orchestrated activism was more media hype than grassroots insurgency, it did contribute to a rising tide of urban popular movements that would lift a nonwhite auto mechanic, Luis Inácio da Silva (“Lula”), into the President’s office.73 In comparison, the institutionalization of participatory democracy in the planning of Portland, Oregon, has turned it into a hotbed of insurgent citizenship. The natural beauty of the Northwest has long made it a magnet for green activists of every stripe. Over the decade following the uprisings of the mid-sixties, every level of the state government worked together to find a balance between urban growth and environmental protection. Strong political leadership helped enact the first directly elected, regional scale government. It encompassed twenty-four cities and 1.25 million people spread across three counties. Reformers also established an “urban growth boundary” to limit suburban sprawl while saving a greenbelt of farms and forests. The regional government not only managed a flexible system of land use regulations but also opened several forums on the future of the city. One outcome, for example, was a regional transit plan. For the downtown, contentious involvement of residents, shopkeepers, and officials produced a plan of managed growth. By concentrating a lively mix of cultural, shopping, and leisure activities, the plan sought to ignite the kind of critical mass of spectacle that Jane Jacobs watched being generated spontaneously on her neighborhood streets. But building advocacy planning into the process of policy formation comes with a price, as Clara Elena Irazabal underscores in her recent study of Portland and Curitiba. While favoring democracy over dictatorship, she warns that too much citizen participation can lead to political gridlock. “In Portland,” Irazabal found, “the constant fight to build and maintain public consensus has sometimes become an exhausting activity that consumes

  73 Ibid.



208 | H AROLD L. PLATT

considerable amounts of time and money that are taken away from the programs themselves that leaders try to advocate.”74 Since the 1970s, São Paulo has become one of the world’s leading laboratories for the application of ecological approaches to urban planning. In part, the Paulistanos’ regime of techno-bureaucracy has a long tradition of welcoming foreign investment and expertise in the makeovers of their city. Working together, they have been delivering coordinated “packages of services” at each scale of urban space. The restoration of the Guarapiranga watershed illustrates how this holistic strategy is reducing the risk of impending disaster for the entire metropolitan region. To avert water shortages, floods, and epidemics, the planners are working simultaneously on the built and natural environments. Upgrading the favelas around the reservoirs is being matched with conservancy programs of reforestation, wastewater recycling, and the expansion of the infrastructure. Moreover, local self-determination in the planning of the watershed is mandated under constitutional reforms sponsored by Lula’s Workers’ Party. In a similar way, redesigning the city on the level of the micro-neighborhood is being integrated with regional scale, public works plans. For example, the package for the rehabilitation of the favelas includes legal titles to individual doit-yourself homeowners/construção, house repairs, and the full array of basic utility services. Street and riverfront improvements, parks and playgrounds create attractive public spaces. Social equity, moreover, is built into this prototype of the “international community’s” engine of “urban regeneration.” Besides including social workers in the service package, the plan aims at reducing the

  74 Ibid., 173, for the quotation; ibid., 172–227. On Portland, see Carl Abbott, “Urban Design in Portland, Oregon, as Policy and Process, 1960–1989,” Planning Perspectives 6 (1991): 1–18; and Carl Abbott, Greater Portland: Urban Life and Landscape in the Pacific Northwest, Metropolitan Portraits (Philadelphia: 2001). Portland’s restricted growth policies have had the effect of raising the price of homeownership, creating a “new segregation.” See for the QuantEcon, Center for Environmental Justice of The National Center for Public Policy Research, Smart Growth and Its Effects on Housing Markets: The New Segregation (Washington, D.C.: 2002). Also compare the participatory regime in Rotterdam: John McCarthy, “The Redevelopment of Rotterdam since 1945,” Planning Perspectives 14, no. 3 (1999): 291–309; and Justin Beaumont and Maarten Loopmans, “Towards Radicalized Communicative Rationality: Resident Involvement and Urban Democracy in Rotterdam and Antwerp,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32 (2008): 95–113.



P LANNING M ODERNISM

| 209

displacement of the homesteaders to a minimum, while encouraging their participation in the decision-making process to a maximum.75 At the low-tech edge of guerrilla architecture is Teddy Cruz, the planner of insurgent democracy. The Guatemalan-born, American-trained architect is committed to breaking down barriers of spatial segregation and social inequality by devolving power to the powerless. Sitting in his studio in San Diego, Cruz was

  75 See Haroldo Torres, Humberto Alves, and Maria Aparecida De Oliveira, “São Paulo Peri-Urban Dynamics: Some Social Causes and Environmental Consequences,” Environment and Urbanization 19, no. 1 (2007): 207–33; Basil van Horen, “Developing Community-Based Watershed Management in Greater São Paulo: The Case of Santo Andre,” Environment and Urbanization 13 (2001): 209–22; Pedro R. Jacobi, “The Challenges of Multi-Stakeholder Management in the Watersheds of São Paulo,” Environment and Urbanization 16 (2004): 199–211; and Rosa Maria Formiga Johnsson and Karin Erika Kemper, “Institutional and Policy Analysis of River Basin Management: The Alto-Tiete River Basin, São Paulo, Brazil,” in World Bank Policy Research Reports, WPS3650 (June 2005). See the following list of progress reports: Huggins and Snow, “Water Resources”; Inter-American Development Bank, News Release: IDB Approves $200 Million to Support Stage Ii of Massive Clean-up of Tietê River in São Paulo, October 20, 1999, accessed March 8, 2009, http://www.iadb.org/ news/detail.cfm?language=EN&id=726; State of São Paulo, The Guarapiranga Program, accessed March 8, 2009, http://www.prodam.sp.gov.br/invfut/guara2/ guarap.htm; Ivo G.P. Imparato and World Bank, The Guarapiranga River Basin Environmental Sanitation Project. Available from http://www.worldbank.org/urban/ upgrading/guarapiranga.html; Mario Osava, “Brazil: Water Sources Threatened by Lack of Low-Cost Housing, Sanitation,” International Press Service (June 8, 2007); Stockholm International Water Institute, Sustaining Urban Water Supplies: A Case Study from São Paulo, Brazil, accessed March 8, 2009, http:/www.siwi.org; Eloisa Rolim, “Reports of the São Paulo State Metropolitan Planning Public Company,” in Reports of the São Paulo State Metropolitan Planning Public Company (São Paulo: 2005); Rede das Aguas, A Public Policy for the Waters; and Mario Osava, MegaCities Squander Water Resources, accessed March 17, 2009, http://www. tierramerica.info/nota.php?lang=eng&idnews=1264. On reforestation, see Nature Conservancy, São Paolo Water User Fees for Reforestation, accessed March 17, 2009, http://www.nature.org/success/art20217.html; Monic Porto, Sustaining Urban Water Supplies: A Case Study from São Paulo, Brazil, 2001, accessed March 8, 2009, http://www.siwi.org/documents/Resources/Water_Front_Articles/2000-2001/WF100_Sustaining_Urban_Water_Supplies.pdf.



210 | H AROLD L. PLATT

struck by the stark contrast between his American city and its Mexican neighbor, Tijuana, just across an increasingly militarized border. He observed: Two completely different urbanisms expressing two different attitudes toward the city have grown up in reaction to the phenomenon of the border. If San Diego is emblematic of the segregation and control epitomized by the master-planned communities that define its sprawl, Tijuana’s urbanism evolved [organically] as a collection of informal, nomadic settlements or barrios that encroach on San Diego’s periphery. [...] Unavoidably, both cities seem to contain something of one another: In every “first world” city, a “third world” city exits, and every third world city replicates the first.76

Cruz was inspired by a transgression of these physical and symbolic boundary lines when he saw a house in the path of condo gentrification and slated for demolition being carried across the border on a flatbed truck. He followed this disposable castoff of a consumer society as it crept through the hilly streets of Tijuana into a huge, Levittown development with Munchkin-sized dwellings that look like cornrows of two-car garages. He watched as the moving house was lifted onto a frame that had been jerrybuilt above and between two of these closely packed tract homes. He found himself standing in the midst of a jungle of gorilla architects who had already appropriated and transformed their space with do-it-yourself additions, build-outs that fill the yards, and conversions of the tiny dwelling units into a full array of neighborhood shops and services. “These tract [houses],” Cruz realized, “are perceived as open systems, their inherent uniformity giving way to occupants’ collective desire for functionality and flexibility, for the freedom to activate improvisational, higher-density, and mixed uses—the very DNA of urbanism itself.” He hopes that his patches of blank slab, concrete frames clustered at three times the density normally permitted in San Diego will give rise to similar places, where community attachments and neighborhood identities evolve out of a democratic process of local self-determination.77 This overview of a spectrum of contemporary hybrid prototypes highlights the fractured state of planning theory and practice at the dawn of the new millennium. Like the fragmented, metropolitan regions of physical walls and social

  76 Teddy Cruz, Border Postcard: Chronicles from the Edge, American Institute of Architects (2005), http://www.aia.org/cod_042404_teddycruz. 77 Ibid., for the quotation, and Nicolai Ouroussoff, “Shantytowns as a New Suburban Ideal: Can Tijuana Slums Teach America How to Grow?,” New York Times, sect. 2, March 12, 2006, 1, 27.



P LANNING M ODERNISM

| 211

barriers the planners helped to build, the diverging paths of their visions of the organic city keep radiating in all directions. From the perspective of seeing like a state, a milestone was reached in January 2010, with the opening of the new, tallest building in the world, the Burj Kalifa in Dubai. Soaring more than a halfmile in the sky, this megastructure is designed to house 12,000 people within its 6,000,000 square feet/557,000 square meters of mixed-use space. Standing on the street corner, a sign of the times is a diverse group of neighbors working together turning empty lots into garden plots. Greening districts devastated by global restructuring and property abandonment, this resistance movement “from the bottom up” is reclaiming urban space from the planners in a transformative process of community empowerment.78 After almost a half-century of consensus building behind a vision of the organic city, the planners had finally been put in charge of the reconstruction and renewal of the city by war-weary societies. The subsequent escalation of Cold War tensions reinforced the profession’s influence among national policymakers as the world became engaged in a bipolar race of technological modernization. Seeing like a state blinded Le Corbusier and his legions of followers to the human, social, and environmental costs of their clean-sweep, finished blueprints of the city of tomorrow. Insulated from public criticism, they went about changing the skyline to conform to a monolithic, international style of architecture and urban design. But beginning with the ghetto uprisings of the mid-sixties, the planners’ fall from grace splintered its postwar consensus into diverging ways of seeing and knowing. For the conservators of systems approaches, the pursuit of ecosystems theory is leading to a conviction that their computer simulations of “Spaceship Earth” are more real than the natural world. For the prophets of post-modernism, the search for spontaneous experience, the “DNA of urbanism” means looking to local communities for inspiration in drawing their plans of physical space. Not surprisingly, the fractured state of planning mirrors the current status of our fragmented and fortified cities of walls.

  78 Landon Thomas Jr., “Dubai Opens a Tower to Beat All,” New York Times, January 4, 2010; Michael Slackman, “Piercing the Sly Amid a Deflating Economy,” New York Times, January 13, 2010; Helen Elizabeth Meller, “Citizens in Pursuit of Nature: Gardens, Allotments and Private Space in European Cities, 1850–2000,” in Resources of the City - Contributions to an Environmental History of Modern Europe, ed. Dieter Schott et. al. (Aldershot: 2005), 80–96; and Leonie Sandercock, Cosmopolis II Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century (New York: 2003), chapter 2.





Layered Landscapes: Parks and Gardens in the Metropolis1 S ONJA D ÜMPELMANN

In Fritz Lang’s famed 1927 film Metropolis, in its futuristic skyscraper metropolis and in its underground workers’ city, there is one noticeable lack: gardens. There is however a notable exception. Freder, the son of an industrialist whose aim is to reconcile the workers and industrialists, meets Maria, the daughter of a worker, in what is fashioned as a paradisiacal pleasure garden—a green oasis aboveground that belongs to the sophisticated and futuristic metropolis of the directorial class. The film set of the garden includes features typical of Western gardens in the Middle Ages that were also used in many gardens in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, an elevated circular fountain basin forms the garden’s centerpiece. Peacocks prance through the garden where men flirt with lightly dressed women. However, the fact that the symbolic use and treatment of the garden in the film exemplifies some characteristics and the conceptualization of gardens and green, open spaces in early twentieth-century metropoles is more important than the individual elements of the set design in the context of this essay. The fact that the film set of the garden partly followed the paradigm of the inward-looking, enclosed courtyard garden parallels what Lars Olof Larsson has shown to have been a common albeit paradoxical notion amongst architects of the time: despite the sprawl that had come to characterize the modern metropoles by the turn of the century, the metropolis was largely

  1

Short parts of this article were published previously in “Creating order with nature: transatlantic transfer of ideas in park system planning in twentieth-century Washington D.C., Chicago, Berlin and Rome,” Planning Perspectives 24, 2 (April 2009), 143173.



214 | S ONJA DÜMPELMANN

perceived and treated as a compact organic architectural structure “influenced by the image of the walled town of old.”2 Thus, although the comprehensive framework plans that were drawn up for a number of cities included public gardens and parks and in many cases even entire park systems, these green spaces were still largely perceived of as individual entities or a system in and of itself. Like the paradise garden in the film that is set apart from the skyscrapers towering above and the dark and dirty workers’ city below, gardens and parks were seen in contrast to the built urban structure of the city. Like the film set, gardens and parks in early twentieth-century metropoles were thought to provide healthy, lushly vegetated, airy, and sunlit spaces that offered places for respite, relaxation, and rest. They provided a haven in an otherwise hectic world built out of stone and dominated by the rhythm of industrial production. In fact, for the German landscape architect Leberecht Migge, an astute observer of his times and ardent promoter of urban garden culture in the early twentieth century, the metropolis was “a mother of gardens.”3 In 1913, he commented that riding into a metropolis by train, the first thing one perceived were the allotment gardens that formed a “green ribbon of peace” around “the raucous city.”4 Once in the metropolis, a variety of green open spaces, including private house gardens, front yards, public urban parks, cemeteries, and exhibition, botanical, and zoological gardens were available for recreation, relaxation, education, representation, and veneration. As this essay will show, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, different types of gardens, parks, and open spaces both contributed to the formation of the metropolis and resulted from its creation. Furthermore, these private and public urban green spaces have provided venues for the expression and fostering of a metropolitan spirit in social and materialistic terms. Whereas the first initiatives for the implementation of urban green space and entire open space systems in the nineteenth century went hand in hand with concerns for public hygiene and the physical and mental wellbeing of the urbanite, in the twentieth century, the preoccupation with metropolitan green space became an expression of healthy living and our concern for the environment as a whole. Both in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, green space was used to regulate and order metropolitan growth. As scientific and technological development

  2

Lars Olof Larsson, “Metropolis Architecture,” in Metropolis 1890–1940, ed. Anthony Sutcliffe (Chicago: 1984), 200.

3

Lebercht Migge, Die Gartenkultur des 20. Jahrhunderts (Jena: 1913), 7.

4

Ibid.



L AYERED L ANDSCAPES | 215

progressed with time, parks and gardens have increasingly been considered essential components of metropolitan ecosystems.

I.

P ARKS

AND

G ARDENS

AS

M ETROPOLITAN S YSTEMS

Toward the end of the twentieth century, the term “landscape urbanism” began to be used by many North American landscape architects and urban designers to describe a specific design approach used in the context of the North American metropolis. “Landscape urbanism,” which has since been complemented by another neologism, “ecological urbanism,”5 is based on the understanding that the “landscape”—which includes plants, animals, parks, gardens, sidewalks, roads, freeways, and the processes that shape it—should be viewed as an agent in urban design.6 By considering natural factors and features part of the city, the self-proclaimed designers and promoters of landscape urbanism seek to overcome the widespread conceptual opposition between the human-made city and nature. Projects that have been referred to as exemplifying the principles of landscape urbanism include the designs for Paris’ Parc de la Villette by the teams led by Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas in the 1980s, the design for Downsview Park in Toronto by a team led by Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, and the more recent designs for the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island and for the Highline in New York City by the landscape architecture practice Field Operations. These designs try to integrate environmental and social processes with engineered infrastructural systems to accommodate a variety of planned and unplanned activities over time.7 In the wake of the 1997 conference that helped define the ideas associated with landscape urbanism, landscape architectural and urban design practice has increasingly focused on not only harnessing the environmental processes that connect urban core areas with the metropolitan region and life cycles in general, but also on making them visible. For example, storm water management systems have in the past decades frequently been

  5

Jan Bunge, “Landschaftsarchitektur als Marke,” Garten und Landschaft 119, no. 9 (2009): 10–13. Also: Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty, eds., Ecological Urbanism (Baden: 2010).

6

See, e.g., Charles Waldheim’s chapter “Landscape as Urbanism” and Grahame Shane’s chapter “The Emergence of Landscape Urbanism” in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, ed. Charles Waldheim (New York: 2006).

7



Charles Waldheim, “Landscape as Urbanism,” 36–53.

216 | S ONJA DÜMPELMANN

brought into public vision and have influenced the design of streets, parks, gardens, and other public urban spaces. Although clearly a postmodern brainchild grounded in the belief that “the processes of urbanization—capital accumulation, deregulation, globalization, environmental protection, and so on—are much more significant for the shaping of urban relationships than are the spatial forms of urbanism in and of themselves,”8 landscape urbanism, as many critics have noted, builds upon nineteenth-century precedents. Of particular importance for the North American context are the first municipal and metropolitan park system plans, which are adaptations of ideas developed during the formation of the first European metropoles. Indeed, in 1829, years before London established its first Metropolitan Board of Works in 1855, the Scottish architect, gardener, and writer John Claudius Loudon published a farsighted greenbelt plan for metropolitan London entitled “Hints for Breathing Places for the Metropolis.” In his diagram, concentric greenbelts that allowed for picturesque landscapes, rural scenery, and geometrical gardens alternated with concentric urban zones. Their number could be increased indefinitely as the city grew. Loudon’s plan—a reaction to public health concerns, uncontrolled urban growth, and specifically to the attempted enclosure of Hampstead Heath—provided every Londoner with access to green space within a half-mile from his or her home.9 The same idea was the basis of the first park system plans developed by Frederick Law Olmsted and his contemporaries for North American cities who were inspired by the parks and boulevards they had seen on their trips to Europe. Consisting of differently sized parks connected by tree-lined avenues and parkways, park systems perpetuated the social, moral, hygienic, economic, and representational aims that underlay the creation of the first public urban parks on broader municipal and metropolitan scales. American landscape architects and park commissioners began to draw up comprehensive park system plans after Olmsted and Calvert Vaux had devised their first plan for Buffalo, New York, in 1868. By the end of the nineteenth century, park systems had become important tools for the developing field of American city planning. They affected entire cities, changing and determining the distribution of infrastructure and of highand low-income housing. The idea of parkways linking up all principal parks and

  8

James Corner, “Terra Fluxus,” in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, ed. Charles Waldheim (New York: 2006), 28.

9

Melanie Louise Simo, Loudon and the Landscape: From Country Seat to Metropolis (New Haven: 1988), 227–42.



L AYERED L ANDSCAPES | 217

points of interest of a city corresponded to the City Beautiful movement’s aim to combine utility and beauty in city development. In maps depicting park systems for cities like Kansas City, Baltimore, and San Francisco, parks, parkways, and reservations appeared as interconnected radial and circulating green streams that flowed through the urban fabric. In fact, if available, natural features such as creeks and streams were used as the basis of the net of parks and tree-lined streets. Thus, “nature,” understood as public parks, open spaces, and tree-lined streets, was used to order and structure the seemingly chaotic industrial cities. City officials and planners believed that by creating a system of parks instead of isolated parks, the development of a city’s built environment and of society at large could be “controlled.” When the 1909 Chicago Plan Commission’s managing director Walter D. Moody described the plan’s goal as “to make a practical, beautiful piece of finished fabric out of Chicago’s crazy quilt,” he inadvertently provided a metaphor not only for the changes planned for the built environment, but also for society—especially in reference to those poorer individuals of society who were literally producing quilts in order to survive.10 As a concept, park systems resembled a number of other systems that were being planned and implemented in the Progressive Era: systems of transportation, communication, production, and distribution. In fact, park systems were inextricably linked to transportation systems since parkways were part of both. Like these systems that, as Alan Trachtenberg has shown, characterized the “Incorporation of America,”11 the park system consisted of a number of individual parks with different functions and a hierarchy. On the neighborhood scale, Boston and Chicago pioneered a number of small neighborhood parks and playgrounds that provided recreational facilities and meeting points for citizens living nearby. On a citywide scale, bigger parks with pastoral scenery fulfilled similar purposes. In many cases, as in the first park system plan for Buffalo, landscape architects distinguished between the social functions of these parks. Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. and Calvert Vaux designed a pastoral landscape for passive “receptive” and “neighborly” recreation in Buffalo’s The Park (Delaware Park) while providing wide, open spaces and terraces for “gregarious” activities in The Front (Front Park) and The Parade (Martin Luther King, Jr. Park).

  10 Walter D. Moody, Wacker’s Manual of the Plan of Chicago: Municipal Economy (Chicago: 1912), quoted in Robin F. Bachin, Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago (Chicago: 2004), 197. 11 Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: 1982).



218 | S ONJA DÜMPELMANN

In Boston in the 1870s, Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace not only provided ample open space for recreation, but by turning Boston’s Fens and Riverway into constructed wetlands, the water was cleansed and the adjacent land protected from flooding. Only a few years later, in 1893, Boston set another example for the structuring of the growing city by means of green open space, this time on the metropolitan level. Under the leadership of the landscape architect Charles Eliot and the journalist Sylvester Baxter, the Metropolitan Park Commission established the first metropolitan park system in the US. By preserving forests, conceptualizing them as parks and open space and making them accessible to the population of the city and neighboring municipalities, Eliot and Baxter wanted to improve public health, manage the rapid urban growth, and create a “framework for a new kind of metropolis.”12 In fact, as Baxter wrote in his report, the metropolis was to become “one vast garden.”13 Thus, in late nineteenth-century Boston, the preservation of parkland and open space became a vehicle for the establishment of an early metropolitan governance body. By the first decade of the twentieth century, Washington and Chicago had followed Boston’s example, drawing up metropolitan park system plans that were widely admired abroad. Observing that German city and provincial governments were far behind their American equivalents in the provision of comprehensive park system plans,14 the German architect Hugo Koch commented in 1912 that: “The Chicago Plan exemplifies with its system of useful and representational parks and promenades the excellent extent to which garden art can contribute to the construction of the modern metropolis.”15

II. M ETROPOLITAN P ARKS AND G ARDENS FOR M ASS P RODUCTION AND C ONSUMPTION In contrast to the story in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, where the pleasure garden was only accessible to the directorial class, many nineteenth and early twentiethcentury industrialists understood that gardens and parks should be open to all

  12 Steven T. Moga, “Marginal Lands and Suburban Nature: Open Space Planning and the Case of the 1893 Boston Metropolitan Parks Plan,” Journal of Planning History 8, no. 4 (2009): 317. 13 Ibid., 320. See also Massachusetts. Metropolitan Park Commission, Report of the Board of Metropolitan Park Commissioners (Boston: 1893), 72. 14 Hugo Koch, “Neuere Gartenkunst,” Der Städtebau 9, no. 3 (1912): 31. 15 Hugo Koch, Gartenkunst im Städtebau (Berlin: 1921), 242. My translation.



L AYERED L ANDSCAPES | 219

and that they could indirectly increase industrial production and yield. For Frederick W. Taylor’s efficiency principles concerning the scientific management of labor productivity and corporate administration to show effect, public places were needed where workers could recuperate in healthy surroundings not too far from their homes. Parks were a means to sustain a healthy and productive work force, and the park system was an efficient way to provide a large section of the population with green open space. Parks and gardens were therefore indirect products of mass production and consumption. Organized leisure activities led by social reformers provided efficient ways for recreation, so much so that Ohio “play director” John Chase spoke of playgrounds as “play factories” that had to be organized according to tight schedules to provide for the “maximum product of happiness.”16 The Boston Herald noted the pecuniary benefit of open space and playgrounds in 1904, as reported by the French landscape architect Jean Charles Nicholas Forestier. On the assumption that “a young intelligent and industrious man is worth at least an average of 50,000 francs for himself and the community,” the newspaper speculated that if the positive influence of playgrounds could prevent a thousand children from committing vice and crime, they could generate a productivity gain of about 50,000,000 francs. Considering the costly damage and harm done by criminal youth, the Herald concluded that the construction of playgrounds was well worth it.17 Parks and gardens not only played an important role in the economy of big cities, the methods used to establish open space and entire park system plans also corresponded with modern scientific studies influenced by the scientific management models introduced by Taylor. In fact, as George F. Ford announced in 1913: “The principles of modern industrial efficiency, of ‘Taylorizing,’ are now being applied to city planning,” of which the provision of different types of gardens and parks was an important part.18 They represented the “progressive faith in science and efficiency as the basis of moral reform.”19 The normative nature attributed to metropolitan parks and gardens was revealed in maps and planning frameworks. For example, tables in the Chicago Special Park Commission’s report on a metropolitan park system showed the relationship between the acre-

  16 John Chase, “How a Play Director Feels,” Playground 3 (1909): 13. 17 Jean Claude Nicolas Forestier, Grandes Villes et Systèmes de Parcs (Paris: 1906), 14– 15. 18 George F. Ford, “Efficiency in City Planning,” The American City 7 (1913): 139. 19 Robin F. Bachin, Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago 1890–1919 (Chicago: 2004), 167.



220 | S ONJA DÜMPELMANN

age of parks and the number of inhabitants in Chicago and other cities. Tables and calculations similar to the ones published by American park system planners appeared a few years later in Martin Wagner’s dissertation on “The Sanitary Green of Cities” (1915) in Berlin. These quantitative and scientific aspects have played an important role in the open space planning efforts of metropoles ever since. Gardens, public parks, and park systems were not only a consequence of the industrialized metropolis. They also played an important role in its formation. In Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century, due to overcrowding in the city’s tenement districts, many workers either settled on or cultivated parcels of undeveloped land on the periphery, which they rented from the developers’ leaseholders. While the small temporary gardens and huts that working class families constructed on the allotted parcels were essential for their survival, the developers and their leaseholders made a profit before even building on the land. The allotments covered the land between the city core and the surrounding villages that were eventually developed and incorporated as part of Greater Berlin in 1920. Thus, in a multiplicity of ways, the allotments prepared the ground for urban expansion by forming a belt around the city. Parks and gardens were considered an indirect means to maintaining a high and efficient economy. They were also regarded as a direct means of stimulating certain industries like tourism. They acted as instruments of civic boosterism due to their aesthetic and functional appeal. By the mid-nineteenth century, already the surging metropoles London and Paris had realized the benefit of parks as venues and showcases of the first World’s Fairs. Whereas London’s Hyde Park provided the setting and frame for the Crystal Palace in 1851, at the 1867 Fair in Paris some of the parks created during the French Second Empire became exhibition objects themselves, showcasing new uses of construction materials like concrete, as well as plantings with non-native species. The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair occupied park areas to the south of the city for which Olmsted and Vaux had already provided a plan in 1871. The area of Treptow outside of Berlin increasingly became subject to metropolitan growth after the 1896 Great Industrial Exposition of Berlin had taken place in Treptower Park, a public urban park created in the 1870s to the east of the city core. The thrust outwards and the use of gardens and parks to stimulate metropolitan growth and development, while at the same time alleviating its negative side effects, continued throughout the twentieth century, particularly in the latter half. Economic changes in many metropoles have now led to abandoned former industrial areas being turned into parks and event landscapes. Many marshalling yards, airfields, and airports that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries



L AYERED L ANDSCAPES | 221

contributed to the growth of metropolitan areas in the first place are now also being converted into park landscapes with the aim of connecting them to existing park and greenway systems and catering to new urban and suburban neighborhoods. The same is increasingly occurring with waste landscapes like landfills. Once located outside the cities, many landfills like Fresh Kills on Staten Island have become open park landscapes surrounded by metropolitan agglomerations. Landscape features in these contexts ideally not only provide respite and recreational opportunities for urbanites, but they also can play an important role in the remediation and reclamation of polluted soils and in the rehabilitation of former toxic environments. Many such park and open space designs for metropolitan areas try to take into account the unpredictability of changes in ecologies, economies, demographics, and labor markets, as was taken to an extreme in 2000 with the winning design for Downsview Park on a former airbase in Toronto’s Metro area, northwest of the city center. Rather than offering a design for Downsview Park as an (albeit living) object, the team led by the architect Rem Koolhaas and the graphic designer Bruce Mau provided the idea for a park as an “object-event,” (Gilles Deleuze) or as a “performative catalyst subject.”20 The design proposal, entitled “Tree City,” proposed loosening the compacted soil of the former airbase and using a crop rotation system during the first two years to remediate and prepare the soil for future plantings. In the second phase, a network of “1000 paths” would be created, and playing fields and gardens established. Finally, woods, wetlands, and open meadows would create a varied landscape enjoyable 24/7 through active and passive recreation. While the vision and the strategy for these design phases were formulated and displayed with the help of Bruce Mau’s simple iconic graphic vocabulary, no actual design features were located anywhere on the plan. Instead, the designers’ intent was for the social, environmental, and economic processes to determine the ultimate design of the park, an endeavor that has so far largely been unsuccessful.

III. S TANDARDIZATION , D IFFERENTIATION , AND C ONSERVATION OF THE M ETROPOLITAN L ANDSCAPE The diversification of society throughout both the nineteenth and twentieth century led to an increasing differentiation of metropolitan garden types, designs,

  20 Anna Klingmann, Brandscapes: Architecture in the Experience Economy (Cambridge, MA: 2007), 114.



222 | S ONJA DÜMPELMANN

and uses. At the same time, however, the ever-growing and ever-faster international exchange of ideas, and an increase in international trade and travel, promoted an increasing standardization. Every metropolis had to boast major garden and park developments in order to compete with its counterparts. And it was not just public urban parks and park systems that became universal phenomena; botanical and zoological gardens were also established in every major urban center throughout the nineteenth century. These facilities collected plant and animal species from far-away parts of the world and thereby exhibited the respective metropolis’s scientific prowess. Design ideals were spread, adopted, and adapted in various countries, so that pastoral and picturesque landscapes, or their combination with geometrical features, dominated gardens and public urban parks in the major metropoles by the early twentieth century. By this time, features like sports fields and wading pools also belonged to the standard facilities of public urban parks. Within these standardized frameworks, however, city governments wished to be competitive and attempted to promote individual identities and preserve local landscape features and characteristics, in particular through the use or conservation of specific materials. In Berlin, as in Chicago, at the beginning of the twentieth century, attempts were made to both preserve outside forest areas and to reconstruct miniature versions of the regional landscape in public parks. Friedrich Bauer’s 1908 winning design for Berlin’s Schillerpark was developed while discussions about a plan for Greater Berlin were intensifying and extension plans for the growing metropolis were being drawn up. The design incorporated the area’s existing sand dunes and proposed the use of predominantly native plant species to recreate a regional landscape within the metropolis.21 Landscape types and plant communities typical of the region were also used to construct the nature reserve that Garden Director Erwin Barth designed for Berlin’s Sachsenplatz (today Brixplatz) in 1912.22 In a similar vein, some German landscape architects argued for the creation of nature protection areas within public urban parks. These areas would initially be planted and managed in order to encourage the establishment of a diverse flora and fauna before being left to develop on their own. The landscape architect Heick explained that access to the protected areas would be prohibited.

  21 Fr. Saftenberg, “Ein Vorschlag,” Die Gartenwelt 16, no. 5 (1912): 62. See also Friedrich Bauer, “Gartenbau und Landschaft,” Die Gartenkunst 8, no. 6 (1906): 109– 13. 22 Dietmar Land and Jürgen Wenzel, Heimat, Natur und Weltstadt. Leben und Werk des Gartenarchitekten Erwin Barth (Leipzig: 2005), 200–204, 233–240.



L AYERED L ANDSCAPES | 223

Heick stated: “Only the initiated would be allowed to research the sacred peaceful place now and then, and their publications would inform all others about the quiet secrets.”23 In Chicago already in the late 1880s, the landscape architect Jens Jensen displayed native trees, shrubs, and wildflowers in what he called the “American Garden” in Chicago’s Union Park. Despite its name, the American Garden was a first attempt to establish a specifically regional style, later defined as “prairie style” by the landscape architect Wilhelm Miller and employed in private estate gardens and public parks. Commissioned to draw up a plan for a Greater West Park System, Jensen argued for a system of parks that celebrated regional landscape characteristics and native plants. Views onto the “broad and open prairie” were to be preserved and along the river, native species were to produce “the typical Illinois expression that has character all its own.”24 By using native plants and by replicating landscape features typical of the Illinois landscape such as bluffs and cascades in his parks and park system plan, Jensen wanted to recreate, preserve, and restore regional landscape types and promote nature appreciation among Chicago citizens. While some designers promoted nativist agendas, many gardens and parks also sustained more cosmopolitan identities and ideals. Thus, in California in 1910, the Oakland Park Commission under the direction of landscape architect Oskar Prager strove to accommodate as many different plant species as possible in an attempt to satisfy the cosmopolitan population.25 In New York City, Central Park, despite its arguably “American” landscapes, provided the fledgling film industry with verisimilar sets for film scenes in France, Japan, and England.26 This paradox only demonstrates the importance the park had assumed in forging the identity of what had by now developed into an international metropolis. The preservation of open space, flora, and fauna in the growing metropoles preoccupied various professionals throughout the twentieth century. In the last decades of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first, air

  23 G. Heick, “Der Naturschutzpark in den Parkanlagen,” Die Gartenkunst 13, no. 12 (1913): 226. My translation. 24 Jens Jensen, West Chicago Park Commissioners, A Greater West Park System (Chicago: 1920), 38–39. 25 Oakland (Calif.) Park Commission and Oakland (Calif.) Playground Commission, The Park System of Oakland, California (Oakland: 1910), 69–70. 26 Charles Gatchell, “Movie Pilferers in Parks,” The Park International 1 (1920): 149– 52.



224 | S ONJA DÜMPELMANN

pollution and heat island effects resulting from urban growth have led metropoles like Berlin to draw up open space plans that are geared toward climate improvement. In addition, concerns regarding nature protection and the preservation of rare flora and fauna have influenced the recent designs of Berlin’s Naturpark Südgelände, which lies on a former railway marshalling yard in BerlinLichtenberg, and of Natur- und Erholungspark Johannisthal, which lies on Germany’s first airfield located southeast of today’s city center. The development and plant growth in parts of these parks are monitored and protected from human intrusion. Whereas some parts of Naturpark Südgelände only permit access by elevated walkways, the core area of Natur- und Erholungspark Johannisthal may only be enjoyed visually from a surrounding walkway that widens in certain areas to form viewing terraces. Thus, concern for species diversity and environmental functions that can benefit the urban climate have encouraged a specific wilderness aesthetic and have determined the design in parts of these parks.27 Biotope connections on a metropolitan and regional scale have also influenced design decisions in the case of the Orange County Great Park that is being developed southwest of Los Angeles on the decommissioned El Toro airbase. The park that has been planned as the heart of an extensive, mixed-use development north of Irvine—in what has been described as a post-suburban landscape that combines urban, suburban, and rural character traits 28—is currently being promoted as “The First Great Metropolitan Park of the 21st Century.”29 The park design offers a canyon for hiking and biking; a cultural center that includes an amphitheater, a library, and a museum; a veterans’ memorial; agricultural lands; and sports grounds. What is more, 178 acres of the parkland will form an ecological corridor that will connect the Cleveland National Forest in the north with the Laguna Coast Wilderness Park in the south. In fact, a variety of ecosystems including grassland, meadows, forests, wetlands, and creeks will make up the park, according to the design by the team around landscape architect Ken Smith, thus making biodiversity one of the determining factors of the park’s aesthetic.

  27 On the role of biodiversity and urban ecology in German urban planning and open space design see Jens Lachmund, “Mapping Urban Nature: Bio-Ecological Surveys and Urban Planning in Germany, 1975–1998,” in The Expert in Modern Society, ed. Gerd Gigerenzer and Elke Kurtz (Amsterdam: 2004), 231–48. 28 Rob Kling, Spencer Olin, and Mark Poster, “The Emergence of Postsuburbia: An Introduction,” in Postsuburban California: The Transformation of Orange County since World War II, ed. Rob Kling, Spencer Olin, and Mark Poster (Berkeley: 1991), 5–11. 29 Orange County Great Park, accessed on May 27, 2010, http://www.ocgp.org/.



L AYERED L ANDSCAPES | 225

IV. M ETROPOLITAN G ARDENS AS C ONTESTED S PACE

AND

P ARKS

In the second half of the nineteenth century, urbanizing areas and metropoles attracted an increasing number of people not only from rural areas but also from other countries. This movement has continued ever since, leading to the growth of metropolitan areas and to dynamic demographic shifts throughout these regions. Public gardens and parks have played an important role in accommodating newcomers. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was believed that the landscapes of public urban parks were a means to impose moral values, customs, and traditions on members of racial and ethnic minorities and on those from the lower classes. The park landscapes and the uses they allowed and did not allow were believed to forge a common cultural identity and weld a peaceful society. During the reform park era in the first three decades of the twentieth century, the mixing of ethnicities and classes was one of the declared intentions of the social reformers, philanthropists, park designers, and commissioners who were pursuing the establishment of public urban parks. As laid out by Olmsted on various occasions already in the second half of the nineteenth century in the US, parks were considered a means to educate the lower classes and a space for the mixing of classes.30 The reality was different, however. Although the working classes were able to use the parks eventually, the long distance between parks and tenements and the cost of public transportation, as well as the specific park designs, in many cases prevented workers and their families from being able to enjoy them. As Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar have shown for New York’s Central Park, rules and regulations often limited uses and therefore indirectly determined what the visiting public would look like.31 The park designers and commissioners intended Central Park to be traversed either on foot on the pathways, on horseback on the bridle paths, or in an even-paced carriage on the driveways. Walking on the grass, fast driving, as well as gambling, gaming, fortunetelling, hawking, and peddling were forbidden. Instead, the visual enjoyment of park scenery was what the park designers and commissioners mainly provided, thus neglecting the working classes, whose interests focused on games

  30 Frederick Law Olmsted, Public Parks and The Enlargement of Towns (Cambridge, MA: 1870), 18. 31 Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca: 1992).



226 | S ONJA DÜMPELMANN

and sports.32 In the nineteenth century in cities like New York and San Francisco, many workers and their families therefore flocked to the beer gardens on the periphery of the cities and to other venues like New York City’s Jones Wood where they were able to celebrate, play games, and drink beer without fear of being persecuted for “unruly behavior.”33 Although reality in many cases again proved otherwise, parks in the United States were also seen as spaces for the mixing of ethnicities and races, and in particular as a means for the assimilation, integration, and “Americanization” of immigrants. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was thought that parks were the public space in which the growing immigrant workforce of the metropolis would have opportunities to become accustomed to “American mores.” The playgrounds that had been established from the 1870s onwards in urban centers like Boston, Chicago, and New York City, following European models, were considered of particular importance for the assimilation of immigrant children. On playgrounds, as the Chicago professor of sociology, Charles Zueblin, explained, people were to be welded “together as in a great melting pot.”34 After the Playground Association of America (PAA) was founded in 1906, the number of play and sports grounds in metropolitan areas grew as a result of PAA members promoting play requirements and establishing playground standards. Consequently, the small neighborhood parks that were established in cities like Boston and Chicago included sport fields and field houses, features that were also integrated into larger parks that had previously only catered to passive recreation. Although the use of public open space in early American metropoles and cities was largely divided by race and, as Galen Cranz has shown, parks were “a battleground between the races since the late 1910s,”35 Ernest T. Attwell insisted in a 1920 article that metropoles like Chicago had “no problem in the commingling of races.”36 This was a gross overstatement. As scholars like Cranz and

  32 Rosenzweig and Blackmar, The Park and the People, 232–59. 33 For Jones Wood in New York City see, e.g., Rosenzweig and Blackmar, The Park and the People, 233–37. For pleasure and beer gardens in San Francisco see Terence Young, Building San Francisco’s Parks 1850–1930 (Baltimore: 2004), 37–44. 34 Charles Zueblin, “The Child at Play,” in The Child in the City, ed. Sophonisba P. Breckinridge (Chicago: 1912), 449. 35 Galen Cranz, The Politics of Park Design (Cambridge, MA: 1982), 201. 36 Ernest T. Attwell, “Playgrounds for Colored America,” The Park International 1, no. 3 (1920): 223.



L AYERED L ANDSCAPES | 227

Robin F. Bachin have pointed out,37 racial conflicts and tensions were not only instigated by metropolitan park politics, they also often played out in the parks themselves.38 In Chicago, at the beginning of the twentieth century, for example, white gangs terrorized African Americans who tried to use the baseball fields in Washington Park.39 In the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles, racial tensions led to the segregation of many recreation grounds including swimming pools, beaches, and parks until into the second half of the twentieth century. This occurred even without the Jim Crow laws that officially segregated these facilities in many cities of the American Southeast.40 In contrast to the paternalistic, environmentally determinist belief of many early social reformers, and in contrast to the racial and ethnic discrimination that has been played out in many parks and gardens, in the second half of the twentieth century metropoles provided the interstitial spaces and wastelands for grassroots initiatives that deliberately responded to the multiracial and ethnic character of the metropolis. These initiatives have materialized, for example, in the use of specific vernacular design forms in community gardens. In metropoles like New York City, community gardens in particular have acted as spaces for the empowerment of immigrant and poor communities. Since its beginning in the 1970s, the community gardening movement has led to the establishment of over 600 gardens on vacant lots throughout the city. Although the gardens have turned out to be vehicles for gentrification and many have been bulldozed and built-over since, many others have persisted. New gardens continue to be created and to provide green oases—plots for the cultivation of ornamentals and crops and spaces for community engagement. Malve Von Hassel has shown that the beliefs underlying the community gardening movement include “a vision of community that is self-consciously multiracial and multiethnic, extends across […] class lines, and […] beyond the borders of the local site […] to include the block, the neighborhood and the entire city.”41

  37 Robin F. Bachin, Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago (Chicago: 2004). 38 Cranz, The Politics of Park Design, 196–202. 39 Bachin, Building the South Side, 160–61. 40 Lawrence Culver, “America’s Playground: Recreation and Race,” in A Companion to Los Angeles, ed. William Deverell and Greg Hise (Oxford: 2010), 421–37. 41 Malve von Hassel, “Community Gardens in New York City: Place, Community and Individuality,” in Urban Place: Reconnecting with the Natural World, ed. Peggy F. Barlett (Cambridge, MA: 2005), 91–116.



228 | S ONJA DÜMPELMANN

Some community gardens have successfully fostered these local identities as well as created homes away from home for immigrant communities. A case in point is what Barbara Deutsch Lynch and Rima Brusi have called the “Latino garden movement” that converged with the community gardening movement in New York City’s Hispanic neighborhoods like the South Bronx, Loisaida, and El Barrio (Spanish Harlem).42 Predominantly built by Puerto Rican and Dominican immigrants the “casita complex” consisting of a hut (casita), a swept yard (batey), and a garden provides an area for the cultivation of food crops, ornamentals, and for the keeping of small animals like chickens and rabbits. The casita and batey recall vernacular landscape features and cultural practices in the rural areas of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Furthermore, as illustrated by Lynch and Brusi, the “conquest” and reclamation of vacant lots and abandoned city property by New York City’s Latino gardeners can be considered an adaptation of ideas inherent in the 1941 Puerto Rican and Dominican Land Law that granted landless rural workers small parcels for house building and gardening.43 Not a grassroots initiative but a plan by Berlin’s city government to symbolize German-Turkish friendship and provide the Turkish population in Berlin with a symbol of their homeland was the 1998 insertion of the short-lived Pamukkale fountain in the city’s Görlitzer Park. Modeled after the world-famous travertine terraces in the Denizli Province in southwestern Turkey, the fountain soon deteriorated due to construction faults, and its ruins were partly covered with turf in 2009.44 More than the oftentimes simplistic symbolic references and representative features like the Pamukkale fountain, it has been the spontaneous and often temporary use of existing parks that has provided new images and visions for public spaces in contemporary metropoles. By the end of the twentieth century, members of diverse immigrant communities had appropriated many public parks for their own purposes. While these are informed by their native cultures, traditions, and customs, the idiosyncratic temporary and transitory nature of many of today’s metropolitan immigrant communities has also caused new spontaneous uses based on the specific

  42 Barbara Deutsch Lynch and Rima Brusi, “Nature, Memory, and Nation: New York’s Latino Gardens and Casitas,” in Urban Place, 191–212. 43 Ibid., 199–200. For Puerto Rican vernacular architecture also see, e.g., Joseph Sciorra, “Return to the Future: Puerto Rican Vernacular Architecture in New York City,” in Re-Presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st-Century Metropolis, ed. Anthony D. King (New York: 1996), 60–92. 44 See Patricia Hecht, “Jetzt wächst Gras über die Ruine,” Der Tagesspiegel, July 31, 2009.



L AYERED L ANDSCAPES | 229

necessities of these communities in a foreign city. These new uses have often challenged the parks and garden departments of city governments. While Columbus Park and Sara Delano Roosevelt Park in Manhattan’s Chinatown provide elderly Chinese men with venues to exhibit their songbirds in bird cages, an opportunity for socializing and part of China’s early-morning urban park culture,45 Berlin’s Tiergarten has over the past few decades become a favorite place for the city’s Turkish population to hold family barbecues in summer. For maintenance reasons and as a result of conflicts between different user groups, the Berlin Senate government has regulated the use of barbecues in its parks and has therefore also zoned certain areas of the Tiergarten for this specific purpose.46 In Rome on Sundays, the Parco della Resistenza dell’Otto Settembre near the metro station Piramide and the Cappella dei Padri Basiliani, where the mass is held in Russian, has come to be adopted as a lunch and meeting place by many Ukrainian and Romanian women. These park visitors have, since the late 1990s, sought temporary work as domestics in the city and are now often employed as care workers for the elderly. The park provides the women, who in many cases had professional jobs in their native countries, with a space where they now can participate in the economy by offering haircuts and selling small snacks to their compatriots. Previously, Filipinos occupied the park, and some have since moved to a small garden area in the park’s vicinity. Italian residents have com-

  45 See “Sara D. Roosevelt Park,” City of New York Parks and Recreation, http://www. nycgovparks.org/parks/saradroosevelt. Chinese men have also taken to using the Forsyth St. community garden in New York City for their morning songbird displays. Gardeners from a variety of countries including China, Italy, and the Dominican Republic designed this garden. As soon as they had set aside part of the garden for attracting birds, a group of Chinese men began using the space for their songbird gatherings. As Ashley Graves Lanfer and Madeleine Taylor have shown, small adaptations were undertaken to accommodate the birdcages: to provide opportunities to hang them, poles with hooks were sunk into the ground. See Lanfer and Taylor, Immigrant Engagement in Public Open Space: Strategies for the New Boston (Boston: 2005), 11. 46 For a map of barbecue zones and a list of rules and regulations regarding barbecues in Berlin’s public urban parks see: “Grillen,” Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung und Umwelt, accessed May 24, 2010: http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/umwelt/ stadtgruen/gruenanlagen/de/nutzungsmoeglichkeiten/grillen/.



230 | S ONJA DÜMPELMANN

plained about the use of the park by the foreigners, subjecting them to racial and ethnic discrimination.47 As these recent examples show, public parks in metropoles continue to be contested spaces that on occasion may become “battlegrounds” rather than peaceful melting pots. A study carried out in four Los Angeles neighborhood parks in the 1990s reported that different social groups tended to coexist rather than mix. The park spaces that came closest to being described as “melting pots” were the children’s playgrounds.48 Thus, the strategy followed in some open space designs in contemporary metropoles has been to provide “hybrid landscapes” that can be used flexibly by different user groups at different times for different purposes. These designs have sought to layer different uses and functions, which is also one of the declared objectives of the aforementioned landscape urbanism. The redesign of Visserijplein in the 1990s, a square surrounded by slab buildings in the low-income immigrant neighborhood Delfshaven in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, provides an example of this practice that has also been described as “temporary” and “everyday urbanism.”49 Visserijplein is a layered landscape. While it functions as a regular parking lot on most days of the week, basketball courts have been marked on the surface and concrete slab benches have been incorporated into its slope so that it may also be used for games by

  47 On the use of Parco della Resistenza by Ukrainians and Romanians also see Romina Peritore, “L’uso plurale dello spazio pubblico: luoghi dell’identificazione collettiva della comunita ucraina,” in La citta eventuale, ed. Universita degli Studi Roma Tre (Macerata: 2005), 116–29. 48 Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, “Urban Form and Social Context: Cultural Differentiation in the Uses of Urban Parks,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 14 (1995): 99–101. 49 For the temporary use of urban spaces see Florian Haydn and Robert Temel, eds., Temporary Urban Spaces (Basel: 2006) and Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung Berlin, ed., Urban Pioneers: Berlin; Stadtentwicklung Durch Zwischennutzung / Temporary Use and Urban Development in Berlin (Berlin: 2007). For “everyday urbanism” see John Chase, Margaret Crawford, and John Kalinski, eds., Everyday Urbanism (New York: 1999). The practice of “everyday urbanism” focuses on the everyday uses of small, temporary, and often interstitial and unintentionally leftover spaces in the city. Its objectives include the creation of designs that are as inclusive as possible, responding to the needs of different users and to the specific site conditions, and of designs that reinforce the existing qualities and that leave room for spontaneous activities.



L AYERED L ANDSCAPES | 231

resident teenagers. Electrical outlets in the new steel sculptures that have been positioned throughout the square supply market stalls with electricity when they turn the parking lot into a marketplace twice a week. Despite designs such as this in today’s metropoles, the shifts in demographics as a result of in- and outmigration and the effects of an increasingly global labor market have probably shown their effect more explicitly in new uses of existing parks and open spaces rather than in the material form of newly created landscapes.

V. T HE M ETROPOLIS AS P ALIMPSEST : P ARKS AND G ARDENS AS D IDACTIC AND M EMORIAL L ANDSCAPES Although gardens and parks have provided settings for a variety of educational pursuits since ancient times, in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century metropoles a variety of open spaces were especially developed for this purpose or were expressly used as educational facilities in and of themselves. The nineteenth-century botanical and zoological gardens that were established in the big metropoles fulfilled a variety of purposes. While they were used to show off and increase the power, wealth, and cultural and scientific prowess of metropoles and their countries, they were first and foremost developed for the study and acculturation of plant and animal species that were brought to these gardens from different countries and continents, especially the respective country’s colonies. In the United States, the first zoological gardens that were established in the 1870s and onwards were also seen as a measure of wildlife preservation and conservation. Although some zoological gardens, like London’s 1828 Regent’s Park zoo, were only accessible to scholars and members of zoological societies at the beginning, they were soon opened to the public, providing places for public education as well as for entertainment and amusement. Germany’s early kindergartens (where children were led to cultivate garden plots due to founder Friedrich Fröbel’s underlying pedagogical ideas) were developed as educational institutions of a different kind. First implemented in German towns, kindergartens were adopted in North American metropoles from the 1870s onwards after the first kindergarten had been set up at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876 to educate children, provide healthy play spaces in the fresh air, and provide a means of acculturation for immigrant children.50

  50 Susan Herrington, “Kindergartens: Shaping Childhood from Bad Blankenburg to Boston,” Die Gartenkunst 18, no. 1 (2006): 81–95.



232 | S ONJA DÜMPELMANN

Adult education occurred in various forms in public urban parks, like the Retiro Park in Madrid, where visitors could borrow books provided by the Madrilenian municipality. The Christian Science Monitor reported on this institution that people were allowed to take a book “to read while in the park, a notice at the stand placing him on his honor, for the common weal, to return it before he leaves.”51 To further enhance park enjoyment, amusement, and the general public’s information on local and world affairs, a proposal was set forth in a 1920 issue of the short-lived American journal The Park International to provide park visitors with newspapers at no or very low charge.52 In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gardens and parks in the growing metropoles were considered ideal settings for heroic portrait statues and monuments that related to national and patriotic narratives. Statues, it was thought, could uphold virtues and moral standards, foster national identities, and forge collective memories. They could also educate citizens about local, regional, national, and international history. They transformed parks into historical spaces.53 In Berlin’s Tiergarten, which was transformed from a royal hunting park into a public urban park on the basis of a design prepared by Peter Joseph Lenné in the 1830s,54 sculptures began to be erected in the three last decades of the nineteenth century. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the sculptural adornment of the park included sculptures that represented the four rivers—the Rhine, Elbe, Oder, and Weichsel—that delineated the Reich’s borders. It also included statues of important German cultural figures like Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Joseph Hayden, and Ludwig van Beethoven. Furthermore, in the 1890s, the German Kaiser Wilhelm II had thirty-two groups of marble statues erected along the park’s boulevard Siegesallee. Glorifying the history of Brandenburg and Prussia, the Royal Ministry of Education considered the statues such valu-

  51 Christian Science Monitor quoted in “Democracy at Madrid,” The Park International 1, no. 2 (1920): 166. 52 Judith Oliver, “Newspapers Vital to Parks,” The Park International 1 (1920): 263–65. 53 See Terry Wyke, “Marginal Figures? Public Statues and Public Parks in the Manchester Region, 1840–1914,” in Sculpture and the Garden, ed. Patrick Eyres and Fiona Russell (Aldershot: 2006), 93. 54 For a history of Berlin’s Tiergarten see Folkwin Wendland, Gustav Wörner, and Rose Wörner, “Der Berliner Tiergarten,” in Gartendenkmalpflege, vol. 3, ed. Der Senator für Stadtentwicklung und Umweltschutz (Berlin: 1986). Also see Marie-Louise Plessen, ed., Berlin durch die Blume oder Kraut und Rüben (Berlin: 1985), 148–55.



L AYERED L ANDSCAPES | 233

able didactic instruments that it sent schoolchildren to the Siegesallee for lessons in German history.55 In Rome, a similar development occurred in the Pincio Gardens after the city finally became the Italian capital in 1870. The gardens north of the Piazza del Popolo had already been the focus of improvement in 1849, when, after the proclamation of the Roman Republic, nationalist sentiment led to the proposal to arrange busts of literati and fighters for Italian independence along the Pincio’s public walks. Busts of illustrious Italians erected in a public park, it was thought, would create a national consciousness and a shared culture, joining all citizens in their quest for independence and unification. The idea was finally carried out in the 1880s.56 In New York City’s Central Park, the placing of statues also began in the 1870s against the park designers’ will. Many citizens’ groups representing European immigrants considered the sculptures “an appropriate way to beautify their city and to legitimate their heritage, as well as their newfound status as Americans.”57 These ideas were still prominent throughout the twentieth century. Most recently in the twenty-first century, however, metropoles have provided the grounds for rethinking how history is remembered. New urban parks, gardens, and open spaces have in these past decades been used in their entirety as mnemonic devices. Thus, memorials have been embedded in and become part of urban landscapes, as exemplified by the 2002 Irish Hunger Memorial in New York City’s Hudson River Park. Built to memorialize the events that led to the Irish potato famine of 1845– 52, the death and emigration of circa two million Irish citizens, as well as contemporary issues of world hunger and poverty, the Irish Hunger Memorial appears as half landscape, half sculptural object on a quarter-acre site. It recreates a 1880s fallow Irish potato field replete with a roofless fieldstone cottage, stonewalls, and indigenous wildflowers and grasses im-

  55 Christof Mauch, “Capital Gardens: The Mall and the Tiergarten in Comparative Perspective,” in Berlin-Washington, 1800–2000, ed. Andreas Daum and Christof Mauch (Cambridge: 2005), 210. See also Wendland, Wörner, and Wörner, “Der Berliner Tiergarten,” 25. 56 Massimo De Vico Fallani, Storia dei giardini pubblici di Roma nell'Ottocento: dalle importanti sistemazioni del Pincio, del Parco del Celio e della Passeggiata archeologica al Gianicolo (Rome: 1992), 88–126. See also Alessandro Cremona, “Il giardino della memoria,” in Il Giardino della Memoria: I busti dei grandi italiani al Pincio, ed. Alessandro Cremona and Alessandra Ponente (Rome: 1999), 11–26. 57 Michele H. Bogart, Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890–1930 (Washington: 1997), 18–19.



234 | S ONJA DÜMPELMANN

ported from Ireland on top of a sloping, cantilevered platform overlooking the Hudson River toward Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. The surrounding plaza and the base are clad with Kilkenny limestone. Although the Hunger Memorial draws a visual connection to one of the actual sites of the events it refers to, it was not built on the site of any of the events themselves. Instead, some of the materials used to build the memorial were imported from Ireland and derive from the time period of the potato famine. In turn, entire urban sites and parks have become monuments, memorials, and “memory sites.” Sometimes they are located on the sites of the actual events and built structures they are commemorating. Other times they are embedded in the urban fabric of the contemporary metropolis. For example, the History Park of the former Zellengefängnis Moabit Berlin was opened in 2006 on the site of the 1849 Prussian model prison that assumed particular importance for Berlin and German history due to its use by the Nazi regime for the imprisonment and murder of a number of resistance fighters. In addition to Berlin and German history, world history plays an important role in the creation of the Berlin Wall Memorial landscape that is currently under construction along a stretch of the street Bernauer Straße where the Berlin Wall divided West and East Berlin from 1961 to 1989. The design offers a variety of pathways and information points in a complex urban fabric on the original site that features remains of the Berlin Wall beside a new memorial chapel and documentation center. As combinations of landscape architecture and sculpture that are designed as part of the urban fabric to be moved through, these memorial landscapes render their home metropolis a palimpsest of history and a museum in and of itself. As Andreas Huyssen has shown, these landscapes also reveal how in recent decades, local memory discourses have increasingly been influenced by global conditions and practices.58 Furthermore, the landscapes briefly described here cater toward visitors that Huyssen has described as “metropolitan marathoner[s],”59 globalcity tourists who consume commodified memory space. Whereas green open spaces were used as venues and frames for exhibitions of national power in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as for the personal and public presentation and wealth, parks and gardens have become exhibitions in and of themselves in twenty-first-century metropoles. Metropolitan parks and gardens become layered landscapes as palimpsests of history. They have also become layered as, throughout the twentieth century, they have pro-

  58 Andreas Huyssen, Present Past: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: 2003), 96–98. 59 Ibid., 50–51.



L AYERED L ANDSCAPES | 235

vided for a multiplicity of uses by diverse social groups. By the second half of the twentieth century, they were also planned and designed explicitly to increase species diversity and promote a healthy living environment as a whole. The development and design of green open spaces, as this essay has shown, is closely related to the social, economic, cultural, and political life in metropoles. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, parks and gardens have contributed to the creation and definition of the metropolis and, vice versa, the formation of metropolitan areas has influenced the ways in which parks and gardens have been designed, built, and used.





Section 3: Social Spaces of Metropolitan Culture





Berlin Street Life: Scenes and Scenarios1 W OLFGANG K ASCHUBA

I.

B ERLIN B ECOMES

A

M ETROPOLIS !

The statement, “Berlin becomes a metropolis,” describes what we might call an acceleration in the city’s history at the end of the nineteenth century. The German Empire found its military and national unity in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and its capital in Prussian Berlin and in the four or five decades that followed, the city underwent a rapid and radical transformation. Berlin became a “sort of world center,” as the Danish writer Martin Andersen Nexö noted.2 And it became a metropolis, at least regarding the international presence of its culture and media, and at least until the Nazis destroyed this new cosmopolitanism. This metropolis did not, however, emerge simply “from within,” in its own right, or with its own steam. Rather, its new expansiveness and character increasingly came from “outside”— from incorporation and immigration. Between the years 1860 and 1900 alone, the city’s population tripled to 1.9 million people, 798,612 of whom were officially registered as “outsiders” or “strangers” (Fremde). While these Fremde primarily included hundreds of thousands of labor migrants who came to Berlin from other German states or from abroad, they also

  1

This article first appeared in German in the volume Der Fotograf Willy Römer 1886– 1979. Auf den Straßen von Berlin (Berlin: 2004) edited by Diethart Kerbs. This text, as well as all quotes, unless otherwise noted, have been translated by Pamela Selwyn for this volume.

2

Martin Nexö Andersen, “Deutschlandbriefe,” in: Reiseschilderungen (Reden und Artikel), (Berlin: 1956). As quoted in Ruth Glatzer, Das Wilhelminische Berlin. Panorama einer Metropole 1890–1918 (Berlin: 1997), 35-36.





240 | W OLFGANG K ASCHUBA

included thousands of princes, bankers, politicians, and journalists who moved to the capital to engage in politics and business. None of these people possessed local citizenship rights. Statistically speaking, soon only one in two inhabitants of the city was a native Berliner. The other half belonged to the constant and endless stream of immigrants. This omnipresence of “strangers” and “otherness” became a sort of Berlin trademark, albeit one apparently taken quite lightly, because in Berlin, this constant coming and becoming now seemed almost normal. As Andersen Nexö recalls, “One day, after several months in Berlin, I saw two men doffing their hats to each other. It was indeed an experience to find two people who had known each other before meeting in this Babel!”3 Nexö may have told this story tongue-in-cheek, but change had come to define the rhythm of the city, and it could be felt in the streets, squares, railway stations, and newsstands; in the department stores and pubs; everywhere people, groups, and languages gathered and attempted to communicate. In many cases, the milieus and differences mixed in such a way that in some districts, it was precisely this social blend that became the new common ground: a demonstrative unity of difference. This Berlin mixture emerged “in public,” and the city’s streets were its main arenas. Above all, Berlin consists of its streets, and this is precisely where the new Berlin mixture emerged. The streets were the daily, concrete, and ubiquitous scenes of everything that traffic and tempo, architecture and technology sought to embody as “modernity,” with all of its theoretical and practical meanings. The automobile and the tram, cinema advertising and electricity, the masses and events: for contemporaries, these were primarily urban “outdoor experiences,” components of the public world of the streets, which is why everybody wanted to be part of it. Berlin’s new burst of urbanization and modernization was also expressed in these years in a new thirst for knowledge and sensation among a public that had not yet withdrawn with the media into the private sphere, as television had not yet brought images of the new things and events into their homes. Instead, people consciously used the occasion of press or radio reports to visit the scenes of events personally—to “be there” as curious, horrified, moved, or titillated spectators, whether at artistic spectacles, fairs, Zeppelin flights, or crime scenes. Thus, a new public street culture emerged in this metropolitan landscape. When we speak of “public,” however, we must speak of it as plural and diverse, for there were many publics each quite different from the other. From the

  3

Quoted in Dieter Glatzer and Ruth Glatzer, eds., Berliner Leben 1900–1914: Eine historische Reportage aus Erinnerungen und Berichten, vol. 1. (Berlin: 1986), 22.



B ERLIN S TREET L IFE | 241

organ grinders and children in the back courtyards to workers and clerks outside the bars, from demonstrations of the unemployed to the elegant patrons of the cafés on Kurfürstendamm, street life proved to be a complex system of urban publics. These publics were socially diverse and yet similar in their scenes, divergent and yet connected, lively—even hectic—and yet in a sense also contemplative in their insistent dynamism. Walter Benjamin once spoke of the Parisians’ particular technique “of inhabiting their streets” in this same sense, that is, appropriating the space in an almost intimate way that unites the private and the public.4 Berliners seem to have mastered this technique as well. These scenes of everyday life had long since been joined, however, by scenarios: deliberately arranged motifs of public street life. As orchestrated forms and arrangements of social life on the stages of urban space, these scenarios imagined and displayed groups and trades, subcultures and lifestyles, consumption and commerce. Such strategies of representation and forms of (self-) stylizing gave an urban, public room for self-dramatization, staking claims, occupying space, and demanding attention. This also expressed a certain desire to be seen and a new need for public attention and recognition, which adroitly used the city and its spaces as a stage. All of these scenes and scenarios embody presentations of the complex experience of modernity—an experiential figure in which the city, its diversity and disparities notwithstanding, appears as a collective agent, a coherent subject perfectly capable of action. Contemporaries saw it this way as well. As one anonymous person wrote in 1905: “The Berlin of 1905 is made up of its physical and spiritual elements, as it presents itself as a single entity to a cultured contemporary, comprehended by a temperament, judged according to the opinions of the age, and depicted in the language of today.”5 Indeed, Berlin appeared to be a new city, for, as Hans Mackowsky noted in 1923, “The old Berlin died around 1900, and was replaced by the sort of faceless world city one can find anywhere.”6 The new and the modern were also deplored and feared. For this reason, Berliners also tried to preserve the old, or at least tried to locate old certainties in the new—in streets and buildings as well as ideas and people. Work on the city therefore also frequently became “social work,” work on an urban “people” who

  4

Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin.

5

Anonymous, Berlin und die Berliner: Leute, Dinge, Sitten, Winke (Karlsruhe: 1905),

6

Hans Mackowsky, Häuser und Menschen im alten Berlin (Berlin: 1923), 15.

(Cambridge, MA: 2002), 421. 3.



242 | W OLFGANG K ASCHUBA

had apparently lost their ethics and morals in a big city environment allegedly bereft of traditions and taboos.7 Countless social reforms and reformers appeared particularly in Berlin, many of them with muddled or fanciful ideas of how to educate and ennoble “the people.” It seems clear at any rate that labor migrants, as the “drifting sand” of industrialization, created new problems because many of them arrived in the strange city without connections and with scant opportunity to put down roots. As Walther Classen noted in 1915: The city offers splendid deep soil to the intelligent offspring of the old middle classes and the fresh sons of the countryside, allowing them to develop their powers to an extent never seen before. But those already born in the city into broken families can only weakly flap the wings of their souls; accustomed from an early age to a rapidly changing sequence of impressions, they have never learnt to observe things thoroughly; mentally passive, incapable of imagination or of helping themselves[...] these creatures of the big city are deficient human beings, and of little use.8

Thus, the “rootless people of the big city” became a metaphor of bourgeois social critique, which retained its penchant for a romantic peasantry and its skepticism toward the “Moloch of the metropolis.

II. F LÂNERIE : “R EADING

THE

S TREET ”

The panoramic perspective opens vistas, sketching an image of the metropolitan cityscape. It is this panoramic world in which Willy Römer gained his impressions and sought his motifs as a photographer—by no means wholly free and unbiased but full of outside urgings and demands. He did this just as the city itself no longer found an innocent reflection in its images, but was instead subject to a constant discourse of interpretations and meanings. Preservation and extinction, memory and forgetting, documentation and orchestration—these were not simply alternatives and decisions facing politicians, architects, or social reformers. They also faced the observer who thought professionally in visual images and created his own “reality” in them through his choices of motif and

  7

Rolf Lindner and Ruth Alexander, eds., Wer in den Osten geht, geht in ein anderes Land (Berlin: 1997).

8

Walther Classen, Großstadtheimat. Beobachtungen zur Naturgeschichte des Großstadtvolkes (Hamburg: 1915), 122.



B ERLIN S TREET L IFE | 243

detail, light and shadow, stasis and dynamism, empathy and distance. In this way, this city also became his city. In 1929, the journalist and author Franz Hessel published his book Spazieren in Berlin (Walking in Berlin), in which he states: Tauentzienstraße and Kurfürstendamm have the high cultural mission of teaching Berliners the art of flanerie, unless this urban pursuit should disappear altogether. But perhaps it is not yet too late. Flanerie is a sort of reading of the street, in which human faces, displays, shop windows, café terraces, tracks, cars, and trees become so many equal letters of the alphabet that, taken together, make up the words, sentences and pages of everchanging books. In order to engage properly in flanerie, one must have no fixed objective. And since the route from Wittenbergplatz to Halensee offers so many possibilities to shop, eat, drink, or attend the theatre, cinema or cabaret, one may risk the promenade with no clear destination and set off in search of unsuspected adventures of the eye.9

Flânerie, as a specific way of experiencing urbanity, appears as a recurring cipher of modernity. Most notably, Walter Benjamin introduced the term when he referred to the cultural historical origins of the discourse on urbanity and thereby to its starting point, mid-nineteenth-century Paris. He wrote: Paris created the type of the flâneur. What is remarkable is that it wasn’t Rome. And the reason? Does not dreaming itself take the high road in Rome? And isn’t that city too full of temples, enclosed squares, national shrines, to be able to enter tout entière— with every cobblestone, every shop sign, every step, and every gateway—into the passerby’s dream? The national character of the Italians may also have much to do with this. For it is not the foreigners but they themselves, the Parisians, who have made Paris the promised land of the flâneur—the “landscape built of sheer life” as Hofmannsthal once put it. Landscape— that, in fact, is what Paris becomes for the flâneur. Or, more precisely: the city splits for him into its dialectical poles. It opens up to him as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a room.10

Willy Römer was doubtless such a flâneur in the nascent metropolis of Berlin, as well as its pictorial chronicler. He discovered the city for himself, quite subjectively and constantly anew. At the same time, he discovered it in the perspectives and thoughts of his contemporaries, who were also continually talking about and

  9

Franz Hessel, Ein Flaneur in Berlin (Berlin: 1984), 145. Translator’s note: This is a new edition of Spazieren in Berlin.

10 Benjamin, Arcades, 417.



244 | W OLFGANG K ASCHUBA

“reinventing” the city. Of course, Römer was not just an amateur in the sense of an individual devotee of the city who merely followed his own inclinations. He was a press photographer whose pictures had to take up the motifs of the contemporary literary and media discourse. To this extent, Römer was never simply Römer: his photos crystallize the perceptions, mentalities, and feelings of a society between the Wilhelmine Empire and the World Wars, which was just beginning to work out its “worldview.” Undoubtedly, Berlin offered one of the most fascinating and exciting vantage points to capture this. What interests us here are Römer’s pictures and viewpoints in this particular sense—a photographer who sees the city “from the inside” because he lives there, knows it, and understands himself as a part of it. He was by no means a cool and objective observer. In this, he resembles the figure of the flâneur as described by Walter Benjamin, as well as the figure of the anthropologist, for whom empathy and sympathy are familiar stances because they connect him with his field. This, however, also means that the “anthropological gaze” is always at once knowledgeable and questioning, not truly “native” and not truly “foreign” but rather ambivalent in its perspective. This seems to be the point of view in Römer’s photos as well: knowledgeable and sympathetic in their attitude, but questioning in their interpretation and message. The photographer Römer probably often felt like the writer Franz Hessel, who noted during his walks through the city: Sometimes I would like to enter the courtyards. In the older parts of Berlin, life in the back of the tenements becomes denser and more intimate and makes the courtyards rich—the poor courtyards with a bit of green in the corner, the frames for beating carpets, the rubbish bins and the wells that survive from the time before water pipes. In the mornings, I succeed only when the singers and fiddlers perform, or the barrel organ man, who also played the natural whistle with two free fingers, or the amazing fellow who plays snare in front and a bass drum in back. [...] But I would also like to participate in the courtyard evenings, and see the last games of the children, who are always being called to come upstairs, and the young girls returning home and wanting to go out again; however, I find neither courage nor excuse to intrude, for it is all too obvious that I have no business there. In this country you need to have a reason, or you aren’t allowed. One doesn’t simply go somewhere here; one has to have a destination. It is not easy for the likes of us. [...] I always get suspicious looks when I try to stroll among the busy people. I think they take me for a pickpocket.11

  11 Hessel, Flaneur Berlin, 8.



B ERLIN S TREET L IFE | 245

The author probably has it easier because he merely looks while he is out and about and produces his texts at home. The photographer, in contrast, looks and produces “on site,” and is thus doubly intrusive and far less footloose. One must naturally keep in mind the particular historical and cultural as well as technological circumstances of photography at the time when Römer was working. The medium was not yet common enough for the photographer to go unnoticed in the city, and he even became a sensation in some tenement courtyards for showing an interest in such marginal motifs. Despite Heinrich Zille’s drawings that depicted the social environment of the common folk of Berlin, photographing everyday life was still considered something that required explanation because photography in general, and press photography in particular, had heretofore been dedicated mainly to major events and state actions: weddings not washdays, Otto von Bismarck not the man in the street. From a purely technical perspective, cameras were still heavy, awkwardly large, complicated, and timeconsuming to operate. Even the new box cameras that came on the market around the turn of the century were still the size of a brick and could only hold a maximum of six photo plates. Their set up, adjustment, and exposure time did not make them conducive to spontaneous snapshots either. The handy Leica, which became available in 1926, offered a good deal more comfort, but not to press photographers, since printers still required pictures on plates. Thus, the technological medium existed in a certain conflict with the cultural object. What motivated and fascinated Römer above all was the rapid transformation of the Berlin cityscape after 1900. He seems to have been impressed by the contemporary discourses and juxtapositions in which an old Berlin of the premodern era was contrasted with the growing metropolis. The losses and gains of history and the present aura and modernity were very familiar categories, especially in regard to his choice of motifs and pictures. And he clearly saw it as his duty to secure pictures of both Berlins: the motifs and horizons of the fading city as well those of the up-and-coming one. The fading city often appeared to stand still. It declined slowly enough to allow the leisurely setup of camera and image. The up-and-coming city, in contrast, was often too fast and dynamic for camera technology to easily capture, so quickly did it rush past. Here, photographic technology had not yet caught up with the technology of everyday life. What emerged in this Berlin—a mixture of old and new, native and immigrant—particularly attracted Römer, as it did many journalists and authors of his time. The Viennese author Felix Braun, for example, wrote:



246 | W OLFGANG K ASCHUBA

Berlin was the open-streeted, noisy-vehicled Potsdamer Platz, the crossing of which verged on adventure; Friedrichstraße at night full of people of all classes taking a stroll, the proletariat outside Aschinger’s beer halls, passengers streaming out of the underground, shouting newsboys, prostitutes; Kurfürstendamm with its department stores, shops, tall omnibuses, all kinds of vehicles whose drivers wore strangely shiny hats, intellectual faces, strikingly dressed women. [...] It often seemed to me that I was in an Asiatic city, in Nineveh or Babylon, and for me Berlin always retained this Oriental and destructible quality.12

And Franz Hessel added, These streets are still a world of their own and a sort of home to the eternal foreigners until they, carried here not long ago in a push from the East, have become sufficiently acclimated to Berlin that they are tempted to penetrate further into the West and shake off the all-too-obvious signs of their peculiarity. It is often a shame, since they actually look far finer walking around the Scheunenviertel than they do later in the garment trade or the stock exchange.13

Thus Braun, Römer and the others all really “read” their images into the city. These images arose in literary and intellectual discourse and were then constantly reworked, just as the city was always reworking itself. Römer could discover the contrasts he found in the streets of Berlin because they were already present in his mind. In the light of current debates on late modernism, we could refer to his pictures as “constructivist” and highly “reflexive,” because in his choice of motifs and details he not only considered the contents of the pictures but also took into account their effect and interpretation against contemporary discourse on Berlin. It was a “construction” of experience and reality, as is always the case with texts and images. Here, in this medium and for this individual, however, it appears to have been a conscious and deliberate “construction.”

III. U RBAN S CENES

AND

S ITES

The big city has been called a “human workshop,” a “site of modernity,” a “laboratory” of society’s future. These metaphors illustrate the particular resonances that the art, scholarship, and intellectual debate of Römer’s time found in urban

  12 Quoted in D. Glatzer and R. Glatzer, Berliner Leben, 27. 13 Hessel, Flaneur Berlin, 80.



B ERLIN S TREET L IFE | 247

culture. Its development appeared to prefigure, and indeed anticipate, the future of industrial modernity—in regard not merely to architecture, infrastructure, transport, and communication but also to the “urban individual” in his new and therefore mysterious world. Thus the question of a new mentality and even a new human arose with increasing frequency. With psychology as the new leading science on the relationship between the individual and society, the metropolis was discovered to be a new, experience-defining space. It was the home of neurosis, as scoffers put it at the time. In any case, it was a place and environment of masiveness, technology, and tempo that subjected the individual to particular social tensions and mental stresses, and thus could also produce particular psychic, mental, and intellectual consequences. This interest in the “spirit” of the city, and especially of Berlin, was naturally not a new phenomenon, as was frequently pointed out in the press and in literature. As one author noted, “The peculiarity of this way of being in Berlin already [...] disquieted Master Goethe, when it approached him in the splendid form of the freemason and musician Zelter; since then, it has preoccupied quite a few folk psychologists, bidden or unbidden.”14 Initial work, however, consisted mainly of citing regional clichés, and thus provided very little insight. A new chapter in the scholarly debate began when the cultural psychologist Willy Hellpach in 1939 described the evolution of a new type of human being who developed new mental, almost genetic, qualities as a response to the conditions of the urban environment: There is an incredible mass dynamism, people streaming and flooding, swirling and whirling, in which everything is incessantly being displaced, and thus ever-changing: new phenomena are constantly appearing to replace those that went before. [...] And this uninterrupted succession also belongs to the city’s very essence; without it the traffic and the dynamism of the masses would come to a standstill, and the confinement could never cope with the crowd. Onward, ever onward! This battle cry of breathlessness belongs to the very existence of metropolitan street life.15

Thus, Hellpach’s place was also the street. He, too, saw something emerging here in the anonymity of fleeting glances and wordless rushing, in the mixture of haste, alertness, and foreignness that was worth watching closely. He believed that a state in which cognitive vigilance coexisted with “emotional indifference”

  14 Alexander Meyer, Aus guter alter Zeit. Berliner Bilder und Erinnerungen (Leipzig: 1909), vii. 15 Willy Hellpach, Mensch und Volk in der Großstadt (Stuttgart: 1939), 68.



248 | W OLFGANG K ASCHUBA

was typical of big city dwellers. High mental alertness paired with deliberate indifference was a combination that seemed quite necessary in the sensory frenzy of a large city like Berlin if one wished to so much as cross Potsdamer Platz or Unter den Linden successfully—i.e., without being killed. Cultural sociologists like Georg Simmel, for their part, discovered the extraordinary variety of symbolic forms in which urban culture treated human mental states such as anonymity and individuality, mass existence and community, loneliness and the craving for pleasure. Simmel chiefly addressed the new “nomadism”: people’s increasing mobility that allowed “the spatial conditions of their existence” to “become fluid” and produce wholly new forms of cultural “socialization,” especially in the metropolis.16 Urban sociology then gradually followed people into their neighborhoods and milieus to test whether the purportedly vast and bewildering landscape of urban manufacturers and “economic organizations,” in Max Weber’s term, nevertheless allowed for the emergence of “small worlds”: social neighborhoods and ethnic group cultures that create their own loyalties and ties. A nascent ethnology of the city began to ask how people in urban life-worlds were compensating for the cultural loss they had apparently suffered during their migration from the small towns and villages, and how they were trying to cultivate regional traditions of culinary culture or festivals in order to salvage old social ties and values in a new environment. During this period, Berlin became a hotbed of such scholarly efforts, as is also evident in the images of the city that arose at the time. After all, scholarship never simply adopts what already exists. It also adds its own ingredients like motifs, images, and interpretations. As a site of modern mass culture, Berlin’s tenements, traffic, and cinemas virtually promoted such scholarly creations and inventions. These were theses, emblems, and visions of both a theoretical and an aesthetic nature. It was also from this intellectual material that the specific image of Berlin as a social “laboratory” and a city “in the making” emerged. Literature and media, in turn, took up these scholarly motifs and disseminated them to tourists through city guides and newspaper articles. Visitors in turn “communicated” these images back into the everyday life of the city through their encounters with waiters and pub owners, newspaper sellers and cab drivers, police officers and journalists. An intensive dialogue of images arose, which had effect on the city itself and its inhabitants. Ultimately, it was probably this discourse about Berlin as the new cultural metropolis of the twentieth century that actually “made” the city just that.

  16 Georg Simmel, “Spatial and Urban Culture,” in Simmel on Culture, ed. David Frisby and Mark Featherstone (London: 1997), 160.



B ERLIN S TREET L IFE | 249

Römer’s pictures capture all of these facets of Berlin, storing them, regrouping them, and creating a collage: their very own Berlin panorama. Thus, they naturally also expose and illuminate politics and its media orchestration, for instance Kaiser Wilhelm II at a military parade, Karl Liebknecht giving a speech on Unter den Linden, or Römer’s photojournalist colleagues snapping the members of parliament entering the Reichstag in an early flurry of flashing folding cameras. The intellectuals and bohemians also have their day in the spotlight, as do the theatres and cinemas, the old palaces and ministries in Wilhelmstraße, and the new villa suburbs on the River Havel. This made Römer a good professional photographer but many who worked with pictures at the time also did the same. What most others did not do, however, was Römer’s special realm—the observation of everyday life in Berlin. This everyday life had two faces: the metropolis as a monumental world of urban canyons and traffic and the more circumscribed environment of “ordinary” folk in the side streets and back courtyards they called home. With all the decisiveness (but also all of the naïveté) of his time, Römer engaged in a sort of “metropolitan ethnology” of the technological and urban world as well as the neighborhoods and quarters. In this he resembled Heinrich Zille, who also roamed Berlin’s courtyards armed with his camera in search of photographic motifs for his drawings and paintings. Römer, too, pursued particular motifs. For instance, he produced an entire series of pictures of Potsdamer Platz on the theme of urban traffic. He documented the jumbled profusion of people and vehicles of all kinds, the coexistence of Maybach limousines and horse-drawn brewery drays, the merging of the individual into a crowd, and the cooperation of old and new, fast and slow, chic and shabby. Some manner of order nevertheless shone through all of this apparent chaos, for Römer’s pictures make us feel that we can follow the portrayed movement, understand the transport technology of the day, and practically hear the accompanying street noise. His long shots organize space and movement almost ornamentally. For example, he captures Potsdamer Platz during the 1919 transport strike as anthill-like in its directional streams, yet individual in the hotchpotch of trams, automobiles, carriages, carts, bicycles, and pedestrians. This ornamental quality returns in his observations of the great railway stations with their masses of arrivals and departures or of political demonstrations and parades. While the movement of people in transit creates its own order, as it were, other urban spaces appear to be pre-structured. Architecturally designed squares and buildings or Berlin’s countless monuments, for example, articulate the space and its perception, especially in the city center. An English journalist commented with astonishment in 1906 that, “You can hardly turn your head without seeing a



250 | W OLFGANG K ASCHUBA

statue. They are here, there and everywhere—in beautiful, leafy, exact-looking parks and squares, on the corners of streets, in the middle of streets, at the ends and beginnings of streets—everywhere. Statues, statues, everywhere.”17 This omnipresence and density of citations from history and art guides not only the gaze but also the footsteps, which attain a different rhythm and a rapidly changing clarity of focus. This also applies when the scene changes to Kurfürstendamm, which doubtless offers a somewhat different ambiance and itinerary: the elegant promenade and the shopping boulevard. Here, one encountered not monuments but department stores like Wertheim, as portrayed in the 1907 reportage:

 The bazaar was originally located in the four storeys of a block of flats, and one had to walk through one hundred rooms of a Berlin apartment if one wished to shop. Messel’s plans, in contrast, were of a splendid simplicity. A huge atrium and all around, on every floor, a single, endless room, its ceiling supported only by columns, the exterior walls articulated only by pillars.[...] The first glance informed the passer-by what this building was and wanted to be: a department store, in which the crowd could disperse freely and unimpeded through every part of the space, and where the goods were not hidden in cupboards and crates, but laid out openly for all to see.18

One also strolled around the theatres, cinemas, cabarets, and art galleries and finally refreshed oneself in one of the countless cafés. Then, perhaps, one returned to the historic center of Unter den Linden to enjoy the tea dance on the roof terrace of the Berolina with the view across the roofs of Berlin against the grand backdrop of the palace. These places, however, were exclusive and their pleasures expensive. The demonstrative luxury enjoyed by the rich is also very apparent in Römer’s photos. Sharply delineating contrasts, the images go out of their way to show cheaper alternatives: drink stands in the streets, a makeshift ice cream parlor in an entryway, and the coffee and beer gardens in the suburbs and outskirts of the city. The following quote describes such locales: “Thousands of Berlin families came here on a Sunday with bag and baggage to visit the many outdoor cafés; people actually prepared coffee, and ate the ‘home baked’ goods they had brought with them.”19 The notoriously cheeky Berlin vernacular then turned this institution’s inviting sign, “Families can boil coffee here” (Hier können Familien Kaffee kochen), into the famous “Kaffirs can boil families here” (Hier können

  17 Bart Kennedy, The German Danger (London: 1907), 59. 18 Quoted in D. Glatzer and R. Glatzer, Berliner Leben, 61. 19 Ibid., 661.



B ERLIN S TREET L IFE | 251

Kaffer Familien kochen), a colonialist-inspired example of Berlin’s renowned and at times appallingly racist wit. Fun fairs and sporting events were cheap and dear at the same time. Generally low in entrance fees and prices, these urban spectacles created high expectations and provided much enjoyment for their visitors—above all, the children, young people, and many single young adults who populated Berlin’s streets, factories, and servants’ quarters. For these populations, popular entertainments of all kinds now became sites of small pleasures. Franz Hessel noted how “[e]verywhere in the suburbs where large vacant plots exist, a fairground fills the empty space for a time with its shooting galleries, wheels of fortune, dance floors on wooden disks, great sausage eating contests and the like.” Because there was so much “emptiness”—both spatial and emotional—the fun fair soon became a permanent institution. As Hessel observed: “Here at Luna Park everything is more modern and on a larger scale. In the evening, a gigantic firework display, the Halensee in flames, bursts over the swinging boats, the Iron Sea, the roller coaster and the chain bridge, which compares favourably with the flaming Treptow and the other burning pleasure villages.[...] All of Berlin comes here, little shop girls and grand ladies, bourgeois and bohemians. Luna Park is ‘for everyone.’”20

IV. T YPES

AND

D RAMATIZATIONS

In his pictures, Römer shows how strongly the dynamism and drama of the big city play out in terms of massification and acceleration, density and intersection, and work and pleasure. Technological and cultural developments blend together here, feeding on each other and culminating in those segments of the social space that are marked especially as places of “public life” in the metropolitan landscape: major roads and squares, railway stations and the underground, cinemas and theatres, the Reichstag and the palace, the newspaper quarter and the cafés on Kurfürstendamm, the parks and fairgrounds, neighborhoods and back courtyards, and public swimming baths and lake shores. In this respect, the Berlin landscape seems especially diverse. As a result of immigration and incorporation after 1871, the city possessed countless subcenters and quarters with a life of their own. It also produced a happy union between high culture and Bohe-

  20 Hessel, Flaneur Berlin, 149. Berliners also flocked to the regatta route on the river Spree, the sport stadium, and the Deutschlandhalle—or at least its male portion and the occasional female companion.



252 | W OLFGANG K ASCHUBA

mia that, in the scenes surrounding the visual arts, music, and cabaret, bore the traits of something close to our understanding of pop culture today. For that reason, too, “public life” in Berlin so frequently meant “street life.” Much of what would disappear into the separate spaces of the work or the family sphere or into the leisure or culture industries elsewhere or later was still present in the public realm here: craft work and commerce, celebrations and love, Dada and children’s games. There remained, however, those images from the “other” Berlin—a Berlin of artisans and workers who performed hard, strenuous physical labor. These were the manservants and maidservants, luggage and coal porters, boatmen in the ports on the River Spree, and many unskilled child laborers. Römer shows bodies and faces that speak of effort and hardship, of early experience and premature aging. But he also shows us the colorful aspects of these scenes: the conversations and breaks, familiarity and encounters, negotiations and trade. Spatially, work is often directly associated with the market, thus rendering the city’s markets distinct life-worlds of this other Berlin. An account from that time, for example, describes the old market on Kreuzberg’s Maybach Ufer, which still exists today: Kottbusser Straße takes us back to the canal, and we come to the city of stalls belonging to a market that covers the entire Maybacher Ufer. All of Neukölln seems to have converged from the South to shop here. Everything is for sale: slippers and red cabbage, goat fat and shoelaces, neckties and kippered herring. Next to the old Jewish woman spreading out scraps of fur and unpacking silk, a neighbour eats a raw carrot from her vegetable cart. Bottles of essence of lily of the valley promise cheap, sweet fragrance to combat the vilest stench of fish.21

Römer discovers this market scenery everywhere in the city: the Italian trader exhibiting his plaster statues on the water wing at the bridge over the Landwehr Canal, the second-hand bookseller before his book cart, the lemonade seller, the old clothes dealer in the Scheunenviertel, and the street stall on Potsdamer Platz selling the newest windshield wipers complete with rubber blades. Then, Römer changes not his location but his perspective, observing the city from a kind of worm’s eye view, and the focus shifts to Berlin’s children. This begins in a cheerful vein when he shows the banks of the Spree as an unofficial children’s bathing establishment: “All of a sudden there is a great crowing and shouting and someone falls into the water with a dull plop.[...] A few windows

  21 Ibid., 174–75.



B ERLIN S TREET L IFE | 253

open, people step outside, but everybody is laughing or smiling. A merry, noisy outdoor swimming bath in the middle of Berlin, between the Jungfern and Gertraudten Bridge.”22 Other photos depict boys in the street wearing the latest roller skates on their feet. The year was 1919, and another transport strike was in progress. Everybody was trying to get where they were going—as quickly as possible, of course. Those who wanted to roll along in such a modern fashion required the most modern surface, however, so cobblestones were out of the question, as were the popular Berlin granite paving stones. On inky black, mirror-smooth asphalt, the new basic urban material, one could cruise at speed and “parade” for the photographer. This child’s perspective took Römer to the back courtyard, the place that was at once nursery, playground, and parlor—a narrow and compact world of experience for those growing up in the big city. What we see in the courtyard photographs is the backside of the street, a glimpse behind the urban scenes: “In order to gain an impression of the lives of the inhabitants, one must penetrate the courtyards, the sad first and the sadder second, one must watch the pale children who hang about there, squatting on the steps to the three, four or more entrances to the murky transverse buildings, pathetic, grotesque creatures like those Zille painted and drew.”23 Here, too, a world of play certainly existed. Römer’s photos show marble runs and sandboxes, cartwheels, cycling, and hopscotch, organ grinders and children’s parties, which lend the photographed scenes the appearance of courtyard idylls. His photos, however, also capture decay and rubbish in images of children rooting through refuse in search of bread or coal, as well as in images of flats in whose gloom and poverty a pig was occasionally found living in the kitchen with the family. This, then, was the Kiez (the ‘hood), the Miljöh (the milieu), the poor, old, genuine, and folksy Berlin. The attributions and clichés are virtually random, and they increase the more picturesque these courtyard scenes appear to the curious, bourgeois beholder. This Kiez is often also an “ethnic” Berlin, that of the Jewish, Polish, and Russian immigrants from the East, such as was perhaps particularly embodied by the Jewish street culture of the Scheunenviertel (literally, “barn quarter”) with its blend of trade and habitus. Photography turned it into both new realism and new exoticism. It documented and staged an often “alien” Berlin, which frequently only became so foreign through its accentuation as a postcard motif, which robbed it of its normality, its context, and perhaps its innocence as well. Thus, these social and ethnic milieus also made an apparently

  22 Adolf Heilborn, Die Reise nach Berlin (Berlin: 1925), 9. 23 Hessel, Flaneur Berlin, 220.



254 | W OLFGANG K ASCHUBA

seamless transition into moral milieus. The neighborhoods of the poor, homeless, and foreign were also the quarters of love, especially and frequently the kind that was for sale. City guides and newspaper features sections were fond of repeating, in a tone at once censorious and prurient, that: Our German capital has the unfortunate reputation of being the most pleasure-rich city in the world, and thus also that most filled with temptations. One need only observe the nightlife in the “Passage”, the bunte Ecke, the “Scheunenviertel”! Watch as the theatres and cinemas, the operettas and music halls, the ballrooms and barrooms empty between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. and overstimulated youth give themselves up to the temptations of the nocturnal streets.24

“Entertainment” districts also became a central motif of the discourse on the “moral jungle” of the metropolis, in which the supposed moral decay and criminality was cited as a peril to young people and women in particular. Tangible as a social and lived environment, the imagined prurience was also central to emerging literary forms, especially in the exploding genre of pulp literature (Schundliteratur). It was against this pulp that the mass forces of moral and educated Germany promptly began a determined campaign for the hearts of German youth and women. The moralists’ fears centered on the night in the big city as both a material and a literary scenario. Philistine fantasies and literary nights were somewhat ahead of the photographer, since they simply needed to record their “inner” images. This nocturnal world remained closed to the external, photographic images because it was generally too dark to be captured by gaslight, electricity, or even flash photography. The last already existed, but its mighty eruption of light rendered nocturnal observation difficult, since it made the photographer resemble an exploding grenade more than an inconspicuous flâneur. In any case, Römer was not interested in sensationalist photography of nightlife or the red-light milieu. His aim was rather to capture what was defining and typical in the everyday life of metropolitan worlds. This was also true in the naïve sense in which the preface to a 1905 book on “Berlin and the Berliners” promoted itself and the city: “It both replaces a journey to the imperial capital and tempts us to go there. We read of people, places and deeds that awaken memories and longings. But it is not just the individual personalities, palaces and monuments that arise before our eyes. The people in all their multifaceted unity,

  24 Quoted in Joachim Schlör, Nachts in der großen Stadt: Paris, Berlin, London 1840– 1930 (Munich: 1991), 21.



B ERLIN S TREET L IFE | 255

a unique, valuable and often underestimated part of the young German nation, stand broad and massive behind the incomplete series of individuals listed by name.”25 Römer, too, was doubtless seeking something of these people and their faces, and he also helped to mould these faces. Finally, the mass of encounters and actions in the big city gave rise to a sense of the typical and of types. In these, the metropolitan landscape seems to have entered into a special relationship with the human landscape, a relationship they embody as figures and routines. For example, the housewife queuing for milk at a handcart, the flower seller tying her bouquets at the market, or the housemaid with a shopping basket over her arm. The barefoot street urchin who shines men’s shoes but also self-confidently claims the street as his playground. Or the coachman, the chauffeur, the ticket collector, the policeman, each with his particular habitus, which consists on the one hand of robust, uniform-like jackets, gaiters, caps and helmets, and on the other, a sort of majestic body language through which the symbolic force of the uniform seems to have been transferred from the men’s clothing to their limbs. And also the “exotics”—the peddlers, barrel organ players, and bear tamers— whose little spectacles became courtyard sensations for an afternoon. And finally, and naturally above all, the “unknown passer-by” walking down some Berlin street, one standing in for millions, the part for the whole. Aside from the types, Römer’s photos also annotate the era’s stylizations, for example the theme of tempo and hurrying that underlies virtually every street and traffic scene as a leitmotif to document “public haste” and the “fast city.” The urban noise that renders Römer’s pictures nearly audible—the way they record the street surfaces and tram wheels, the hobnail boots and horses’ hooves, the building sites and machines—was what Walter Benjamin recalled as the “rhythm of the metropolitan railway and of carpet-beating” that had rocked him to sleep as a child.26 Together with those other “sounds of the city”—snatches of music from radios and gramophones, barrel organs and children playing in the courtyards, street singers and musical taverns—they provided the score for the metropolis. The vital need for modernity, which meant that everything from street lighting to the latest model of automobile, from fashions in dress to lifestyles, required constant technological and aesthetic affirmation. Finally, there was struggle and conflict: the street as a site of politics, of strikes, demonstrations, revolution— and the photographer as chronicler.

  25 Anonymous, Berlin, 5. 26 Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood Around 1900: Hope in the Past (Cambridge, MA: 2006), 39.



256 | W OLFGANG K ASCHUBA

Römer looked deep into the city and helped to shape it with his images, but he did not get too close, deferring to its boundaries and those of its people. He maintained a certain distance that had nothing to do with a lack of sympathy or empathy and everything to do with respect and recognition. His pictures never expose, hurt, or denounce their subjects. And although Römer did sell them, he did not sell himself or his actors out in the process. His camera was not yet the relentless and insatiable eye of the media industry, acting rather like a highwayman, in the way that it imagines people only before the camera lens or the screen, “Your life or your money!” Römer instead lets life be life. His street photography delineates a human transit space, a transition between inside and outside, between arrival and being here, between private and public worlds, between the various scenes and neighborhoods, between poverty and elegance. Sometimes composed like paintings— with intense chiaroscuro effects, seemingly stylized groups of people, and framing spatial perspectives—Römer’s photographs help us to “see” the everyday world of a Berlin that was at once disappearing and arising anew.

Translated from German by Pamela Selwyn





Metropolis in Transformation: Cinematic Topologies of Urban Space L AURA F RAHM

Whenever cinema brings a new cinematic city to light—be it an imagined metropolis that is captured on screen or be it the cinematic reinvention of an already well-known metropolis—it inevitably amplifies and changes our spatial perception. From the very beginning, films have aimed at grasping and deciphering the complex spatial processes that underlie the metropolis, cutting their way through the thicket of metropolitan life. For cinema allows us to wander around and travel through the metropolis. In cinema, we undertake journeys into an unknown space, immersing ourselves in a continuous spatial passage that follows its own spatial logic. Throughout the twentieth century, cinema has explored these passages through the metropolis via movement and montage. It has invented new means of grasping the spatial dynamics of the metropolis in accelerating and decelerating its rhythms, in compressing and dispersing its masses, and in layering and juxtaposing its spaces. In so doing, it transforms the metropolis into a quintessentially moving space that forms the beating heart of cinema. Yet these cinematic journeys through the metropolis, which in their inventiveness have often played a pioneering role in the history of film, have to be differentiated according to their different purposes: On the one hand, filmmakers have always strived to explore unknown urban worlds where common spatial categories seem to be suspended. They have designed urban architectures, which in their sheer magnitude and uniqueness defy any classification. These grandiose utopian or dystopian visions of the metropolis—we could think of Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927), Things to Come (William Cameron Menzies, 1936), or Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)—have reinvented the world under modified “urban conditions,” where the urban architecture surmounts and absorbs the lived spaces of the metropolis. On the other hand, filmmakers have actively embraced the





258 | L AURA F RAHM

rhythms and conditions of everyday life in the metropolis. Far from disconnecting or alienating their urban configurations from the existing metropolises, they have rather aimed at maintaining a perceptible and palpable relation to metropolitan life. Especially the early “city symphonies” that were produced in the 1920s— like Manhatta (Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, 1920–1921), Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Walter Ruttmann, 1927), and À propos de Nice (Jean Vigo, 1930), among others1—reveal a high awareness of the spatial processes in the metropolis. They aim at grasping the full complexity of its “spatial thickness.”2 In the following, I will explore the idea of a “metropolis in transformation,” focusing my remarks on the city symphonies of the 1920s and their cinematic successors. In undertaking their particular journeys through the metropolis—in capturing its manifold movements and rhythms—the early city symphonies, above all, reveal their nature as a quintessentially spatial cinema. This spatial cinema, however, does not merely refer to the built, architectural spaces of the urban environment, but rather interweaves them with the social spaces of the city dwellers and the symbolic spaces of cultural imagination. In creating a dense spatiality that sensitively reacts to the diversity of metropolitan spaces, these city symphonies aim at deciphering the spatial dynamics of the metropolis. In moving through the metropolis, they do not only visualize the spatial characteristics of the metropolis. They also actively engage in the process of spatial production, modifying and transforming the metropolitan spaces by inscribing their own spatial vocabulary. At its heart, cinema is based on a transformative spatiality that has the potential to reach beyond the idea of a direct or “immediate” spatial

  1

The city symphonies are an important sub-genre of the city film, which were mainly produced in the “extended” 1920s, ranging from Manhatta (1920–1921) to À propos de Nice (1930), A City Symphony (1930), A Bronx Morning (1931), Autumn Fire (1931), and City of Contrasts (1931). Yet the idea of a city symphony has been frequently taken up again in the twentieth century, from Leo de Laforgue’s Symphonie einer Weltstadt—Berlin wie es war (Symphony of a World City—Berlin as it Was) (1943–1950) and Robert A. Stemmle’s Berliner Ballade (1948) to Dominic Angerame’s series of City Symphonies (1987–1997) and Thomas Schadt’s Berlin: Sinfonie einer Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis) (2002), a reinterpretation of Walter Ruttmann’s city symphony.

2

The notion of “thick space” draws on recent discussions on the concept of metropolitanism, as developed in Günther H. Lenz, Friedrich Ulfers, and Antje Dallmann, eds., Toward a New Metropolitanism: Reconstituting Public Culture, Urban Citizenship, and the Multicultural Imaginary in New York And Berlin (Heidelberg: 2006). See also the introduction to this volume.



M ETROPOLIS IN TRANSFORMATION | 259

representation, and even beyond the idea of movement and montage, transgressing into a spatial field where the transformative quality of space forms the starting point of any spatial reflection. Based on these assumptions, the objective of my article is threefold. Firstly, I will elaborate on the transformative spatiality inherent to city films by positioning this concept of cinematic space in the context of current spatial debates. I will highlight the potential of transformative space in terms of a redefinition of metropolitan space as a “thick space.” Secondly, I will explore the idea of a “metropolis in transformation” by focusing on the spatial configurations of city symphonies in the 1920s. These early city symphonies in particular, as I will argue, produce a complex spatiality that is characterized by a dense layering of spaces. By constantly interweaving and combining the different spaces of the metropolis according to their specific rhythms, they allow us to reconsider the spatiality of cinema in terms of a topological space of transformation. Thirdly, I will further develop the theoretical implications of this “metropolis in transformation” in looking at two experimental films that position the idea of the city symphony in the context of urban theory and the historiography of film.

I.

T OWARD

A

C INEMATIC T OPOLOGY

In the past decades, scholars in the diverse fields of social sciences, human geography, philosophy, and cultural and media studies have increasingly raised the question of space. In their most advanced approaches, scholars have set out to reevaluate the very conditions of their discipline’s spatial concepts.3 Their reflections on space have triggered a vital debate that crosses disciplinary borders. Most importantly, these spatial discourses have provided the opportunity to rethink space within a conceptual framework that transcends the notion of a fixed, immovable “container space,” which still—in spite of its fundamental questioning

  3

For a comprehensive discussion of the recent revisions of spatial concepts, see Jörg Döring and Tristan Thielmann, eds., Spatial Turn. Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften (Bielefeld: 2008); and Stephan Günzel, ed., Raumwissenschaften (Frankfurt: 2009). The most influential collections of texts on space are provided by: Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, ed., Thinking Space (Critical Geographies) (London: 2000); and Jörg Dünne and Stephan Günzel, eds., Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt: 2006).



260 | L AURA F RAHM

in the wake of the “spatial turn” in the 1980s and 1990s4—persistently remains in the basic notion of space.5 In order to tackle the historical roots of this spatial concept, discussions have branched out into the questions of mapping and topographical representation addressed in the so-called “topographical turn.”6 The advocates of a recent “topological turn,” meanwhile, have focused on reconsidering space as a set of dynamic spatial structures and relations.7 The omnipresence of spatial debates in these diverse fields of social and cultural inquiry faces both major problems and opportunities. A problematic aspect is that, by this time, the discussion seems to be supersaturated, which leads some scholars to increasingly criticize the dominant attention to space, arguing that it

  4

In close connection with Henri Lefebvre’s seminal book The Production of Space (Oxford: 1991 [1974]) the “spatial turn” has been mainly put forward by: David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: 1990); Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: 1994); Allen J. Scott and Edward Soja, The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: 1996); and Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: 1989).

5

In his introduction to Max Jammer’s Concepts of Space (1954), Albert Einstein addressed the persistency of “container space,” noting: “It required a severe struggle to arrive at the concept of independent and absolute space, indispensable for the development of theory. It has required no less strenuous exertions subsequently to overcome this concept—a process which is probably by no means as yet completed” (Introduction to Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space in Physics by Max Jammer (Cambridge: 1954), xiii–xvii, xvi.

6

The term “topographical turn” derives from an influential article by Sigrid Weigel: “Zum ‘topographical turn.’ Kartographie, Topographie und Raumkonzepte in den Kulturwissenschaften,” Kultur-Poetik 2, no. 2 (2002): 151–65. Here, she differentiates the different topographical approaches in the field of cultural studies. The term was further advanced, among others, by: Hartmut Böhme, “Raum—Bewegung—Topographie,” in Topographien der Literatur, ed. Hartmut Böhme (Stuttgart: 2005), ixxxiii; Vittoria Borsò and Reinhold Görling, eds., Kulturelle Topografien (Stuttgart: 2004); Karl Schloegel, Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit. Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik (Munich: 2003); Robert Stockhammer, ed., TopoGraphien der Moderne. Medien zur Repräsentation und Konstruktion von Räumen (Munich: 2006).

7

In his introduction to the anthology Topologie. Zur Raumbeschreibung in den Kulturund Medienwissenschaften (Bielefeld: 2007), editor Stephan Günzel compares the theoretical underpinnings of the “spatial turn,” the “topographical turn,” and the “topological turn,” while the different articles sound out the potential of a redefinition of space through the concept of topology.



M ETROPOLIS IN TRANSFORMATION | 261

displaces other essential questions. Yet in contrast, we are witnessing the undeniable achievements of a strong, focused discussion on spatial concepts that has by now advanced to the point where we no longer need to reconfirm the constitutive dynamization and flexibilization of spatial categories as opposed to more fixed and static notions. The discourse on space, for the first time, has the opportunity to move a step further; it enters into a field where the relationality and the processuality of space may form the bases of any spatial reflection. More specifically, it has the potential to go beyond the dualism between a fixed, static notion of space and a relational, dynamic spatial category, leading to a new concept of space under the terms of a “cultural, social, and medial spatiality.”8 Against this background, it might seem surprising that the question of cinematic space, which actively engenders the idea of transformative space, has for a long time led a rather marginal existence within the overall debate of spatial concepts. Yet the cinematic concept of spatial transformation, as I will argue, may serve as a touchstone for the current revisions of spatial concepts. For cinema constantly and visibly overcomes a fixed, immovable space by introducing a quintessentially moving space of dynamic spatial relations.9 To put it more precisely, cinema achieves its spatial fixity only through a conscious arrest

  8

Günzel, Topologie, 13. My translation. Original quotation: “kultureller, sozialer und mediengebundener Räumlichkeit.”

9

In the past decades, scholars in the field of film and media studies have increasingly addressed the specific spatiality of cinema and thus contributed to a redefinition of cinematic space. See Hartmut Winkler, Der filmische Raum und der Zuschauer. ApparatusʊSemantikʊIdeology (Heidelberg: 1992); André Gardies, L’espace au cinéma (Paris: 1993); Hans Beller et. al., eds., Onscreen/Offscreen. Grenzen, Übergänge und Wandel des filmischen Raumes (Ostfildern: 2000); Sigrid Lange, ed., Raumkonstruktionen in der Moderne. Kultur–Literatur–Film (Bielefeld: 2001); Susanne Dürr and Almut Steinlein. eds., Der Raum im Film/L’espace dans le film (Frankfurt: 2002); Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy, eds., MediaSpace: Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age (London: 2004); and Gertrud Koch, ed., Umwidmungen. Architektonische und kinematographische Räume (Berlin: 2005). Yet the idea of a quintessentially moving cinematic space reaches back to the early decades of cinema, where space was discussed as a “vivifying” category. See Hermann Scheffauer, “The Vivifying of Space,” in Introduction to the Art of Movies, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York: 1960 [1920]), 76–85. See also Tom Gunning, “An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film,” in Film Before Griffith, ed. John L. Fell (Berkeley: 1983), 355–66; and Anthony Vidler, “The Explosion of Space: Architecture and the Filmic Imaginary,” Assemblage 21 (1993): 44–59.



262 | L AURA F RAHM

of movement. Even in its most static, fixed views of a city, a street, or a building, which undeniably form a significant part of the cinematic configuration of urban space, a trace of movement always resonates. In capturing the moving spaces of the metropolis on screen, cinema inevitably transforms and modifies its spatial coordinates, producing a “spatial thickness” that is articulated through a complex overlay of spaces.10 In order to elaborate on this transformative spatiality of cinema, I will introduce the notion of “cinematic topology,” which is based on an understanding of topological space as a quintessentially transformative space that allows us to conceptualize the fundamental shift in spatial theory addressed above—that is, the shift from an immovable, static notion of space toward a transformative space of dynamic relations.11 Recent discourses on space, as I pointed out earlier, show a decided tendency to draw on topological concepts. For the promise of topology, or so it seems, is to provide a conceptual framework that allows us to position space beyond the idea of a fixed, self-contained spatial entity. The historical roots of topology instead reach back to the concept of relational space as developed in Leibnizian philosophy, where he delineates space as the “order of coexisting things” (spatium est ordo coexistendi).12 At its most basic level, topology is defined as a complex spatial structure where the spatial properties remain stable under continuous deformations and transformations of objects. Put forward by mathematicians in the second half of the nineteenth century, topology was initially developed, according to Joachim Huber, “even in its most rudimentary form […] in order to

  10 For a detailed exploration of the topos of the “complex city” and its potential of reshaping the approaches of urban studies, see Frank Eckardt, Die komplexe Stadt. Orientierungen im urbanen Labyrinth (Wiesbaden: 2009), especially 187–231. 11 In my book Jenseits des Raums (2010), I develop the notion of “cinematic topology” in close connection with the concept of a “cinematic topography,” which forms an essential counterpart to the transformative spatiality of topology. See Laura Frahm, Jenseits des Raums. Zur filmischen Topologie des Urbanen (Bielefeld: 2010), 167–78. 12 Leibniz writes in The Metaphysical Foundations of Mathematics: “Space is the order of coexisting things, or the order of existence for things which are simultaneous. In each of these two orders—that of time and that of space—we can judge relations of nearer to and farther from between its terms, according as more or less middle terms are required to understand the order between them.” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “The Metaphysical Foundations of Mathematics,” in Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. L. E. Loemker (Dortrecht: 1989 [1714]), 666–67.



M ETROPOLIS IN TRANSFORMATION | 263

describe complex, non-representable “things” by means of a spatial vocabulary.”13 Topology is a way of describing spaces through the idea of transformation. It is a way of conceiving of space as a flexible, dynamic structure that is only defined by its different spatial relations. As a result, topology introduces a way of thinking about space through a set of modal, qualitative relations. Johann Benedict Listing, one of the founders of mathematical topology, pointed out this facet as the most basic property of topological space in his Vorstudien zur Topologie (Preliminary Studies on Topology) (1847): “By topology we mean the doctrine of the modal features of objects, or of the laws of connection, of relative position and of succession of points, lines, surfaces, bodies and their parts, or aggregates in space, always without regard to matters of measure or quantity.”14 Thus Listing aims at a mere qualitative way of thinking about spatial positions, trying to grasp the full complexity of non-metric relations as a “degree of order and coherence of the space of all ‘complexions.’”15 In its integration of n-dimensional spaces and manifolds, topology provides the opportunity to think about space as a complex spatial structure, where different topologies are superimposed onto each other and thus create a dense spatiality. This notion of topology as a spatial complexity can be further developed with regard to an influential article by John Law “Objects and Spaces” (2002), where he delineates the idea of conceiving of objects as topologically complex. This is because, he notes, they “exist within different spatial systems, or because they are produced in intersections between different spatialities.”16 This observation is crucial as it allows us to define objects, as Law argues, as intersections between different topologies. Using the examples of the vessel and the water pump, he delineates how these objects are able to exist, at the very same time, in

  13 Joachim Huber, Urbane Topologie. Zur Architektur der randlosen Stadt (Weimar: 2002), 35. My translation. Original quotation: “[D]ie Topologie wurde auch historisch in ihrer rudimentärsten Form immer gebraucht und entwickelt, um komplexe, nichtrepräsentierbare ‘Dinge’ räumlich zu beschreiben.” 14 Johann Benedict Listing, “Vorstudien zur Topologie,” Göttinger Studien 2 (1847): 814. Translated in: Ernst Breitenberger, “Johann Benedict Listing,” in History of Topology, ed. I. M. James (Amsterdam: 1999), 916. 15 Marie-Luise Heuser-Keßler, “Geschichtliche Betrachtungen zum Begriff der Topologie,” in Topologie. Ein Ansatz zur Entwicklung alternativer Strukturen, ed. G. Bien et. al. (Stuttgart: 1994), 8. My translation. Original quotation: “der Ordnungs- und Zusammenhangsgrad des Raumes aller ‘Complexionen.’” 16 John Law, “Objects and Spaces,” Theory, Culture & Society 19 (2002): 96.



264 | L AURA F RAHM

Euclidean space, in a network space, and in a fluid space. In a critical reflection on the theoretical premises of “actor-network theory,” Law aims at denaturalizing network-space and network-objects (or the “immutable mobile”) by emphasizing that “objects are always enacted in a multi-topological manner, and are dependent for their constancy on the intersection of different spaces.”17 While being mainly developed with regard to the specific status of objects, Law’s observations may also form a crucial part in the reevaluation of spatial concepts. For they allow us to conceive of space as an intersection between different topologies. They provide the conceptual framework for a “spatial thickness” that interlinks the spaces of the metropolis and the spaces of cinema. By virtually moving and transforming the metropolis, cinema introduces a concept of space in its own right that has the potential to bridge the gap between urban and media studies. More specifically, it allows us to reconsider the relation between “the cinema” and “the metropolis” in terms of an intersection between their different spatialities. The city symphonies of the 1920s in particular, as I will highlight, relentlessly scrutinize these intersections by creating cinematic topologies that engender the mobility and thickness of the metropolis while at the same time fostering a reflection on the transformability of space.

II. C INEMATIC J OURNEYS

INTO THE

M ETROPOLIS

The early history of cinema is characterized by a constant play of approaching and traversing the metropolis. It is interspersed with attempts to capture and to intensify its inherent qualities of moving. The first film sequences taken in a city and shot with an immobile camera already aim at capturing the most manifold movements. Here, the cameras were placed in locations that ensured a high mobility of metropolitan life: a crossroad with its moving cars, a marketplace with its agitated hustle and bustle, a train station with its rushing passengers.18 This process was even intensified in the so-called “travelogue film,” a highly popular genre in the first decade of cinema, ranging from 1895 to 1905, where the camera was placed on different mobile vehicles—a cart, a car, a train—in

  17 Ibid., 98. 18 For a detailed description of these early scenes of filming the city and filmmaking in the city, see Hanno Moebius and Guntram Vogt, Drehort Stadt. Das Thema ‘Großstadt’ im deutschen Spielfilm (Marburg: 1990), 87.



M ETROPOLIS IN TRANSFORMATION | 265

order to enhance the impression of virtually traveling through a moving space.19 As Giuliana Bruno has pointed out in her book Atlas of Emotion (2002), the “travel-film genre inscribed motion into the language of cinema, transporting the spectator into space and creating a multiform travel effect that resonated with the architectonics of the railroad movie theater.”20 The cinema and the metropolis share, or so it seems, a mutual fascination with mobility, or as Mark Shiel puts it in Cinema and the City (2001), their privileged relationship is precisely premised on the “correlation between the mobility and visual and aural sensations of the city and the mobility and visual and aural sensations of the cinema.”21 To what extent, then, do the city symphonies of the 1920s further develop this fascination with mobility? In the following, I will argue that the city symphonies transfer the early fascination with mobility into a reflected and subtly orchestrated spatial transformation of the metropolis. By describing the early city symphonies as a quintessentially “spatial cinema,” I will elaborate on the ways in which they actively process and (re)construct metropolitan space, synchronizing the daily rhythms of the metropolis and its inhabitants according to the rhythms of cinematic movement and montage. In this “laboratory of city films,”22 the most basic elements of both cinematic and metropolitan space are under close scrutiny. The city symphonies capture and dissect the mobile elements of the metropolis—the rushing trains, the crossing cars, the whirling masses—in order to recompose them into a cinematic cross-section of the city.

  19 For an in-depth exploration of the travel film genre, see Jeffrey Ruoff, ed., Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel (Durham: 2006), especially Tom Gunning’s chapter “‘The Whole World Within Reach’: Travel Images Without Borders,” 25–41. 20 Guiliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (London: 2002), 20. 21 Mark Shiel, “Cinema and the City in History and Theory,” in Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (Malden: 2001), 1. The interrelation between the cinema and the metropolis—being one of the core questions in the field of the cinematic city—has been widely addressed in the past decades. See Peter Brooker, Modernity and Metropolis: Writing, Film, and Urban Formations (New York: 2002); David Clarke, ed., The Cinematic City (London: 1997); Barbara Mennel, Cities and Cinema (London: 2008); Irmbert Schenk, ed., Dschungel Großstadt. Kino und Modernisierung (Marburg: 1999); Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, eds., Screening the City (London: 2003); and Guntram Vogt, Die Stadt im Film. Deutsche Spielfilm (Marburg: 2001). 22 Bruno, Atlas of Emotion, 21.



266 | L AURA F RAHM

The early city symphonies give rise to the idea of a “metropolis in transformation.” They virtually move and transform the different metropolises by generating a series of cinematic topologies, which I will further specify in the following as “topologies of movement” and “topologies of thickness.” On the one hand, the city symphonies almost obsessively sound out the different facets of urban and cinematic movement. They approach and traverse the metropolis in terms of a continuous, progressive movement that gradually cuts its way through the thicket of metropolitan life. And they unfold a recurring, circular movement that points as much to the inner rhythms of the metropolis—that is, to the rhythms of everyday life—as it points to the outer rhythms of the overall symphonic arrangement of spaces. On both levels, the city symphonies reflect on their potential of capturing and producing a quintessentially moving space. On the other hand, the city symphonies generate “topologies of thickness,” which are first and foremost based on their complex overlay of spaces. They produce a spatial thickness, where the different spatial layers of the metropolis virtually flow into one another. Yet their vibrant cinematic cross-sections do not only refer to the multiplication and orchestration of the different urban elements, they also position the cinematic transformation of the metropolis in the context of other arts and media. To put it more precisely, the city symphonies of the 1920s actively embrace and further develop their own cinematic qualities of capturing a metropolis. Yet they do so in positioning themselves within a broader field of artistic and medial expression. They create a medial thickness by interweaving their views of the metropolis with the aesthetics of photography, poetry, and painting. In this process, they nevertheless accentuate a truly cinematic quality—that is, the cinema’s potential to visibly transform space.

III. T OPOLOGIES OF M OVEMENT : T HE M OBILITY OF THE M ETROPOLIS The city symphonies configure a metropolis that is constituted of the most different movements and rhythms: the rhythms of approaching the metropolis, the rhythms of its daily routines, and the rhythms of its overall symphonic arrangement. Yet they significantly differ in the way in which they synchronize these rhythmic spaces. The first city symphony in the history of film, Charles Sheeler’s and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1920–1921), introduces the city through a series of approaching movements. Starting out with photographic impressions of the waterfront, it shows the steamboats surrounding and bypassing the island of Manhattan. The first distinct movements are the movements of the passengers



M ETROPOLIS IN TRANSFORMATION | 267

disembarking Staten Island Ferry, rushing to their work places in the early morning. Meanwhile, the camera observes their hectic movements from a static point of view, remaining on a position outside of their agitation. Jean Vigo’s city symphony À propos de Nice (1930), in contrast, approaches the city from an aerial perspective, introducing Nice through an overview of its topography. Here, the movements are still restricted to the gradual movement of the airplane flying above the shore of Nice, revealing the inherent relationship between the city and the sea that will further define the spatial configuration of this city symphony. While Manhatta and À propos de Nice explore the different ways of approaching the metropolis by boat and by airplane, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Walter Ruttmann, 1927) introduces what will become one of the most influential topoi of approaching the metropolis: the train ride. Seizing the idea of gradually entering a space through a continuous, progressive movement as developed in the early travelogue films, Ruttmann’s Berlin Symphony virtually slides into the metropolis through a visible and perceptible movement. The panoramic view of the window displays a gradual transformation of space: At first, we see a rural landscape, which turns into industrial architecture with working-class housing until it reaches the outskirts of the metropolis, progressing more and more into the heart of Berlin. In the process of this initial train ride, Berlin Symphony reflects on the gradual development of the spatial thickness of the metropolis. Looking out of the window, we can observe the architectural structures becoming more and more complex, describing a continuous accumulation of buildings, until the train ride ends in a series of overlapping signs and signals of the different train stations, indicating the final arrival in the vivid metropolis of Berlin.23 What these first sequences of the different city symphonies most clearly reveal is that approaching the metropolis always involves addressing the relationship between the metropolis and its counterpart, be it the country or the sea. They describe a continuous spatial passage that, step by step, paves the way for the vibrant dynamics of the metropolis. Only in contrast to the slower rhythms of the land and the sea is the metropolis able to fully unfold its energetic movements. In Manhatta, this relationship always remains palpable as the daily rhythms

  23 In his influential article on Ruttmann’s Berlin Symphony, Wolfgang Natter discusses cinema as a “form of writing” (204) which constantly performs the transition “of any given place [into] the necessarily fragmented, symbolic space of filmic narration,” (204) foregrounding the “spatial representation of the city both as the film’s content and as its formal principle” (212). See “The City as Cinematic Space: Modernism and Place in Berlin, Symphony of a City,” in Place, Power, Situation, and Spectacle: A Geography of Film, ed. Stuart C. Aitken and Leo E. Zonn (London: 1994), 203–28.



268 | L AURA F RAHM

of the metropolis—the rhythms of walking, the rhythms of working, the rhythms of resting—are constantly related to the surrounding waters, unfolding an overarching movement that interlinks their different spatialities. In this process, Manhatta describes a metaphoric journey, as Christopher Horak has pointed out, that spans “in time from morning to evening, in space from Staten Island to Manhattan, in the gaze from an urban cityscape to an image of a natural landscape.”24 While Manhatta subtly balances the rhythms of the metropolis and the surrounding nature, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City instead carries the mobility of the metropolis to its extremes.25 In portraying one single day in the metropolis of Berlin, it follows the different rhythms of the daytimes, from the slow awakening of the city to the city’s daily turmoil to its pulsating rhythms in the evening. Moreover, every daytime is assigned to a different act that performs its own dramaturgy of movements: They all start with a series of still images and slow movements that gradually gather pace in the course of the act, accelerating the rhythms and movements of the metropolis until each act bursts into a visual excess of movements—be it the wrestling of two dogs that is associated with an accelerating printing press at the end of act two, or the bursting fireworks above the metropolis that mark the grand finale of this city symphony. In the metropolis of Berlin Symphony, every single urban element is subject to movement. Yet these manifold movements and rhythms of the metropolis are by no means undirected. On the contrary, the city symphonies—and above all the Berlin Symphony—unfold their full potential precisely by orchestrating the

  24 Jan-Christopher Horak, Making Images Move: Photographers and Avant-Garde Cinema (Washington: 1997), 95. As Horak has shown in his seminal books on the first American avant-garde, the city symphonies share “an extremely contradictory relationship to the modernist project. [Their] utilization of modernist form in connection with expressions of highly romantic, even antimodernist, sentiments is symptomatic of this ambivalence toward modernism.” “The First American Film Avantgarde, 1919–1945,” in Experimental Cinema: The Film Reader, ed. Wheeler W. Dixon and Gwendolyn A. Foster (London: 2002), 27. Another useful tome is Horak, ed., Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919-1945 (Madison: 1995). 25 For Martin Gaughan, Ruttmann’s Berlin Symphony incorporates “the processes of an accelerated modernization and rapid urbanization” that marked Berlin in the beginning of the twentieth century, while the film constitutes “a paradigmatic moment in the visualization and theorization of the experience of modernity in Weimar Germany.” “Ruttmann’s Berlin: Filming in a ‘Hollow Space’?” in Screening the City, ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (London: 2003), 41–42.



M ETROPOLIS IN TRANSFORMATION | 269

different movements in the streets according to the movements of a symphony. In Berlin Symphony, this process of correlating the metropolitan and musical movements is even intensified by the overarching movements of opening and closing. While the early sequences are characterized by a series of movements of opening—the closed shutters, the locked doors, the working desks—the film’s last sequences perform a series of closing movements, where the metropolis visibly unwinds after the hustle and bustle of the day. At all times, Berlin Symphony integrates the diverse elements of metropolitan life into an overarching symphonic movement, which nevertheless only presents a short extract—the occurrences of one single day—of the cycle of metropolitan life. An almost obsessive fascination with movement and mobility also characterizes the highly influential city symphony The Man with the Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929), which further intensifies the process of virtually “moving” the metropolis. Far from merely depicting the rhythms of metropolitan life, The Man with the Movie Camera intensifies and overdraws its inherent mobility.26 By experimenting with split screens, overexposures, and superimpositions— cinematic techniques that, above all, characterized the early visions of skyscrapers in the 1920s, ranging from Split Skyscrapers (Al Brick, 1924) to Skyscraper Symphony (Robert Florey, 1929)27—the different moving elements of the metropolis suddenly seem to overlap, crisscrossing in the middle of the bustling metropolitan street. At the same time, and most crucially, The Man with the Movie Camera visibly exposes the very process of filmmaking. Instead of integrating the metropolis into the overarching movement of a metaphoric journey or the rhythms of everyday life, the agitated street scenes of Moscow are framed by sequences in a movie theater, where the audience is visibly duplicating the process of film reception. Furthermore, the sequences of Moscow constantly reveal the visible intervention of the movie camera, superimposing the street scenes with images of the camera lens, the camera tripod, or the cameraman. In its most remarkable sequence, the camera is enlarged and placed on the rooftop of a building, inscribing the mediality of the “cinema-eye” into the streets of Moscow.

  26 In his in-depth analysis of Vertov’s film, Lorenz Engell comments on the different levels of cinematic movement involved in this cinematic configuration of Moscow. See Bilder des Wandels (Weimar: 2003), 29–32. 27 As Helmut Weihsmann has pointed out, the early documentaries on the construction of skyscrapers served the purpose of familiarizing the audience with this emerging metropolitan architecture, while Al Brick’s popular “Looney Lens-Series” experimented with ironic and playful approaches to skyscrapers. See Gebaute Illusionen: Architektur im Film (Vienna: 1988), 168–69.



270 | L AURA F RAHM

In generating a series of topologies of movement that are superimposed upon one another, the city symphonies transform and rearrange the spaces of the metropolis to such an extent that they develop a different spatiality. Unlike the early travelogue films that slowly and steadily move through the streets of the metropolis, trying to capture the different buildings that line up on the roadsides, the city symphonies of the 1920s, instead, actively subvert and crisscross the mere depiction of the metropolis. In this process, they constantly visualize the transition from a continuous, progressive movement to a circular, recurring movement that interlinks the different spaces and rhythms of the metropolis. They integrate their cityscapes into a circular movement that is taken up again and repeated in the smallest details of their spatial construction. At the same time, and precisely in subjecting the metropolis to an overall symphonic rhythm, they produce spaces that constantly expose their transformability—that is, their potential to gradually decipher the process of “becoming” a metropolis.

IV. T OPOLOGIES OF T HICKNESS : T HE M EDIALITY OF THE M ETROPOLIS The city symphonies of the 1920s all share a fascination with the mobility of the metropolis. Yet at the same time, they also accentuate its “spatial thickness.” By constantly interweaving the architectural study of the buildings, the social portrayal of metropolitan life, and the formation of symbolic spaces, they produce “topologies of thickness” that transcend the mobility of the metropolis. Moreover, the city symphonies are not only crucial in visualizing and highlighting the spatial thickness of the metropolis, they also actively participate in the process of multiplying its symbolic layers. In their detailed cinematic studies of the architectural, social, and symbolic spaces of the metropolis, they nevertheless always reflect on their own mediality, or more specifically, on the impact of media in generating the unique thickness of metropolitan space. While Berlin Symphony and The Man with the Movie Camera intensify the mobility of the metropolis by multiplying and serializing its (moving) elements, the city symphonies of the early American avant-garde, by contrast, focus on a precise cinematic study of its architectural, social, and symbolic spaces. Already in Manhatta, the camera often moves slowly alongside the facades of the skyscrapers, gradually exploring these new epitomes of metropolitan architecture. The most elaborate cinematic study of skyscrapers is realized in Robert Florey’s Skyscraper Symphony (1929), which approaches and scrutinizes Manhattan’s skyscrapers from all possible angles. In a finely orchestrated choreography, it ex-



M ETROPOLIS IN TRANSFORMATION | 271

plores the skyscrapers at first from a static point of view, concatenating a series of photographic images, until it proceeds to visibly transform and distort the buildings, arresting them in oblique angles or blurring their spatial contours. Skyscraper Symphony incites a play of arresting and releasing its “skyscrapers in motion” that constantly probes the boundaries between photography and film.28 While Florey’s Skyscraper Symphony evolves into a pure visual study of architecture, A Bronx Morning (Jay Leyda, 1931) and À propos de Nice embrace the rhythms of everyday life. In these later city symphonies, the metropolis is first and foremost defined by the vitality of metropolitan life that animates its architectural spaces. A Bronx Morning is the cinematic portrayal of a neighborhood, where life seems to take place entirely on the streets (“The Bronx does business … and the Bronx lives … on the street”). The camera captures even the smallest details of this urban marketplace—the fruits on sale, the price tags, the shop windows—as if seen through a magnifying glass. As William Uricchio has pointed out, Leyda’s film describes the Bronx “as a dynamic physical and social experience rather than simply as a space to be described and documented.”29 Moreover, the camera dissects these urban elements just as it dissects the people’s bodies, trying to dig deeper and deeper into the thicket of metropolitan life. A similar process of dissecting and scrutinizing the social spaces of the metropolis characterizes Vigo’s À propos de Nice, where the city dwellers are shown in their preparation of costumes and cardboard figures for the big parade. As the people are strolling around the promenade, watching each other or taking a rest in a café, the camera assumes an almost tactile quality. It virtually disassembles the parts of the people’s bodies, cutting out the arms or the legs of the pedestrians as it hides in a hole on the street. In other sequences, the camera observes the hustle and bustle of the city from a distance, hovering over the city and its inhabitants and analyzing their agitation from an abstract point of view.

  28 According to Brian Taves, Robert Florey (in a letter to Anthony Slide) himself described Skyscraper Symphony as an architectural study of skyscrapers “seen from way high or from down shooting up, with wide and sometimes distorted angles, 24mm shots, and quick pan shots with fast editing.” Quoted in Brian Taves, “Robert Florey and the Hollywood Avant-Garde,” in Horak, ed., Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919-1945, (Madison: 1995), 111. 29 William Uricchio, “The City Viewed: The Films of Leyda, Browning, and Weinberg,” in Horak, Lovers of Cinema, 289. William Uricchio was also one of the first scholars to address the relationship between the city symphonies of the early American avantgarde and their European counterparts; see William Uricchio, “Ruttmann’s ‘Berlin’ and the City Film to 1930” (PhD dissertation, New York University, 1982).



272 | L AURA F RAHM

The city symphonies aim to decipher the spatial dynamics of the metropolis by scrutinizing the interplay of its architectural and social spaces. Yet they also foster a reflection on the production of symbolic spaces of the metropolis—a process that they both observe and engender—by positioning their cinematic visions of the metropolis in the context of other arts and media. This facet is most remarkably addressed in Manhatta, which interweaves not only the most different spatial layers of Manhattan, but also the most different arts and media, spanning from poetry to photography to painting.30 Manhatta traces the rhythms of a day in Manhattan by simultaneously evoking the painted background of the skyline of Manhattan, the intertitles with quotes from Walt Whitman’s poetry, and a series of photographic shots of the metropolis.31 Yet it superimposes these different medial approaches to the metropolis just in order, or so it seems, to sound out and to strengthen the specific qualities of cinematic space. Manhatta creates topologies of thickness where the finely tuned interplay of different arts and media leads to a reflection on the transformative spatiality of cinema. From its enthroning perspective above the city, Manhatta traces the movements of metropolitan life, which are not only restricted to the visible movements of the masses and the traffic on the streets, but also unfold in the subtle movements of the fog between the immovable facades of the skyscrapers and the steam escaping from the liners and cargo boats. While Manhatta reveals the transformative quality of cinematic space precisely in its seemingly static, photographic shots—observing the moving elements through the slightest, almost undetectable motion within the frame—Twenty-Four Dollar Island (Robert Flaherty, 1927) addresses the transformability of the metropolis in terms of a larger historical process. The first sequences trace the history of the island of Manhattan, superimposing a series of historical maps that are suddenly transformed into the animated, pulsating metropolis of the 1920s. By virtually blending the topographical spaces of the map and the topological spaces of cinema, Twenty-Four Dollar Island reflects on the spatial transformability of the

  30 Especially Horak has commented on the close relationship that Sheeler and Strand had with the artistic scene of New York, and he writes: “These various cross-connections are interesting clues, establishing Sheeler and Strand’s artistic preoccupations and their willingness to translate imagery into different media, thereby commenting on the specific limitations and successes of each medium’s formal practice.” Making Images Move, 88. 31 Manhatta’s intertitles are composed of a series of extracts from poems by Walt Whitman, such as “From Noon to Starry Night: Mannahatta” (1860), “A Broadway Pageant” (1860), and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1857).



M ETROPOLIS IN TRANSFORMATION | 273

metropolis, which resonates all throughout the film as it shows a rising metropolis that abounds with building cranes, workers, and construction sites. Twenty-Four Dollar Island configures a metropolis that is still in a state of becoming—that is, which visibly exposes the gradual emergence of metropolitan space. In this process, it produces a visibility of the metropolis—a visibility, however, which is always filtered through the eyes of cinema. The city symphonies of the 1920s all coincide in visualizing and deciphering the spatial processes of the metropolis as if seen through a magnifying glass, interweaving its architectural, social, and symbolic spaces into a grand cinematic collage. At the same time, and most crucially, they position their cinematic visions of the metropolis in the broader context of visual production, addressing the impact of media in actively shaping our perception of the metropolis. The city symphonies both observe and engender the mobility and thickness of metropolitan space—a twosided process that is vital to understanding the way in which they configure a “metropolis in transformation.” In the remaining pages, I will further elaborate on this two-sided approach by looking at two experimental films that reformulate the cinematic program of the city symphonies: on the one hand, by accentuating the (overpowering) spatial dynamics of the metropolis in terms of a cinematic critique of the urban, and on the other hand, by orchestrating its spaces into a grand collage that rearranges and rewrites the history of the cinematic city.

V. S YMPHONY OF A M ETROPOLIS IN P ROGRESS : K OYAANISQATSI While the early city symphonies transform the metropolis by interweaving its rhythms and movements into an overarching symphonic movement or by positioning their cinematic visions within the interplay of different arts and media, the experimental film Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1982) is based on the idea of an ever-expanding, progressive urban sprawl, where the urban condition increasingly shapes the very conditions of life. Reggio’s epic film, which forms the first part of his large-scale Qatsi trilogy—with the sequels Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002)—aims at re-narrating the process of urbanization in a constant juxtaposition with the forces of nature. The film starts with grandiose cinematic impressions of the four elements—illuminating the power of water, fire, air, and the earth to entirely shape the environment. In marked contrast to these vital powers of nature, the metropolitan areas are introduced as a decaying world, and moreover, as a deformed outgrowth of civilization. Far from merely depicting the sprawling metropolitan areas, Reggio correlates his



274 | L AURA F RAHM

first impressions of the metropolis with archival footage of the firing of a missile, which is followed by the demolition of an urban housing complex—the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, which became an example of the failure of social urban development in the early 1970s. From the very beginning, the metropolises are associated with a destructive power that resonates and pulsates in the smallest details of their urban imagery. In a finely tuned synchronization with compositions by Philip Glass, Koyaanisqatsi creates a cinematic cross-section of the most significant metropolitan areas in the United States—New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—and merges them into an ever-moving, ever-agitated spatial complex that in its sheer magnitude and intensity overpowers its inhabitants. In its most impressive sequences, Koyaanisqatsi carries the high degree of mobility of the metropolis to such an extreme that it completely exceeds any sense of place. In a staggered series of excessive visual climaxes, it exhausts all possibilities of time-lapse photography, transforming the metropolitan spaces into a pure visual mesh of intertwining lines of movement. Koyaanisqatsi configures a symphony of a metropolis in endless progress, where the overall urban condition has entirely absorbed and transformed the conditions of life. Koyaanisqatsi can be considered as a successor of the early city symphonies in the way in which it scrutinizes and carves into the thicket of metropolitan life. Yet it significantly differs from its cinematic predecessors by transforming the fascination with the mobility and spatial thickness of the metropolis into a cinematic critique of the overall process of urbanization. By juxtaposing the overpowering images of the metropolises and the slow rhythms of nature, it criticizes metropolitan life as a “life out of balance,” where the spatial thickness of the metropolis becomes increasingly unmanageable. In this process, Koyaanisqatsi shapes and prefigures the idea of an ever-expanding urban world where spatial boundaries become indistinguishable. It creates a cinematic cross-section of the metropolis, which first and foremost aims at a critique of its spatial complexity. While the early city symphonies strived for a visual mastery of the metropolis by integrating its diverging rhythms and movements into an overarching symphonic movement, Reggio regards his film as a contribution to an urban critique that addresses the destructive powers of urban sprawl.32 In this

  32 Especially in the 1980s and 1990s, scholars have increasingly addressed the consequences of urban sprawl (see, for example, Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: 1985) "The New City of the Twentieth Century: Space, Time, and Sprawl," [in English and German] in Bernd Meurer, ed. Die Zukunft des Raums [The Future of Space] (Frankfurt/M., 1994); for a



M ETROPOLIS IN TRANSFORMATION | 275

process, Koyaanisqatsi reveals its nature as a quintessentially cinematic critique that—in the middle of its apocalyptic visions of a metropolis in endless progress—explores its potential to visibly extend and enlarge the dynamics of the metropolis, and with that, to gradually transform its spatial relations.

VI. A C ITY S YMPHONY IN R EVERSE : L OS A NGELES P LAYS I TSELF The experimental film Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003)—a cinematic cross-section of almost ninety years of the film history of Los Angeles— further elaborates on the idea of a “metropolis in transformation” by positioning its cinematic visions in the context of the historiography of the cinematic city.33 Yet in contrast to Koyaanisqatsi, which stretches and overdraws the spatial dimensions of the metropolis in order to raise an awareness of its overpowering structures, Los Angeles Plays Itself unfolds a panorama of the ever-circulating images of the metropolis that animates and rearranges the history of film. By juxtaposing and combining an eclectic series of film excerpts of Los Angeles that span from A Muddy Romance (Mack Sennett, 1913) to The Million Dollar Hotel (Wim Wenders, 2000), Andersen proposes an alternative film history: a film history that re-narrates the urban development of Los Angeles in terms of a history of its abandoned, forgotten, destroyed, and reanimated (cinematic) spaces. In his grand cinematic homage to “his city” Los Angeles, Andersen raises the question of how to capture a metropolis on screen, and especially an over-determined metropolis like Los Angeles, which he describes as “the most photographed city in the world.”34 In order to further tackle this question, he sorts and categorizes the manifold film excerpts of Los Angeles according to their different spatial approaches to urban space. On a first and most basic level, he

    comprehensive history see Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: A Compact History, (Chicago: 2005; Oliver Gillham, The Limitless City: A primer on the urban sprawl debate, (Washington, DC: 2002). While others have focused on the gradual inversions between center and periphery, see Rem Koolhaas, S, M, L, XL, (New York: 1995); Walter Prigge (ed.), Peripherie ist Überall, (Frankfurt/M.: 1998; Thomas Sieverts, Zwischenstadt. Zwischen Ort und Welt, Raum und Zeit, Stadt und Land, (Braunschweig: 1997). 33 For a discussion of Los Angeles Plays Itself in the context of the cinematic city, see Thom Andersen (ed.) Los Angeles: Eine Stadt im Film/A City on Film, (Vienna: 2008). 34 Los Angeles Plays Itself, directed by Thom Andersen (2003), timecode: 0:04:34.



276 | L AURA F RAHM

addresses the “city as background,” that is, a notion of the metropolis as “just being there,” providing the mere background for the narration. Secondly, Andersen discusses those films where the metropolis serves not only as a mere backdrop, but rather gains its own impact on the spatial configuration. In their specific sense of place, the films in the category of the “city as object” produce a spatiality that gradually transforms the metropolitan spaces, capturing their atmosphere on screen and thus accumulating a spatial memory of the metropolis. Thirdly and finally, Andersen introduces the category of the “city as subject,” that is, the most advanced and complex category within his triad of the cinematic city, which is defined by its critical potential and its high degree of reflexivity in view of the development and the transformation of the (cinematic) city. Los Angeles Plays Itself writes a spatial history of Los Angeles, which travels freely through the history of film, switching back and forth between its very first depictions in the movies and its postmodern reinventions, between its hidden treasures and its cinematic landmarks. In this “city symphony in reverse,”35 as Andersen once defined his film, he meticulously uncovers the degree of fidelity toward the specificity of place, or what he calls the “geographic license,” of the manifold films about Los Angeles. In this process, he not only creates a panorama of the most diverse places and neighborhoods of Los Angeles, but also traces their different stages and appearances in the history of film. By creating a spatial cinema that systematically crisscrosses the chronology of film history, he reflects on the mediated nature of any cinematic configuration of the metropolis. In his overall attempt to classify the ever-circulating images of Los Angeles, Andersen sharpens our view on the historical complexity of the relationship between the cinema and the metropolis. His cinematic observations reveal that if we deal with the question of the cinematic city, we have to take into account a complex layering of spaces—a layering of spaces, which not only refers to the spatial arrangement of one particular film, but that has the potential to evoke the cinematic past of a specific metropolis, of a specific neighborhood, or even of a specific building. Every new attempt to capture a metropolis on screen, then, necessarily rewrites and rearranges the history of the cinematic city. Consequently, the historical dimension always resonates in any city film, while the metropolis, in turn, always bears a perceptible remembrance of its own cinematic past. Los Angeles Plays Itself is a city symphony in reverse that relentlessly exposes the transformability of the metropolis—a transformability, which gains momentum precisely through its journey all across the history of the cinematic city.

  35 Los Angeles Plays Itself, timecode: 0:04:12.



M ETROPOLIS IN TRANSFORMATION | 277

VII. C ONCLUSION : A M ETROPOLIS

IN

T RANSFORMATION

It is one of the most remarkable features of cinema that it has the potential to visibly animate and transform the spaces of the metropolis. This particular quality has inspired filmmakers all throughout the twentieth century to explore the creative possibilities of cinematic transformation. Already in 1901, the short film Demolishing and Building Up Star Theatre (Frederick S. Armitage) played with the reversibility of cinematic space, displaying the gradual destruction of New York’s Star Theatre not only in time-lapse photography, but also in an infinite loop of constructing and deconstructing space. The fascination with cinema’s potential of transformation has always shaped the cinematic visions of the metropolis. It has yielded unprecedented views of the metropolis, which by now, in the face of digital (post-)production, have reached a point where it is possible to virtually fold and stretch an entire metropolis—a facet that is most recently and remarkably addressed in Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010). What these particular examples reveal is a notion of cinematic transformation that is taken almost literally, that is, where the transformation is a visible quality of the moving image itself. In my article, however, I have addressed a different facet of transformation—a transformation that unfolds not only in a certain, exceptional moment within the film, but which rather affects the entire spatial arrangement. The city symphonies of the 1920s, as I have argued, give rise to a “spatial cinema” because they continuously configure new spatial relations: They create topologies of movement that first and foremost refer to the circularity of time—the cycle of metropolitan life, the cycle of a day, the cycle of a symphony—that resonates in the smallest details of their spatial construction. At the same time, they produce topologies of thickness, which rather accentuate a spatial circularity by interweaving the architectural, social, and symbolic spaces of the metropolis. In this process, they not only sound out the different facets of metropolitan space, they also produce an overlay of medial spaces. By simultaneously evoking the aesthetics of photography, poetry, and painting, they create a thick urban imagery, which points to the medial transformability of the metropolis. In their unique cinematic visions of the metropolis, the city symphonies of the 1920s serve as touchstones for cinematic cityscapes all throughout the twentieth century. They inspired grandiose cinematic cross-sections of the metropolis that, in turn, redefined the history of film. Koyaanisqatsi and Los Angeles Plays Itself in particular have seized upon the idea of a cinematic cross-section that captures the spatial processes of the metropolis. Yet their cross-sections reach beyond the scope of one single day in the metropolis. They explore new ways of grasping those overarching transformational processes that underlie the metro-



278 | L AURA F RAHM

polis in a long-term perspective—be it the process of urbanization or the process of medialization itself. On both levels, they not only serve as a precise seismograph of the spatial transformations of the metropolis, uncovering the shifting power relations or tracing the circulatory production of metropolitan imagery, they also create a laboratory of space where the transformative spatiality of cinema gradually assumes its shape in view of a metropolis in transformation.







Women and the Modern Metropolis M D ESPINA S TRATIGAKOS

Two images of a woman over Berlin: the godddess of victory atop the Siegessäule (Victory Column) erected in 1873 to celebrrate Prussian military victories over Denmark, Austria, and France (fig. 1), andd a photograph of a young female builder on the roof of Berlin’s city hall takenn in 1910 (fig. 2). Both are symbolic Figure 1: (Left) Siegessäule (Victory Columnn) in Berlin, designed by Heinrich Strack after 1864, erected 1873. Figure 2: (R Right) A woman builder making repairs to the roof of Berlin’s city hall, 1910..

Source: (L) Author; (R) From Illustrierte Frauenzzeitung 38, no. 2 (1910): 17.

m the other with builder’s tools of a conquest of space, one with military might, and the female body. The Siegessäule is a highly visible monument about a visible history; the history of the female buuilder is also about visibility, but its traces are more elusive, even though many of o its monuments still stand. If histories of Berlin mention women and building,, they usually refer to the Trümmerfrauen, or rubble women, who after 1945 literally put the city back together again. Accounts of women as intentional annd even visionary builders in Berlin



280 | D ESPINA STRATIGAKOS

are difficult to find. Without such stories, evidence of their presence, which still lingers in the city, cannot be integrated into our mental geography of the place. The professional female builder pictured here thus remains suspended in a narrative vacuum. Urban history is a latecomer to academic specialties and women’s urban history even more so, emerging only in the 1980s as a field of inquiry. Insisting that female residents contributed to and experienced the city differently from men, feminist scholars deconstructed the notion of a universal urban subject, long posited in writings about the modern metropolis. The loss of this homogenizing perspective revealed the metropolis to be an even more complex, messy, and vital place than previously imagined, which presented historians with the challenge of how to write inclusive histories of difference. Paying attention to urban geography, some scholars used the city’s own physical spaces of connection as the locus around which to write such accounts. Christine Stansell, Elizabeth Wilson, and George Chauncey, for example, have examined streets as an arena of negotiation and contestation for different constituencies of urban dwellers.1 Other scholars have looked for imaginary intersections, comparing men and women’s cognitive maps of the city. Scholars such as Judith Walkowitz, Deborah Epstein Nord, and Deborah Parsons have charted convergences and divergences in men and women’s urban narratives, particularly concerning sexuality and freedom, as expressed in the popular press, autobiographies, and novels.2 Feminist geographers and urban planners, by contrast, have brought attention to a shared material infrastructure, the city’s transportation networks, zoning divisions, and district planning, to examine how difference is embedded physically at the broadest urban scale. Clara Greed, for instance, has examined women’s

  1

Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: 1986); Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (London: 1991); George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: 1994).

2

Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in LateVictorian London (Chicago: 1992); Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca, NY: 1995); Deborah L. Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity (Oxford: 2000).



W OMEN IN THE M ODERN M ETROPOLIS | 281

lack of mobility in past and present London as a consequence of social norms undergirded by inadequate public transportation and a lack of public bathrooms.3 Despite the diversity of topics and methodologies within the scholarship on gender and the metropolis, common concerns emerge. Foremost among these is the division of public places as male and private places as female on the basis of gendered and classed social meanings.4 Pivotal to this constructed dichotomy was the emergence of a distinctive domestic ideology in the nineteenth century, which designated “separate spheres” of the private and public on the basis of perceived biological differences between the sexes. Women’s “proper” place, derived from their roles as wives and mothers, centered on hearth and home, while men, as providers, were assigned to the “public” world of the streets, government, and commerce. Although originally focused on the middle classes, this ideology was later applied to the working classes as well. The policing and maintenance of these boundaries represents a second major concern of the scholarship on gender and the metropolis. Central to the gendered division of private and public space was the insistence on the safety of the private realm (the home) and the disorder of the public sphere (particularly urban streets). This assumption reinforced the need to keep the “weaker” and “undefended” sex—women—at home and away from the public dangers of the city. Concomitantly, it meant an unending battle to prevent the public spaces of the city from slipping into chaos. Among the dangers that needed to be contained was the disruptive presence of women who transgressed social norms, and particularly prostitutes, whose “excessive” sexuality was seen as a threat to moral order. Women on the city’s streets, whether prostitutes or not, were seen to unleash the dangerous lust of men, a conception that turned both men and women into the victims of women’s sexual power.5 A distinctive feature of the

  3

Clara H. Greed, Women and Planning: Creating Gendered Realities (London: 1994). See also Mona Domosh and Joni Seager, Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World (New York: 2001).

4

On the analytic limitations of these categories, see Dorothy O. Helly and Susan M. Reverby, eds., Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women’s History: Essays from the 7th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women (Ithaca, NY: 1992); and Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar, eds., Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy (Chicago: 1997).

5

In addition to Wilson and Walkowitz, see also Dorothy Rowe, Representing Berlin: Sexuality and the City in Imperial and Weimar Germany (Aldershot: 2003); and Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: 1991).



282 | D ESPINA STRATIGAKOS

scholarship on the gendered metropolis is its attention to the connections between power and spatial relations as mediated through gendered bodies. Vision plays a crucial role in the constructed dynamics of urban order and contagion. Women’s social reputations depended on their visibility or invisibility in the public sphere. “Street women” denoted a fallen moral state, whereas women who demurely hid themselves in the home were deemed morally pure for not exposing their bodies to the city’s corrupting dangers, including the leering gazes and solicitations of men. A key contribution of feminist scholarship on the metropolitan experience has been its analysis of and attention to the function of the gaze in objectifying and controlling women in public space.6 Middle-class women actively participated in the creation and maintenance of these social and spatial regulations, which conferred upon them an elevated status as the “angel in the house.” Designated as the moral core of the city, by virtue of being apart from it, the home gained a new social importance, and, by extension, so did the woman who maintained the purity of its boundaries. Many middle-class women embraced their roles as paragons of domestic virtue who provided their husbands and children with an oasis of spiritual and physical health within the broader “corrupted” urban environment.7 While exposing women’s complicity in the gendering of the metropolis, feminist scholars have also explored the spaces of their resistance. The department store, for example, an urban institution targeting female shoppers, undermined the division of separate spheres by bringing domestic consumption into public view. Women’s clubs provided women with a physical base in the city; they also fostered new social and professional opportunities to engage with urban life.8 These new spaces entailed not only a shift in location for women, but also changes in their urban practices. With regard to the latter, the possibility of

  6

Jane Rendell, “Ramblers and Cyprians: Mobility, Visuality and the Gendering of Architectural Space,” in Gender and Architecture, ed. Louise Durning and Richard Wrigley (Chichester: 2000), 135–154; Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” in Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art (London: 1988).

7

Elizabeth Langland, Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca, NY: 1995); Mike Hepworth, “Privacy, Security and Respectability: The Ideal Victorian Home,” in Ideal Homes?: Social Change and the Experience of the Home, ed. Tony Chapman and Jenny Hockey (London: 1999), 17– 29.

8

Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: 2000).



W OMEN IN THE M ODERN M ETROPOLIS | 283

the female flâneuse, the counterpart of the male rambler (a common figure in urban narratives), has become a focus of interest for those studying the gendered dimensions of urban spectatorship.9 Closely interwoven with the gendered experiences of the metropolis are the experiences of its modernity. Feminist critiques have challenged accounts that universalize male experience and erase difference in their analysis of the construction of modernity in urban space.10 They object, for example, to the characterization of modern urban consciousness as one of social anonymity and disembodied engagement, as posited by urban theorists such as Georg Simmel, and as depicted by the figure of the male flâneur in the literature of modernity by Charles Baudelaire or Walter Benjamin, among others.11 Against assertions of sameness, feminist scholars claim that modernity is constituted out of difference, which goes beyond gender to include other social variables such as class, race, and age. Patricia Hill Collins, for instance, has pointed out that the private-public model has never fit African-American women’s experiences, suggesting a need not to explain their deviance, but rather to rethink those social and spatial norms.12 From the feminist literature of the last thirty years produced by historians, literary scholars, urban planners, and social scientists thus emerges a revised image of the metropolis as a construction and experience formed within the complex politics of gender difference. Conspicuously absent from this growing and interdisciplinary scholarship is architectural history. With few exceptions, such as the work of Dolores Hayden and Daphne Spain, architectural histories of the modern city remain remarkably gender-free.13 As a result, buildings have largely dropped out of consideration in analyzing how women negotiated and made claims to urban space. Nor have we questioned the assumed male gender

  9

In addition to Parsons, see Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: 1993); and, Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture (Princeton: 1999).

10 Jenny Ryan, “Women, Modernity, and the City,” Theory, Culture and Society 11, no. 4 (1994): 35–63; Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA.: 1995). 11 Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” in Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Cambridge, UK: 1990), 34–50. 12 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: 1990), 47. 13 Daphne Spain, How Women Saved the City (Minneapolis: 2001); Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, MA: 1981).



284 | D ESPINA STRATIGAKOS

of the creators, whether architects, patrons, or workers. Consequently, it has taken more than a century to notice or to try to explain the appearance in 1910 of a female builder on the roof of Berlin’s city hall. Yet architecture provides novel means to address questions raised repeatedly by the scholarship on the gendered metropolis, such as the division between public and private space, the corporeal experience of the urban environment, or the relationship between the imaginary and the tangible in our sense of place. Indeed, as a construct embedded in a legal structure (zoning), physical space, private and public imaginaries, and systems of cultural signification, architecture is ideally suited for creating a thick description of the gendered metropolis. This implies, following Clifford Geertz, seeing architecture as more than utilitarian structure—as a social act that speaks to larger issues.14 To understand its meaning, we must map the density of connections that tie individuals—architect, patron, and user—to broader communities and concerns. We must also be attentive to the delicacy of architecture’s distinctions, its specificity as object rooted in space, culture, and time. The desired result of such a thick description would be a view of a city that can integrate an allegorical female figure, a winged Niké celebrating the birth of a new nation, with a flesh-and-blood woman constructing its capital with a hammer. In the remainder of the essay I offer a brief case study of imperial Berlin that attempts to sketch out such a view.15 Around the turn of the twentieth century, women began to claim Berlin as their own, expressing a vision of the German capital that embraced their feminine modernity. They did so partly in terms of physical interventions in the built environment, erecting structures, creating spaces, and occupying terrains. From residences to restaurants, schools to exhibition halls, a visible network of women’s spaces arose to accommodate changing patterns of life and work. Female patrons initiated these projects, often looking to female architects to reinterpret modern forms. Alongside these material transformations emerged a visionary encounter: in words and images, female residents reconceived the metropolis in search of an urban experience that acknowledged and supported their evolving identities. Female journalists, artists, political activists, and social reformers portrayed women as influential actors on the urban scene, encouraging female audiences to view their relationship to the city in a radically different light. Con-

  14 Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: 1973), 3–30. 15 For an in-depth analysis, see Despina Stratigakos, A Women’s Berlin: Building the Modern Metropolis (Minneapolis: 2008).



W OMEN IN THE M ODERN M ETROPOLIS | 285

necting the imaginary to the physical, dreams to asphalt, women remapped Berlin as the birthplace of a new female subject. Four important factors coincided in the imperial period (1871–1918) to give rise to this urban experiment in Berlin, and, in particular, to its physical dimensions. The first of these involved money (fig. 3). By the end of the nineteenth century, the bourgeois women’s movement in Germany had coalesced into a strong and dynamic (if not entirely unified) force for social change.16 Among its Figure 3: Showing the money: the Independent Women’s Credit Union (later renamed the Women’s Bank). This bank, which opened in 1910 in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin, was the first institution of its kind in Europe: a cooperative credit union managed by and for women.

Source: “Die erste Frauen-Bank der Welt,” Deutsche Frauenzeitung (1911): 623.

achievements, it counted the entry of bourgeois women into higher education and professional careers, a change that held the potential to revolutionize conventional gender and family roles. The emergence of independent women, an unprecedented social type, produced new architectural needs as women broke away from the domestic spaces that had defined the traditional orbit of their lives. Middle-class women devised a variety of strategies to finance building

  16 Ute Frevert, Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberty, trans. Stuart McKinnon-Evans (New York: 1993), 107–30.



286 | D ESPINA STRATIGAKOS

projects, which also received the committed support of wealthy female patrons, including some of Berlin’s richest widows.17 Yet the ability to build does not explain why women would choose to do so. Evolving gender roles, as noted above, provoked a desire for architectural innovation. The often monumental scale of women’s projects in Berlin, however, suggests that more than functional necessity was at stake. Architecture also fulfilled a new representational concern among women, which they shared with other emerging urban constituencies. The imperial period witnessed Berlin’s debut as a global capital, accompanied by an acute self-consciousness among its residents of living in an era of unrivalled industrial and commercial growth. From German unification in 1871 to the end of the nineteenth century, Berlin’s population rose from 826,000 to 3 million (including the suburbs).18 Its boundaries expanded apace, rivaling London as the largest city in Europe. By 1914, the nation had also acquired territories in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, making Berlin the metropole of a vast colonial empire. To its detractors and champions alike, Berlin epitomized the tempo, processes, and appearance of modernity. This was perhaps nowhere as visible as in the frenzied construction and development that seemed to overtake the capital, leading long-term residents to complain that they barely recognized their own city.19 Berlin appeared to transform almost overnight from a provincial backwater into a crowded metropolis boasting “immense and palatial buildings” and “magnificent” thoroughfares.20 Like other groups struggling to make their presence felt in a rapidly transforming urban landscape, middle-class women grasped the importance of spatial capital. With the city sprawling in all directions and new buildings going up at an overwhelming pace, women understood that their claim to urban power rested in part on being able to visibly express it in physical form. In addition to the financial resources of the women’s movement and the pressure to build in the German capital, the integration of the design professions constitutes a third contributing factor to the creation of women’s space. In the first decade of the twentieth century, women earned the right to matriculate in

  17 Working-class women living on their own in Berlin, who far outnumbered self-supporting bourgeois women, did not enjoy the resources to reshape the urban built environment in a comparable manner. I do not address their uses and appropriation of urban space in this essay, which focuses on women’s architectural interventions. 18 Karl Baedeker, Berlin and Its Environs, 5th ed. (Leipzig: 1912), 50. 19 Arthur Eloesser, “Die neue Strasse” [1910], in Die Strasse meiner Jugend: Berliner Skizzen (1919; repr., Berlin: 1987), 63–70. 20 Baedeker, Berlin and Its Environs, 52.



W OMEN IN THE M ODERN M ETROPOLIS | 287

the architecture programs of Germany’s technical colleges. In the same period, some government-run applied art schools began to admit female students, supplementing the design training available to women in segregated private institutions.21 Berlin, offering economic and cultural opportunities difficult to find elsewhere, as well as a supportive community of professional women, became a center for female architects and designers. In 1907, Emilie Winkelmann opened her office in the city’s fashionable West End, establishing the first architectural firm owned by a woman in Germany. Highly successful, her office expanded to fifteen employees, including junior female architects. While her firm remained a rarity, interior design businesses headed by women artists blossomed in Berlin before World War I. Although men were also hired to design women’s spaces, a significant number of such commissions went to their female colleagues. Female patrons called on women architects and designers to help them define and articulate their architectural needs. The exploration of the nature of female aesthetics and spaces in this period was thus often a collaborative effort uniting female patrons, architects, and designers. This creative process might have occurred without female design professionals, but their presence in the city appears to have pushed women toward a more extensive engagement with built form. Finally, the appearance of a sizeable population of single independent women in Berlin provided an identifiable clientele for architectural experimentation, as well as a strong stimulus to rethink women’s relationship to their urban environment (fig. 4). By the 1890s, increasing access to higher education produced a group of middle-class women with the capacity to leave the parlor for a more public life centered on work, friends, and the rich life of the metropolis. As they explored their new urban identities, these women articulated the desire for a built environment responsive to their changing lifestyles. Despite often meager salaries, their ability to pool resources along with the generosity of wealthy patrons furnished sufficient capital to partially realize this dream.

  21 Despina Stratigakos, “‘I Myself Want to Build’: Women, Architectural Education and the Integration of Germany’s Technical Colleges,” Paedagogica Historica 43, no. 6 (2007): 727–56; Magdalena Droste, “Women in the Arts and Crafts and in Industrial Design, 1890–1933,” in Women in Design: Careers and Life Histories Since 1900, ed. Angela Oedekoven-Gerischer, Andrea Scholtz, Edith Medek, and Petra Kurz, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: 1989), 174–202.



288 | D ESPINA STRATIGAKOS

Figure 4: Women who wore their independence “on their sleeve” stirred public controversy. Here women in bloomers drew crowds in the Tiergarten in 1911.

Source: “Eine Sensation im Berliner Tiergarten: Vier Damen im Hosenrock,” Die Welt 23, no. 1 (1911): 5.

In 1913, a novelty appeared in Berlin bookstores: Was die Frau von Berlin wissen muss (What A Woman Must Know About Berlin), a guide to the city written by and for women. After two centuries of housewifery manuals that instructed women on their duties to family and home, this book encouraged women to look outward—to find their lives and identities in the streets and institutions of the modern city. Led by the reassuring voices of female experts, readers embarked on a voyage to the terra incognita of an anatomy classroom, political assemblies, and newspaper offices, among other traditionally male realms. Alongside these incursions, the book described the rise of a visibly different gendered landscape as female patrons and builders began to define and construct architectural spaces for women. Mapping the capital from a female perspective, the guidebook equated the modernity of urban living (Berlin’s “American pulse,” according to one of its authors) with a new kind of energetic and outgoing woman who embraced the metropolis as her own.22

  22 Jarno Jessen [Anna Michaelson], “Das Kunstgewerbe in Berlin,” in Was die Frau von Berlin wissen muss: Ein praktisches Frauenbuch für Einheimische und Fremde, ed. Eliza Ichenhaeuser (Berlin: 1913), 44. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.



W OMEN IN THE M ODERN M ETROPOLIS | 289

Why did the city’s female residents need such a book? Its editor, Eliza Ichenhaeuser, a prominent suffragette, promised readers an “intellectually, artistically, and socially profound guide through Berlin.” This was no Baedeker travel guide, satisfying the tourist’s superficial curiosity or desire to get from one site of amusement to another. Instead, the book presented itself as a compass to navigate the city’s essential core. Its audience was envisioned as middle-class women, both long-term residents and recent arrivals to Berlin, who hungered for a deep and serious engagement with their urban milieu. In twenty-five essays, penned by women touted as “capable guides,” the book offered readers a view of Berlin from an “artistic, scientific, literary, political, theatrical, musical, and social standpoint,” while also encouraging them to become actively involved.23 Dr. Rhoda Erdmann, a pioneer cellular biologist, outlined a woman’s options for scientific study and the facilities available to her, including anatomical theaters segregated by gender (to avoid the embarrassment, and potential moral danger, of young men and women studying naked bodies together).24 Encounters with the capital’s artistic riches held the potential not only to learn, but also to shape and create as an artist, critic, or curatorial assistant.25 Even urban poverty and crime represented new frontiers for reform-minded women. Alice Salomon, a preeminent social work educator, emphasized professional opportunities in the city’s welfare organizations, many of them founded and run by women.26 Yet the guide was not all work and no play. An essay on sports considered the mortal perils of traversing Berlin’s busy streets on bicycles and roller skates, while another on local excursions promoted the pleasures of hiking through Grunewald, the city’s green lung.27 Across the chapters, an image unfolded of the widening scope of women’s urban lives. There was no longer one exclusive site for female activity (the home), but a network of spaces spanning the city. Inserting herself into the pages of the book, a reader might imagine studying at the university, working as a doctor at the Royal Charité Hospital, socializing and forging professional

  23 Eliza Ichenhaeuser, “Einleitung,” Was die Frau von Berlin wissen muss, 11–12. 24 Rhoda Erdmann, “Berlins wissenschaftliche Anstalten,” Was die Frau von Berlin wissen muss, 61. 25 Jessen, “Das Kunstgewerbe in Berlin,” 44–53. 26 Alice Salomon, “Soziale Frauenarbeit in Berlin,” Was die Frau von Berlin wissen muss, 204–7. 27 Mary Kissel, “Gymnastik und Sport in der Reichshauptstadt,” Was die Frau von Berlin wissen muss, 280; Eliza Ichenhaeuser, “Berliner Ausflüge und Spaziergänge,” Was die Frau von Berlin wissen muss, 288–89.



290 | D ESPINA STRATIGAKOS

alliances at the Lyceum Club, and strengthening her body in tandem with other members of the Wannsee Ladies’ Rowing Club (founded because women could not join the older Berlin Rowing Club). These possibilities undoubtedly thrilled and bewildered, and the guidebook can be interpreted as a quest for orientation, an attempt to gain one’s bearings in a city with rapidly expanding horizons for women. The guidebook promoted the concept of a female body politic in the city—an aggregate force with a significant social, political, and physical impact. Buildings such as women’s clubhouses, schools, and residences enabled a woman to imagine and experience herself as part of an urban female collective by creating tangible symbols of female unity in the urban landscape and by physically gathering women in a common space. Significantly, much of this architecture was monumental. Monumentality challenged cultural precepts that forbade “respectable” women to be visible in the city. Big buildings constituted an explicitly disruptive urban presence, boldly refuting traditional conceptions of women’s proper place. Their monumentality declared that women would not be contained but would instead expand upward and outward into the public spaces of urban life. This desire to express one’s modern identity through buildings also suggests a very different strategy from that adopted by the flâneur. The phenomenon of women building their modernity into the very fabric of the city underscores, as sociologist Janet Wolff has argued about literature, the insufficiency of notions of subjectivity that emphasize disembodied engagement or ephemerality as a universal response to the experience of modernity, a position exemplified in the writings of urban commentators such as Georg Simmel, Karl Scheffler, and Hans Ostwald.28 These male critics, lamenting the instability of modern life, voiced one reaction—to be sure, shared by many Wilhelmine Germans—to the capital’s unruliness. Not all Berliners, however, took a pessimistic view of urban dislocation.29 Seeing the familiar landscape of the city vanish under the onslaught of industrial urbanization, many middle-class women glimpsed their

  28 Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse,” 34–50; Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: 1997), 175–76; Karl Scheffler, Berlin – ein Stadtschicksal [1910], in Berliner Texte, ed. Detlef Bluhm, vol. 3 (Berlin: 1989), 219; Peter Fritzsche, “Vagabond in the Fugitive City: Hans Ostwald, Imperial Berlin and the Grossstadt Dokumente,” Journal of Contemporary History 29, no. 3 (1994): 390–97. 29 On the problematic relationship of anti-urbanism to anti-modernism, see Andrew Lees, Cities, Sin, and Social Reform in Imperial Germany (Ann Arbor: 2002), 23–48.



W OMEN IN THE M ODERN M ETROPOLIS | 291

liberation and joined the fray, helping to construct the new Berlin with the zeal of the converted. As an architectural historian interested in the processes of spatial enfranchisement, I seek to focus attention on the specificity of the built environment, particularly on the importance of architectural language, in the gendered appropriation of urban space. Paying close attention to the choices made by builders and patrons, I am concerned with how women in Berlin employed architectural language to create specific and meaningful identities for themselves as public citizens. Architecture became a medium through which women expressed contested notions of modernity in a language shared and understood by Berliners. By reading buildings as carefully coded texts, I hope to make apparent the significance of visual and spatial representations to marginal urban populations seeking a metropolis that recognized and accommodated difference. Architecture does more than signify, however, and I am equally concerned with understanding how it reshaped gendered experiences, particularly the experience of the public sphere. Two architectural projects discussed below, a residence and an exhibition, illustrate the relationship between representation and experience in the creation of gendered public space. At the end of the nineteenth century, women’s access to the public sphere in Western cities began to expand, due, in large measure, to the integration of higher education. As women earned the legal right to matriculate, however, other very real impediments to studying remained. In Berlin, a lack of housing prevented many young women from pursuing university study. Unlike English residential colleges and many American campuses, German universities did not provide dormitories. The types of accommodation available to male students were either inaccessible or considered inappropriate for women. A few male students had rooms in their Burschenschaften, the student dueling societies that formed an elite fraternity within the universities and left their members proudly scarred by the end of their studies. Women, needless to say, were excluded from these societies, as were other “undesirable” minorities, such as Jews. More common was a room let in a private residence, a form popularly known as the student Bude. The Bude symbolized the liberties associated with university study, including drinking and sexual experimentation (with prostitutes, waitresses, maids, and other “morally dubious” women). In the years before World War I, the Bude increasingly came under attack as an unhygienic form of living and a dangerously sexualized space. Innocent young men, reformers warned, were corrupted by landladies who justified astronomical rents by offering their daughters in the bargain, and bright futures were lost when they were forced to marry low-



292 | D ESPINA STRATIGAKOS

class women they had impregnated in their Buden.30 With this kind of reputation, even the most liberal supporters of women’s higher education found it “unimaginable” to associate a young German woman with a student Bude.31 The Victoria Lyceum, the first institution in Berlin to offer academic courses, though not degrees, to women, took the initiative in responding to this housing crisis. In 1915, the board of trustees opened the Victoria Studienhaus in Berlin, a residential center for female university students (fig. 5). If unbounded liberty and the pursuit of pleasure constituted the tenets of the Bude, radically different Figure 5: View from Berliner Strasse of the Victoria Studienhaus, 1916.

Source: Postcard Collection of the Zentrum für Berlin-Studien, Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin.

  30 Carl Sonnenschein, “Wie Studenten Wohnen,” flyer, Sekretariats Sozialer Studentenarbeit, no. 2 (Mönchengladbach: 1911); Theodor Temming, Sturmfreie Bude: Eine Denkschrift für alle, denen das Wohl unserer studierenden Jugend und unseres Volkes am Herzen liegt (Essen: 1913), 13–16. For a discussion of the problem from a “concerned mother’s” point of view, see Louise Schulze-Brück, “Die Budenfrage,” Die deutsche Frau 3, no. 31 (1913): 3–5. 31 “A. P.” [Anna Plothow?], “Das Viktoria-Studienhaus: Ein neues Studentinnenheim in Charlottenburg,” Neue Bahnen 50, no. 18 (1915): 142. The article was reprinted from the Berliner Tageblatt.



W OMEN IN THE M ODERN M ETROPOLIS | 293

ideals of university life guided the conception of the Victoria Studienhaus. In the absence in Germany of women’s colleges, which then existed in the United States and England, the Victoria Studienhaus played an important role in defining the collegiate experience for German women. As part of that process, Ottilie Fleer, the first director of the Victoria Studienhaus, visited over forty colleges and universities in Europe to gather information on the academic and housing conditions of female students. She also attended female student conferences in Germany, held in 1912 and 1913, to hear what young women had to say on their housing needs.32 Ottilie von Hansemann, a wealthy widow and staunch supporter of women’s higher education, funded this research. From this period of intense deliberation, a vision emerged of a residential center for female student life, which, beyond housing, would offer classes, public lectures, social events, and athletics. With Hansemann’s financial sponsorship and capital from the Victoria Lyceum, the dream assumed built form.33 The board of trustees selected Emilie Winkelmann as their architect, who must have seemed an ideal candidate: beyond her expertise in domestic architecture, which had received considerable critical acclaim, she had personally experienced the difficulties of academic life for young women.34 With the Victoria Studienhaus, she introduced a novel form of architecture to Berlin, the closest thing the city had to an American-style college campus. On the limited space of a city plot in Charlottenburg, she designed a hook-shaped building that incorporated an auditorium, classrooms, living and reading rooms, a dining hall, library, darkroom, art studios, a gym, and ninety-six single rooms for students. A secluded garden, dining terrace, and sports area were located at the rear of the building.35 Shortly after the residence opened in 1915, numerous articles praising it appeared in Berlin’s newspapers and in the national women’s press. Commentators lauded the Victoria Studienhaus for offering a “real” home to women students, a physically healthier and spiritually loftier alternative to the student Bude. This impression was reinforced by the representational strategy of the building, which, despite its complexity, was exceptionally successful in communicating

  32 Ottilie Fleer, “Das Werden des ersten Studentinnenheims in Deutschland,” Nachrichtenblatt Haus Ottilie von Hansemann, Victoria-Studienhaus, no. 26 (1940): 2–3. 33 James C. Albisetti, Schooling German Girls and Women: Secondary and Higher Education in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: 1988), 285n32. 34 Stratigakos, “‘I Myself Want to Build,’” 736–40. 35 Agnes Harder, “Ein Heim für studierende Frauen in Berlin,” Die Welt der Frau, no. 36 (1916): 564–65.



294 | D ESPINA STRATIGAKOS

the ideals of the project. Instead of producing a uniform Gesamtkunstwerk (a visual environment all of one piece), the architect employed two architectural styles, neoclassical and Biedermeier, to evoke different layers of meaning and to create a dialogue within the building itself. Describing her design, Winkelmann wrote that the building’s exterior evoked the architecture of the second half of the eighteenth century, the period in which neoclassicism was ascendant in Berlin and other European cities.36 To cloak a women’s residence in neoclassical forms was a significant and unusual choice. Since its advent in the mid-eighteenth century, neoclassicism had been represented by architects and critics as a masculine style, a return to “disciplined,” strong forms after the feminine “capriciousness of rococo.”37 This was especially true of the heavy, unadorned Doric columns Winkelmann used for the front entrance, considered the most muscular and robust of all the classical orders.38 Yet, despite being defined against imagined “feminine” qualities, neoclassical forms had cultural associations deeply meaningful to this new community of women. At the most basic level, the style alluded to the Enlightenment and its emphasis on reason and secular learning, a heritage claimed by the young women of the Victoria Studienhaus. Numerous architectural examples in Berlin linked classicism (from various periods) to higher intellectual pursuits. These included the university (Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff and Johann Boumann, 1748– 53), Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes Museum (1823–30), and Friedrich August Stüler’s Neues Museum (1841–59) and Nationalgalerie (1862–76). After the turn of the century, the association was reinforced by projects such as the new Royal Library (1903–14) by Ernst von Ihne, which also housed the Academy of Sciences, and the Pergamon Museum by Alfred Messel (1906–30). By drawing parallels through a shared classical language, the Victoria Studienhaus partnered itself visually with state institutions of public education. The stateliness of these royal projects undoubtedly resonated with the founders of the residence, which bore the name of its royal patron (Crown Princess

  36 Emilie Winkelmann, “Erläuterungsbericht zum Neubau Berlinerstrasse 37/38,” 1–2. This was a narrative report submitted with drawings and plans to the municipal building authorities in March 1914. Charlottenburg city hall, archive of the “Wohnungswesen” department. I am grateful to Helga Schmidt-Thomsen for sharing her copy with me. 37 Wilhelm Wirz, “Frau und Qualität,” Wohlfahrt und Wirtschaft 1, no. 4 (1914): 198. 38 For a discussion of the gendering of classical orders, see Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (New York: 2000), 44–50.



W OMEN IN THE M ODERN M ETROPOLIS | 295

Victoria). Contemporary descriptions of the building as “imposing,” “giant,” “monumental,” “proud,” and “powerful” suggest an authoritative presence. 39 By evoking the classicism of Berlin’s grand royal projects, the Victoria Studienhaus appealed to the legitimacy of the state and tradition to sanction what was, after all, a radically new institution. Moreover, as Barry Bergdoll argues, Enlightenment philosophers looked to monumental public buildings such as schools and museums to reawaken civic life and forge an engaged citizenry. Imagining the vibrant public life of the antique polis, symbolized by the “architectural grandeur of the Athenian agora or Roman forum,” reformers drew on ancient paradigms to shape a new civic urbanism.40 The monumental classicism of the Victoria Studienhaus can be read as a continuation of this Enlightenment project, specifically as an attempt by the patrons and architect to signal to Berliners an expanded public realm that encompassed the New Woman. In the austerity of its classicism, the Victoria Studienhaus also referred to contemporary uses of the style to express modern, German functionalism. Responding to a growing discourse on how to design for the modern age, architects such as Paul Bonatz and Peter Behrens mixed pared-down classicism with industrialism. Behrens’s Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG) turbine factory in Berlin became iconic of a “modern and timeless” functionalism, even if its classicizing design elements were not, strictly speaking, functional.41 Perhaps Winkelmann, too, wished to indicate something eternal and new in this residence for young scholars. Yet if the home, or women, possessed some (imagined) immutable trait to be cherished, such as coziness or femininity, that was not to say that domesticity or women remained unchanged. The suggestion of functionalism that adhered to Winkelmann’s spare classicism communicated the message that the residence was a new functional type addressing the needs of modern women. In other words, what the AEG factory was to twentieth-century industry, the Victoria Studienhaus was to urban domestic life: a symbol of continuity and progress.

  39 Harder, “Ein Heim für studierende Frauen,” 563–64; “A.P.”, “Das Viktoria-Studienhaus,” 143; Helene Lange, “Das Berliner Victoria-Studienhaus,” Die Frau 23, no. 6 (1916): 341; “Das Heim unsrer Studentinnen: Haus Ottilie von Hansemann, Berlin,” Daheim 52, no. 47 (1916): 23. 40 Barry Bergdoll, European Architecture 1750–1890 (New York: 2000), 43. 41 Matthew Jefferies, Politics and Culture in Wilhelmine Germany: The Case of Industrial Architecture (Oxford: 1995): 128, 131. See also Stanford Anderson, Peter Behrens and a New Architecture for the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: 2000), 129– 64.



296 | D ESPINA STRATIGAKOS

The aesthetic redefinition of women and domesticity continued in the interior spaces, which Winkelmann designed along with all of the furniture.42 The monumental classicism of the residence’s public face gave way to the intimacies of Biedermeier. Flourishing in Austria and Germany from the early to mid-nineteenth century, Biedermeier represented a style of living centered on the bourgeoisie and the home. Its influence, which touched all the arts, was most profound in the areas of furniture and interior design. Admired for its simple, unpretentious comfort, Biedermeier enjoyed a revival among early twentiethcentury architectural reformers searching for more utilitarian forms. Against Schinkel’s contemporary and very public classicism, Biedermeier stood for the architecture of private life. Interestingly, both public and private dimensions of the Victoria Studienhaus interiors served to reinforce a sense of the intimate and personal. In her designs, the architect labored to avoid any sense of the loss of self associated with large institutions. The communal rooms on the ground floor were not particularly large, and the arrangement of furniture broke up the space into intimate clusters (fig. 6). The dining hall was set with small tables and was divided into indoor and outdoor sections. Most important, no two of the ninety-six student rooms were alike. Variations in the design of the rooms, such as in the wall coverings and furnishings, created a sense of individuality that students further enhanced with their own decorative touches.43 Because Biedermeier was understood as a style embodying personal taste, the Biedermeier-style decoration of the rooms signaled personal domestic space, helping to avert institutional overtones. Finally, Biedermeier evoked the grand era of the Berlin salonnière. In the homes of salon hostesses such as Rahel Varnhagen, whose guests included Heinrich Heine and Alexander von Humboldt, men and women of different classes, nationalities, and religious faiths mingled to discuss art, music, literature, and politics. The salon, a distinctly feminine and domestic form, helped shape a new realm of heterogeneous social discourse that philosopher Jürgen Habermas identifies as the bourgeois public sphere.44 It also represented an

  42 Margot Riess, “Schaffende Frauen: Die Frau als Architektin,” Frau und Gegenwart 28, no. 2 (1931): 37. 43 Louise Faubel, “Das Viktoria-Studienhaus in Berlin,” Die deutsche Frau 6, no. 24 (1916): 2. 44 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: 1989), 31–43. For feminist critiques of Habermas, see Johanna Meehan, ed., Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse



W OMEN IN THE M ODERN M ETROPOLIS | 297

Figure 6: One of the residence’s communal living rooms designed by Winkelmann, c. 1916.

Source: Landesarchiv Berlin.

institution of self-cultivation for women, who welcomed the public worlds of learning, culture, and politics into their homes.45 One can easily imagine the symbolic appeal of the salonnière for a project such as the Victoria Studienhaus. Biedermeier’s urban and progressive associations were reinforced by architectural reformers such as Joseph August Lux, an influential Austrian theorist. To him, the style emblematized the rich hybrid of local and cosmopolitan cultures in Vienna, and prefigured the rise of “great-city urbanism” and “the new, modern individual.”46 All of these meanings—simple functionalism, bourgeois domesticity, private life, salon culture, urbanism, and modernity—recommended

    (New York: 1995); and, Mary P. Ryan, “Gender and Public Access: Women’s Politics in Nineteenth Century America,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: 1992), 143–63. 45 Petra Wilhelmy-Dollinger, Die Berliner Salons: mit historisch-literarischen Spaziergängen (Berlin: 2000), 2. 46 Mitchell Schwarzer, German Architectural Theory and the Search for Modern Identity (Cambridge: 1995), 165.



298 | D ESPINA STRATIGAKOS

Biedermeier to the Victoria Studienhaus, which was to be a practical home for a new type of educated and emancipated urban woman. In devising a representational strategy for this novel type of building, the architect thus mined many levels of cultural meaning. Instead of a singular story, she offered a cluster of narratives about identity and destiny. One could be domestic and stately, individual and communal, modern and timeless. Meanings reflected and altered one another, especially in the relationship between exterior and interior. The enlightenment ideals infusing the neoclassical façade of the Victoria Studienhaus inflected the Biedermeier interior, transforming a bedroom into a scholar’s study. The building’s Biedermeier “heart” similarly spoke to the façade of the necessary infusion of a “spiritual,” domestic femininity into the public worlds of government, commerce, and culture—the central argument of the bourgeois women’s movement. Although it is true that strangers passing by on the street encountered only one of those dimensions, it is important to remember that residents experienced a dynamic. The visual signs of domestic life and citizenship were placed into dialogue, reminding the young students that neither could exist in isolation. Moreover, as indicated above, the character of Biedermeier domesticity was highly complex, and it introduced, through its association with the salon, a notion of porousness to the public realm. Winkelmann manipulated domestic codes to undermine a simple polar opposition between home and the world beyond, unlike the designers of earlier women’s colleges in England, who employed domestic idioms precisely in order to signal this sort of separation as well as to reassure parents that their daughters had not truly left home.47 To return to Geertz’s formulation, a “thin” description of the Victoria Studienhaus notes a young woman taking up residence in a quasi women’s college. Creating a “thick” description for this act in the broader context of the gendered metropolis reveals the residence to be a space of resistance and integration that undermines neat divisions of public and private space, alters urban discourses and experiences, and makes the relationship among Berlin’s multiple public spheres more complex. The next example, of a women’s exhibition, shifts these issues toward the roles of narrative and spectatorship in the appropriation of urban space. On a late February evening in 1912, the fog blanketing the city was pierced by two towers of light that beckoned to Berliners to leave the gloom of the

  47 See Margaret Birney Vickery, Buildings for Bluestockings: The Architecture and Social History of Women’s Colleges in Late Victorian England (Newark: 1999).



W OMEN IN THE M ODERN M ETROPOLIS | 299

streets and enter a dazzling world unlike any they had seen before (fig. 7).48 Inside the exhibition building at the Zoological Garden, amid blooming flowers, silk architecture, and brilliant chandeliers, visitors encountered a vast and intricately ordered cosmos devoted to women, from which “mere man is conspicuously and universally absent.” Women designers had arranged the halls filled Figure 7: Main hall of Die Frau in Haus und Beruf exhibition.

Source: Emma Stropp, “Die Ausstellung ‘Die Frau in Haus und Beruf,’” Illustrirte Zeitung 138, no. 3584 (1912): 44.

with displays of women’s labor, an all-female orchestra serenaded the crowd with music by female composers, and female writers stocked a library with books authored and bound by women. “The greatest exhibition ever devoted to the work of women,” according to the New York Times, encompassed “every sphere of activity, domestic, industrial, and professional, which women have so far invaded.”49 Marveled at by some, abhorred by others, this show of female

  48 Frieda Radel, “Von der Berliner Ausstellung ‘Die Frau in Haus und Beruf,’” Hamburger Fremdenblatt, no. 48, February 27, 1912. 49 “Woman’s Work in Many Fields,” New York Times, February 25, 1912, C2.



300 | D ESPINA STRATIGAKOS

self-sufficiency exerted an enormous attraction. In the four weeks the exhibition remained open, half a million people passed through its portals.50 The exhibition’s organizers, the German Lyceum Club, an association for professional women founded in Berlin in 1904, invited women’s groups across the nation and in the colonies to participate, and thousands of women responded to the call. When the exhibition opened, under the title Die Frau in Haus und Beruf (Women in the Home and at Work), the scope of female labor astounded visitors. From the Architektin (female architect) to the Zeichnenlehrerin (female drawing teacher), town planning in Silesia to housework in German Southwest Africa, every profession and sphere of activity seemed occupied by women. Within the confines of the halls emerged a network of productive German women radiating from Berlin outward to Togo, China, and Samoa. The effect of totality was both calculated to impress and determined by the adoption of a prevailing cultural type: the universal exhibition. Beginning with the Great Exhibition of 1851, in London, and honed by subsequent World’s Fairs in continental Europe and the United States, a new form of mass education emerged in the nineteenth century that aimed for “a total view of any given subject.”51 The encyclopedic display of women’s labor in Berlin was driven by the same inspirational motives that filled the World’s Fairs to the bursting point. The spectacular massing of objects at the World’s Fairs was meant to signify the irresistible forces of progress (whether imperial, technological, or social) and to convince onlookers of “the certain glory of the future.”52 Organizers of the women’s exhibition hoped the visual surfeit of female progress would persuade visitors, both male and female, of the inevitable triumph of women’s causes. They also believed that monumentality was needed to attract men, who avoided small, artsy presentations.53 But a young Theodor Heuss, then political editor of the liberal journal Die Hilfe and later president of the Federal Republic of Germany, predicted the effect would be greatest on women: the “massive

  50 The total number of visitors was 500, 231 as reported in “Bericht über die 6. ordentliche Generalversammlung des Deutschen Lyceum-Clubs,” Deutscher Lyceum Club 8, no. 5 (1912): 338. 51 Paul Greenhalgh, “Education, Entertainment and Politics: Lessons from the Great International Exhibitions,” The New Museology, ed. Peter Vergo (London: 1989), 89. 52 Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: 1988), 23. 53 “Bericht des Deutschen Lyceum-Clubs,” 336. On this same theme, see Anna Plothow, “Die Ausstellung die Frau in Haus und Beruf,” Berliner Tageblatt, no. 100, February 24, 1912.



W OMEN IN THE M ODERN M ETROPOLIS | 301

impression of female accomplishments,” he argued, would instill pride and selfconfidence, providing a needed boost to the women’s movement.54 In Berlin, a public space of such size and splendor dedicated to women was unprecedented. Fia Wille, Else Oppler-Legband, and Lilly Reich were charged with the aesthetic conception of the show. Wille and Oppler-Legband, the show’s principal designers, were well established and respected artists. Wille, together with her husband, Rudolf, owned a successful design firm in Berlin, and their work was regularly featured in architectural journals. Oppler-Legband served on the board of artistic advisors for Wertheim (one of Berlin’s most popular department stores) and as director of the German Werkbund’s Professional College for Display Art in Berlin, an influential position within the design reform movement. The younger Reich, who worked in clothing display for Wertheim and also taught at the Werkbund school, was on her way to becoming one of the most important exhibition designers in Germany, later forming a partnership with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.55 With ninety-two hundred square meters of exhibits, distributed between two vast halls, each with two floors, the designers faced an enormous challenge in bringing harmony and legibility to the whole. The nearest prototype for this kind of women’s space in Berlin was the department store, which was closely associated with the female consumer. With two of the show’s designers employed by Wertheim, it is not surprising that retail models (fig. 8) influenced their conception of a grand female space. Similarities between the department store and the exhibition building already existed: as Meredith Clausen and others have demonstrated, the two types developed interdependently as architectures of display.56 The designers of the women’s exhibition accentuated these affinities, thereby reinforcing the comparison. Visitors entering the exhibition, for example, were greeted by the scents of lilac, primrose, orchids and other flowers, which, for organizers and audience alike,

  54 Theodor Heuss, “Die Frauenausstellung in Berlin,” Die Hilfe 18, no. 11 (1912): 171. 55 Despina Stratigakos, “Women and the Werkbund: Gender Politics and German Design Reform, 1907–14,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 62, no. 4 (2003): 490–511. 56 See Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations, no. 4 (1988): 73– 102; Meredith L. Clausen, Frantz Jourdain and the Samaritaine: Art Nouveau Theory and Criticism (Leiden: 1987); and, Friedberg, Window Shopping, 79–83.



302 | D ESPINA STRATIGAKOS

Figure 8: Atrium of the Wertheim department store in Berlin, designed by Alfred Messel, 1896-97 (photograph c. 1905). The female allegory Work, created by the sculptor Ludwig Manzel, presides over the ladies’ handglove department.

Source: A. Wertheim GmbH, Berlin (Berlin: A. Wertheim, c. 1905), the Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection.



W OMEN IN THE M ODERN M ETROPOLIS | 303

marked the space as feminine.57 At Wertheim, flowers placed by the store’s entrance signaled the passage from the street into the sensual world of retail pleasures. Cascading silks at both venues similarly marked them as feminine spaces, and the spectacular luminosity of the exhibition hall recalled the brilliant electric chandeliers that symbolized modernity in Wertheim’s much-celebrated atrium.58 Most important, the exhibition designers arranged the spaces to heighten the experience of seeing and being seen that was a hallmark of Wertheim’s shopping spectacle, as it was in department stores throughout Europe. I want to focus here on the implications of adopting the scopic regime of shopping for the creation of a female public space. By tapping into an already established architectural type and its visual practices, the designers, I believe, eased the transition to a novel form of gendered space. The show’s predominantly female and middle-class visitors, who were also the department store’s main clientele, came equipped with a ready-made set of visual tools with which to absorb and process the encyclopedic display. As in the department store, their discerning and comprehensive gaze took it all in, scanning objects, spaces, and, also important, other people.59 Prompted by the show’s design, they saw throngs of women and became conscious of being part of the multitude. On the opening day of the exhibition, the majority of the ten thousand visitors in attendance were women—a pattern that would be repeated over the next four weeks. The effect, according to a reporter, was among the most astonishing of the show.60

  57 Anna Plothow, “Die Ausstellung ‘Die Frau in Haus und Beruf’ I,” Frauenwirtschaft 3, no. 2 (1912): 26; Helene Grube, “Rundgang durch die Ausstellung ‘Die Frau in Haus und Beruf,’” Die Wartburg 11, no. 12 (1912): 115; J. Lorm, “‘Die Frau in Haus und Beruf’: Ein Rundgang durch die Ausstellung,” Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, no. 100, February 24, 1912. 58 Kathleen James, “From Messel to Mendelsohn: German Department Store Architecture in Defence of Urban and Economic Change,” in Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850–1939, ed. Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain (Aldershot: 1999), 262–63. 59 On the contemplative gaze of the shopper, see Friedberg, Window Shopping, 57–58. For a discussion of the “comprehensive feminine glance” as developed in London shopping guides for women, see Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 128–29. 60 “Die Frau in Haus und Beruf,” Der Tag, February 26, 1912; “O. T. Sch.,” “Die Frau in Haus und Beruf: Eröffnung der Ausstellung im Zoologischen Garten,” Vossische Zeitung, no. 100, February 24, 1912.



304 | D ESPINA STRATIGAKOS

Admittedly, department store architecture had already materialized crowds of female shoppers, which critics in turn-of-the-century Germany (and elsewhere) portrayed as dangerously unruly, a kind of shopping cyclone that ruined husbands and national economies with its mindless and voracious consumption (fig. 9).61 The women’s exhibition attempted a profound reorientation of this gendered mass away from consumption toward production. As with the Victoria Studienhaus, the designers employed an architectural vocabulary understood by Berliners to undermine conventional urban meanings. In this new context, the consuming female public of the department store was transformed into a civic Figure 9: Crowds of female shoppers in a Berlin department store. Wood engraving after a drawing by Edward Cucuel, 1901.

Source: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, New York.

body—self-conscious, enlightened, and empowered. Organizers strove to make visible a new feeling of unity among women, a sense of shared responsibility

  61 “Tietz und Wertheim,” Die Zukunft 32 (1900): 541–42. For similar criticisms pertaining to France and England, see Lisa Tiersten, “Marianne in the Department Store: Gender and the Politics of Consumption in Turn-of-the-Century Paris,” in Cathedrals of Consumption, 124; and, Rappaport, Shopping For Pleasure, especially chapter 2.



W OMEN IN THE M ODERN M ETROPOLIS | 305

and agency spanning all fields of productive work.62 With her empowered gaze, as described by Anne Friedberg, the department store flâneuse was addressed not as a consumer but rather as a citizen.63 The political implications of making women aware of their collective potential did not escape the attention of state officials. A report by the Royal Police Authority in Berlin concluded that the exhibition must be deemed political for stirring “the consciousness of unity.”64 If this awakening posed a threat, it emanated not from the chaotic female mass envisioned in discourses on shopping but rather from an orderly one. The exhibition’s clarity and cohesion repeatedly found comment in the nearly two hundred reviews that appeared in German and international newspapers and journals. While many reviewers applauded the show as a milestone for women, a few critical voices, all male, attempted to undermine its power by reasserting urban narratives of disorder and sexual danger. Alfons Goldschmidt, an economist with socialist sympathies, criticized the show’s organizers for ignoring women’s poverty, which he represented primarily in sexual terms. In his review, he conjured up for the reader images of abandoned, pregnant women, dark corners of prostitution, harsh slave owners, and young girls traded on the international market.65 Responding to the criticism, a Lyceum Club member labeled the “monstrous images” evoked by Goldschmidt as sensationalist and undignified material for the show.66 The figure of the desperate, impoverished prostitute hardly could have appealed to organizers trying to promote the educated, professional dimensions of women’s labor. But more than the dignity or professional focus of the exhibition was at stake, I believe, in the suppression of these most “public” of women. In creating female public space and putting women “on display” at the heart of the city, organizers of the 1912 exhibition, like the creators of the women’s guidebook to Berlin, sought new types of gendered urban narratives that did not foreground sexual danger. The elimination of monstrous images from the exhibition went hand in hand with the construction of a modern female identity that responded to

  62 Alice Salomon, “Zur Eröffnung der Ausstellung ‘Die Frau in Haus und Beruf,’” Centralblatt des Bundes Deutscher Frauenvereine 13, no. 22 (1912): 173. 63 Friedberg, Window Shopping, 37, 42. 64 “Acta des Polizei-Präsidii zu Berlin, betreffend den Königlichen Commerzienrath und Fabrikbesitzer Georg Friedrich Heyl und Frau Hedwig Heyl,” in Landesarchiv Berlin, A Pr. Br. Rep. 30, No. 10564, 170. 65 Alfons Goldschmidt, “Die Damenausstellung,” März 6, no. 10 (1912): 395. 66 Henni Lehmann, “Die ‘Damenausstellung’: Ein Wort der Abwehr,” Centralblatt des Bundes Deutscher Frauenvereine 14, no. 2 (1912): 10.



306 | D ESPINA STRATIGAKOS

the urban environment as subject rather than object. The woman on view at the 1912 show traversed her city as a social worker, built homes, occupied university classrooms, decorated shop windows, and so forth; she produced and claimed urban space with an agency difficult to reconcile with contemporary discourses of “public women” either as sexual victims or as pariahs. Goldschmidt’s insistence on reintegrating sexual danger into the exhibition, whatever the economic or political justifications, must also be viewed as an attempt, whether conscious or unconscious, to undermine this new female subject and reassert male control in the creation of urban narratives and space. To return once again to Geertz, a “thin” description of the exhibition observes a woman buying herself a ticket to the show for what might seem to be an afternoon of entertainment and leisure. A “thick” description reveals this act to be a small gesture of defiance within a larger social and urban revolution. Women, who lacked the vote and many legal protections, claimed citizenship as gendered metropolitan subjects engaged with the social, cultural, economic, and political life of their city. Women remade their identities as individuals who belonged to a powerful female collective that made its presence felt through visual and spatial interventions in the very fabric of the young German capital. The 1912 exhibition and the Victoria Studienhaus, among a host of other built projects created by and for women, make clear that the winged Niké atop the Siegessäule and the female builder on the roof of Berlin’s city hall did not simply coexist in space. Rather, they were inexorably linked in the contested creation of the modern metropolis.





The Street-Prison Symbiosis: Urban Segregation and Popular Black Fiction in 21st Century America K RISTINA G RAAFF

The segregation of cities along class and ethnic divides is hardly a new phenomenon. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, in burgeoning industrializing metropolises around the world, the spatial segregation of particular groups was a definitive characteristic of emerging modern societies. New urban residents, whether they were immigrants or migrants, often involuntarily clustered in specific areas designated for poor populations. New York City’s Lower East Side, with its massive influx of immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe, was an example of such an immigrant enclave. These new urban residents were frequently subjected to degrading living and working conditions, and their poverty and lack of privilege was often framed in terms of essentialized ethnic differences. While negative stigmas and exclusionary practices were deployed to maintain such spatialized divisions of urban society, immigrant enclaves, such as the Lower East Side, nevertheless represented transitional spaces that could also provide necessary networks and solidarity for its dwellers before most were able to eventually gain traction and integrate into mainstream society.1 In contrast, over the course of the twentieth century, the spatial urban segregation of the so-called “ghettos” in the United States has taken on a far more persistent and pernicious form. Whereas Chicago School sociologists still deployed

  1

Peter Marcuse, “The Enclave, the Citadel, and the Ghetto: What Has Changed in PostFordist U.S. City?,” Urban Affairs Review 33, no. 2 (1997): 242.



308 | K RISTINA G RAAFF

the term to designate any self-contained urban community in the 1920s,2 “ghetto” soon came to be primarily associated with spatially segregated urban neighborhoods that were in the majority inhabited by African Americans and black migrants.3 Although the term is occasionally applied to non-American contexts, to this day, debates and research on “the ghetto” predominantly refer to the involuntary spatial segregation and exclusion from dominant society of parts of America’s black population.4 The concept of a “black ghetto” is itself contentious and, depending on time and perspective, entails a range of meanings, valuations, and connotations, rendering its commensurability for designating urban segregation a thorny issue.5

  2

Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess were among the scholars of the Chicago School who, in The City from 1925, argued that segregated black neighborhoods were comparable to poor immigrant areas in that they were both temporary conditions. For them, blacks were thus the latest group of migrants, who would eventually accommodate and assimilate to mainstream society. See The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment (Chicago: 1967 [1925]). With Black Metropolis, St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton revised the earlier approach in 1945 by acknowledging that the existing color line blocked the residential, social, and economic mobility of black migrants to a different degree than the country’s immigrants ever experienced it. See Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: 1993 [1945]), 94, 99, 118, 757. Regarding the etymology of the term “ghetto,” it originated in the early sixteenth century, when it was used to refer to the Jewish section of Venice. See Richard Sennett, “The Origins of the Modern Ghetto” (paper presented at Arden House Urban Forum on Place and Right, 1992), quoted in Marcuse, “The Enclave.”

3

Apart from the black migrants from the South also black immigrants, especially from the Caribbean, and intra-city migrants were part of those forming black neighborhoods. In the case of New York, many from the latter group originally lived in Midtown and the Upper West Side of Manhattan before settling uptown in Harlem, mainly between 1900 and 1910. Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community; 1900–1930 (Bloomington: 1996), 40.

4

Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 174; Paul Jargowsky, “Response to Loïc Wacquant's ‘Three Pernicious Premises in the Study of the American Ghetto,’” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 22, no. 1 (1998): 160; Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: 1993), 19, 32, 60–61.

5

Problematic is also the singular form of the term that risks leveling out differences between the various neighborhoods although each one is characterized by varying



T HE STREET -PRISON S YMBIOSIS | 309

Often applied to stigmatize communities, it can exempt their residents from agency and omit their diversity. Used from “within,” it can be deployed as a “term of pride and envy”6 aiming at the self-empowerment of those who claim it as their place of origin. Others again speak for the continuous use of the concept, arguing that in light of the unchanging condition of urban segregation it is more useful to assess the term “ghetto” as a permanently changing institution instead of abandoning it due to its prior pejorative usages.7

I. F ROM “G HETTO” TO P RISON S YMBIOSIS

THE

S TREETS

TO THE

S TREET -

When examining recent black cultural expressions that deal with daily life in “the ghetto,” it becomes evident, however, that the term has lost its prominence as a tool for self-definition. Alongside the term “hood” that is especially used in rap music and designates a short form of neighborhood,8 it is the spatial figure of “the streets” that has gained in popularity when describing experiences and practices in African American high-poverty neighborhoods.9 As this essay

    conditions, practices, and experiences that change over time. As Marcuse points out, when using the term “ghetto” we are thus always dealing with ideal types because no segregated urban area will entail all characteristics of the defined “ghetto form.” Marcuse, “The Enclave,” 238. 6

Carl Nightingale, “A Tale of Three Global Ghettos: How Arnold Hirsch Helps Us Internationalize U.S. Urban History,” Journal of Urban History 29, no. 3 (2003): 258.

7 8

Ibid., 260. Of course, the use of the term “ghetto” has not been completely abandoned in hip-hop music. One can, however, perceive a shift to the spatial figure of the “hood” that began to find expression in rap songs since the late 1980s. This shift can, on the one hand, be read as a response to the inflationary use and appropriation of the term “ghetto” mainly by social scientists, as well as the often-generalized perception and pejorative connotations conveyed by it. See Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama's Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: 1997), 16. On the other hand, the focus on local attachment may be explained as a reaction to recent trends of globalization and transnationalism. See Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1992): 9.

9

As Christoph Mager remarks, the mentioning of “the streets” in hip hop music always refers to inner-urban environments, in contrast to other music genres, such as rock or



310 | K RISTINA G RAAFF

illustrates, “the streets” represent a central location especially in the so-called genre of “street literature” that is currently the most widely read African American popular fiction in the US dealing with contemporary urban segregation.10 Frequently penned by first-time authors who draw upon their own experiences, the popular novels have established themselves in America’s black urban neighborhoods through practices of self-publishing and street vending since the late 1990s. The stories are located in the urban streets of high-poverty areas and focus on street-related practices, in particular the crack trade since the 1980s, dealing thus with topics and styles that have received controversial responses especially from African American authors considered as “more literary.”11 Moreover, the novels’ distribution and marketing are also inextricably linked to public space, since a major part of their sales take place from street stands mainly in black, low-income neighborhoods like Harlem, downtown Brooklyn,

    pop music, where “the streets” usually relate to highways and crossroads—representing metaphors that convey utopian ideas of escape. See Hip Hop, Musik und die Artikulation von Geographie (Stuttgart: 2007), 233. In opposition to Mager’s primarily positive reading of “the streets” in hip hop music—as a space of solidarity and creativity, identity formation, communicative exchange, perpetuation of oral history, and knowledge transfer (233, 253)—in the genre of street literature, “the streets” are usually depicted as an ambiguous location. 10 Exact sales numbers are difficult to determine because the large number of books being sold on the streets cannot be tracked. Bestseller lists of the African American Literature Book Club (AALBC), Essence Magazine, and the African American book announcement website, Books of Soul, however, give indication that street literature is currently among the most widely read genres of African American fiction. To give some indication about sales numbers, according to their publisher, prominent novels like B-More Careful by Shannon Holmes sold 100,000 copies in the first twelve weeks, and the novel Dutch by Teri Woods sold 120,000 copies in the first ninety days. See “Authors,” Teri Woods Publishing, http://www.teriwoodspublishing.com/ authors.htm. 11 Among those African American authors who either promote or disapprove of the genre are Danyel Smith and Nick Chiles. See Nick Chiles, “Their Eyes Were Reading Smut,” New York Times, January 4, 2006; Taylor Nix, “Nick Chiles: A Critical Look at

Street

Lit,”

The Urban Book

Source,

last

modified

October

2009,

http://www.theurbanbooksource.com/interviews/nick-chiles.php; and Danyel Smith, “Black Talk and Hot Sex: Why ‘Street Lit’ Is Literature,” in Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, ed. Jeff Chang (New York: 2006).



T HE STREET -PRISON S YMBIOSIS | 311

or North Philadelphia.12 Eventually, these entrepreneurial practices also attracted the attention of commercial presses who established subdivisions for the popular genre and added conventional forms of distribution to the street market, making the novels also available in chain bookstores.13 When authors or their characters refer to “the streets,” the term goes beyond merely designating a traffic road whose main function is that of transportation; instead it is used to represent a larger “street body,” a conglomerate of the infrastructural roads and adjacent walkways, and can also include the transitional zones between inside and outside, such as stoops and housing entrances. “Being in the streets” thus usually relates to condensed sites of social interaction, among them the corner or meeting points in front of apartment buildings or stores. It can refer to a variety of spatial practices and perceptions, including the use of the streets as a hangout spot and as a stage for conspicuous consumption and location of identity formation. Mostly, however, the streets are presented as a necessary business platform, usually for the local drug trade, and are ambiguously portrayed as both a location of income and independence as well as one of entrapment and confinement. Whereas “hood” is generally characterized by a focus on local attachment and identification with specific neighborhoods,14 the term “streets” instead places an emphasis on the practical usages of public space. In contrast to “ghetto,” it directs attention to the economic function that the streets play especially in low-income neighborhoods by providing a platform for alternative street businesses since many dwellers lack opportunities to access the “mainstream” economy. “Life in the streets” hence stresses the vast amount of time spent outside, be it because it represents the only space that generates income or because it functions as the social backdrop that allows one to connect with others who are equally affected by unemployment (and in so doing avoid isolation by taking part in communal life). Therefore, the shift to the expression of “streets” when

  12 The main readership is generally defined as black women and girls, ranging from thirteen- to forty-years-old. See Shanita Jones, “Street Lit Novels and Triangle-Area Public Libraries: A Search through the Opacs (Online Public Access Catalogs)” (Master's Thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006). Since many of the books are, however, passed on, many of them to male inmates, it is difficult to make final statements about the major reader group. 13 Among the most prominent publishers who have taken up street literature are Simon & Schuster, Kensington Books, and Random House. 14 Murray Forman, The ‘Hood’ Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and HipHop (Middletown, Connecticut: 2002), 63, 65.



312 | K RISTINA G RAAFF

talking about contemporary life in black high-poverty neighborhoods has a clear economic underpinning that refers to the inner-urban changes brought about by postindustrial society. Compared to the term “ghetto” that still entails other, especially more privileged parts of the city as a reference point, “the streets” lack this “outside” relation. Rather, the notion expresses a more dislocated, fragmented, and abandoned perception of space. Nevertheless, despite being disassociated from a larger urban environment, the “streets” are not simply selfreferential. As exemplified by the medium of street literature, they are instead clearly linked to another institutional apparatus—that of the prison system. This street-prison linkage is at the center of this essay, in which I argue that it represents the most recent form of spatial, social, economic, and political exclusion specifically targeted toward members of African American highpoverty communities. Choosing an approach that combines literary criticism and ethnographic research, this essay reveals how contemporary black popular fiction is infused by this street-prison symbiosis not only on a narrative level but also in its production, distribution, and consumption practices since a large number of authors and readers are currently or were formerly incarcerated. Using the distinction between a narrative and a material street-prison symbiosis, the essay first uses two novels that belong to the genre of street literature to exemplify how the linkage between streets and the US’s numerous prisons represents a common experience within the stories. This is not only because characters are usually involved in illicit street businesses but also because they live in neighborhoods that are disproportionately targeted by instances of social control. Secondly, it shows on a material level how the novels’ production, distribution, and consumption practices are inextricably linked to the symbiosis between streets and prison by drawing upon interviews with authors and publishers who either experience or participate firsthand in the connective workings between the two locations. Since the term “street-prison symbiosis” derives from Loïc Wacquant’s concept of the “symbiosis between ghetto and prison,”15 my examination of street literature will be preceded by an introduction into Wacquant’s concept, outlining its possibilities and limits. In order to be able to historically situate the street-prison symbiosis, the essay starts out with a brief periodization of three main phases of urban segregation processes in the US since the turn of the twentieth century. Since the formation of black segregated neighborhoods has predominantly been examined

  15 Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment & Society 3, no. 1 (2001): 97.



T HE STREET -PRISON S YMBIOSIS | 313

through the lens of the “ghetto,” this term will be maintained in order to adequately depict the various discourses.

II. T HREE P HASES

OF

“B LACK G HETTO ” F ORMATIONS 16

The beginning of a substantial formation of segregated black urban neighborhoods is usually dated to the period of 1910 to 1940, when more than 1.5 million African Americans migrated from the American South to the urban centers of the country’s Midwest, Northeast, and West. This first migration wave was caused by various push and pull factors. Central was the enactment of the Jim Crow laws in the Southern states after Reconstruction that again limited the anticipated hopes for equality and freedom after the end of slavery. Apart from the experienced racism and often life-threatening violence, the “First Great Migration” was also initiated by the boll weevil infestation of cotton fields in the South and employment opportunities and the promise of less restrictive living conditions in the industrial cities of the North.17 America’s urban centers, however, turned out to be less of a “Promised Land”18 than hoped for. Racist attitudes among white Americans as well as among other immigrants, especially from those who had already achieved a certain living standard, against the large number of rural and usually poor black

  16 One can of course oppose the overall approach of using a periodization scheme to explain the development of different urban segregation processes as scholars like Arnold Hirsch, Loïc Wacquant, and Carl Nightingale have done. See Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940–1960 (Chicago: 1983); Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis”; and Nightingale, “A Tale of Three Global Ghettos.” Among the factors that can be criticized are the time frames chosen as well as the fact that periodization schemes potentially conceal the diversity among different “ghettos.” However, the periodizing approach can also be useful to acknowledge overlaps and continuities in the formations of segregated areas and link them to different historical contexts, demographic dynamics, and engines of segregation. See Nightingale, “A Tale,” 261. 17 Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 29. 18 Traditionally used in the Hebrew Bible to designate the land promised by god to the Israelites, it however also became a common term summarizing the hopes for freedom and better living conditions assigned by African American migrants to America’s urban North and was also used as a motif in African American literature, such as in Claude Brown’s 1965 Manchild in a Promised Land.



314 | K RISTINA G RAAFF

migrants led to the formation of segregated black urban neighborhoods that quickly became institutionalized as “black ghettos.”19 Initiated by white dwellers through the use of threats and violence against African Americans who moved into non-black neighborhoods, the formation—and at the same time the containment—of segregated black areas was further established through other practices. For example, “redlining”—the denial of mortgage loans and insurance policies to certain living areas—and so-called “restrictive covenants”—agreements among property owners not to sell or rent to blacks in white neighborhoods.20 At this time, all classes of African Americans were equally affected by spatial confinement. Hence, in contrast to later formations, these first types of “black ghettos” were inhabited by dwellers of all social backgrounds and therefore marked by a certain interaction between the different classes.21 This first form of neighborhood segregation was further institutionalized during the “Second Great Migration” from the 1940s to 1970s, when more than five million African Americans migrated to the country’s urban areas. One of the major reasons for the solidification of America’s segregated black urban neighborhoods was the “white flight” phenomenon and the emergence of suburban sprawl. Various diverse factors prompted masses of white inhabitants to leave the urban cores such as the post-war baby boom, integration of inner-urban schools, inexpensive land outside of the cities, increasing automobilization, as well as the building of infrastructure to the outskirts, and low-interest loan programs introduced by the Federal Housing Administration that clearly discriminated against blacks.22 With the continuous white flight to the suburbs and black in-migration, black inner-urban neighborhoods grew to a hitherto unknown degree in the 1950s and 1960s.23 Furthermore, state-supported construction and segregation of public housing contributed massively to the institutionalization of exclusively black neighbor-

  19 Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 174. 20 Ibid., 179, 182; William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: 1997), 44; Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 51. 21 Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 558. 22 By the 1970s, suburbanites represented the majority in America’s metropolitan areas. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 44, 53. 23 As Massey and Denton illustrate, in most cities the percentage of blacks more than doubled in the period between 1950 and 1970, such as in Chicago, where it increased from 14 to 33 percent. In Detroit, there was an increase from 16 to 44 percent. Ibid., 45.



T HE STREET -PRISON S YMBIOSIS | 315

hoods. This was because the majority of public housing designated for African Americans was either built in areas that were already inhabited by blacks or that were secluded from white neighborhoods.24 Initially geared towards all races and classes, public housing became much more homogenous from the mid-1960s onward when the passage of the civil rights legislation that diminished discriminatory practices by the Federal Housing Administration, banks, and realtors also allowed large parts of the black middle class to move to the outskirts. Left behind in the cities’ cores were the poorest segments of the black community.25 The beginning of the third form of urban ghettoization—one that persists to this day—is usually dated to the 1970s,26 when the Fordist system based on state-regulated and factory-centered mass production began to transition into a postindustrial regime, marked by decentralized, service-intense, and flexible markets.27 African Americans lacking secondary education and residing in the high-poverty neighborhoods were most affected by the sharp decrease of lowskilled labor in the manufacturing industries and the transfer of businesses to suburbs and international locations.28 Cutbacks in the welfare system and city spending as well as the dismantling of transportation infrastructures additionally contributed to the continuous economic and social isolation of the urban residents.29 Some analysts also consider the increasing number of immigrants arriving especially from Latin America and West Africa since the 1980s as a factor in the rise in joblessness among African Americans because many of the new

  24 Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 225, 243. 25 Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge, UK: 2008), 58; Harold X. Connolly, “Black Movement into the Suburbs: Suburbs Doubling Their Black Populations During the 1960s,” Urban Affairs Review 9, no. 1 (1973): 109. 26 Although many researchers agree that the socioeconomic shift to a post-Fordist system in the 1970s was formative for today’s conditions of urban segregation, some situate the historical break within the period between World War II and the Vietnam War. See Sharon Zukin, “How ‘Bad’ Is It? Institutions and Intentions in the Study of the American Ghetto,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 22, no. 3 (1998): 514; and Janet Abu-Lughod, “The Specificity of the Chicago Ghetto: Comment on Wacquant's ‘Three Pernicious Premises,’” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 21, no. 2 (1997): 358. 27 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: 1990), 150, 156; and Wilson, When Work Disappears, 25. 28 Wilson, When Work Disappears, 25, 37. 29 Ibid., 49, 185, 227.



316 | K RISTINA G RAAFF

immigrants are seen as willing to take on the few remaining low-skilled jobs at reduced wages.30 Additionally, the already-struggling neighborhoods were flooded by crack cocaine in the early 1980s, a new illicit commodity that offered alternative income sources for those excluded from mainstream economy31 but that also impeded chances of re-entering the “regular” labor market.32 As numerous accounts illustrate, living conditions indeed deteriorated and community cohesion suffered in many urban cores especially in light of the drug trade.33 The emergence of the rhetoric of a “crack epidemic,” however, was also deployed to buttress the political speech and media imaginary of a “tough on crime” rhetoric that had already been introduced with President Richard Nixon’s “War on Drugs” campaign in the 1970s. This campaign resulted in a disproportionately high police presence in poor black neighborhoods and a sharp rise in the numbers of arrests.34 While criminality was thus continuously conflated with blackness35—especially the young black male—the urban cores, often euphemistically called “inner cities,” were turned into stigmatized territories seen from the out-

  30 Ibid., 34. 31 Alternative subsistence practices, also described as “hustling,” do not necessarily have to relate to the drug trade but also include practices as diverse as the donation of blood, the selling of food, the pawning of goods, the collecting of cans, as well as gambling, fencing, and prostitution. Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts, 62. 32 Nathan L. Centers and Mark D. Weist, “Inner City Youth and Drug Dealing: A Review of the Problem,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 27, no. 3 (1998); Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 174. 33 Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (New York: 1999); Sudhir Venkatesh, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Cambridge: 2008); Terry Tempest Williams, The Cocaine Kids: The Inside Story of a Teenage Drug Ring (Cambridge, MA: 1989). 34 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: 2010), 47, 52. 35 Associating blackness with crime represents a centuries-old racial stereotype that is continuously solidified through media images and political rhetoric depicting perpetrators primarily as black males. Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 95; Randall Kennedy, Race, Crime and the Law (New York: Random House, 1997), 136.



T HE STREET -PRISON S YMBIOSIS | 317

side as areas that must be controlled and contained vis-à-vis the remaining metropolis and its suburbs.36 The perception of worsening conditions and a hitherto unknown racial and class-based homogeneity within poor urban areas has brought about new designations such as “hyperghetto”37 or “ethclass” and “outcast ghetto.”38 To what extent the most recent form of urban segregation has indeed reached a “new” level—an assumption that is itself contested39—will not be elaborated in this essay. The essay focuses instead on the unprecedented linkage that has been established between the latest spatialized form of black urban poverty and the country’s prisons—a connection epitomized in Loïc Wacquant’s notion of the ghetto-prison symbiosis.

III. W ACQUANT ’ S G HETTO -P RISON S YMBIOSIS According to urban sociologist Loïc Wacquant, following the institutions of slavery, Jim Crow, and the urban “ghettos” that formed during the periods of the First and Second Great Migration, the symbiosis between “ghetto” and prison represents the most recent instrument employed “to define, confine, and control African Americans”40 in the United States. Assuming that, due to the aforementioned changes in poor black urban neighborhoods since the 1970s, “the ghetto”

  36 Wacquant, Urban Outcasts, 175. 37 Ibid., 3, 5. 38 Peter Marcuse, “Space over Time: The Changing Position of the Black Ghetto in the United States,” Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 13, no. 1 (1998): 18; and Marcuse, “The Enclave,” 231. 39 Among those who clearly oppose the narrative of permanently worsening “ghetto” conditions is the economist Warren C. Whatley, who argues that the alleged “new kind of urban poverty” is actually a return to conditions prevailing before the 1940s and that the period of “economic prosperity of the postwar decades” thus merely represented an exception. See “Is There a New Black Poverty in America? Lessons from History,” in A Different Vision: Race and Public Policy, ed. Thomas D. Boston (London: 1997), 74. Today’s concentrated poverty for him is thus not a “sign [...] of a reversal of black economic progress” but rather of “the end of an exceptional period of black-white economic convergence.” Ibid., 79. 40 Loïc Wacquant, “The New ‘Peculiar Institution’: On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto” Theoretical Criminology 4, no. 3 (2000): 377.



318 | K RISTINA G RAAFF

no longer fulfilled its function “as device for caste control,”41 Wacquant regards prison as a “substitute apparatus for [...] containing the segments of the African American community devoid of economic utility and political pull.”42 According to him, it is in particular the “ghetto’s” loss of a “positive economic function as reservoir of cheap and pliable labor”43 that explains its expansion into the prison system which again allows its owners to extract low-wage labor from convicts— a topic that, as will be shown, is also taken up in the genre of street literature. Wacquant’s argument is based on the indeed noticeable shift in inmate population from circa 50% white prisoners in the 1950s to nearly 70% black and Latino prisoners in today’s local jails, state, and federal prisons in the US. With over two million people imprisoned in local jails and prisons according to the most recent statistics, the United States has thus the highest reported incarceration rate per capita in the world; moreover, the black population, who represent a total of 905,800 inmates, is the most disproportionately affected by the country’s prison system.44 Since the majority of inmates stem from the high-poverty neighborhoods to which they usually return after serving their sentences—often only in order to go back to prison because access to the “regular” labor market is even more impeded with a prison record45—many members of these communities are subjected to the “self-perpetuating cycle of escalating socioeconomic marginality.”46 With the locations of prison and “ghetto” becoming increasingly intertwined, Wacquant postulates an increasing resemblance between the two. The ghettoprison symbiosis for him is thus not only characterized by a cultural homogeneity due to the mutual exchange and adjustment between a street and prison culture, but also by a uniformity on a social level as most of the incarcerated

  41 Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis,” 97. 42 Ibid., 103. 43 Ibid., 105. 44 Heather C. West, “Prison Inmates at Midyear 2009,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, NCJ 230113 (June 2010), http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=2200; Roy Walmsley, “World Prison Population List,” King's College London, International Centre for Prison Studies (2008), http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/law/research/icps/ publications.php?id=8. 45 Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis,” 114; Jennifer Gonnerman, “Million Dollar Blocks: The Neighborhood Costs of America’s Prison Boom,” in Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration, ed. Tara Herivel and Paul Wright (New York: 2007), 27; Pager, Marked, 33, 68, 146; Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 191. 46 Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis,” 114.



T HE STREET -PRISON S YMBIOSIS | 319

stem from comparable high-poverty neighborhoods. Both spaces also become more similar in a structural regard since urban neighborhoods are increasingly attended by representatives of state control—ranging from police forces to probation and parole officers—that create the same impression of omnipresent surveillance that takes place inside prison.47 Although very useful as a basis for the analysis of the most recent segregation processes, Wacquant’s concept of the ghetto-prison symbiosis can also be criticized for a number of reasons. Based on official statistics as well as ethnographic research conducted in Chicago’s South Side and selected correctional facilities,48 his research applies results generated from one single urban neighborhood to nationwide urban exclusion processes, an approach that clearly ignores location-based differences.49 Derived from the mid-1990s, most of his data cannot be considered as up to date, a fact that becomes more problematic in light of recent urban developments such as gentrification and immigration that Wacquant only marginally accounts for. His approach can also be contested for not sufficiently considering agency on the part of the residents described as being subjected to the symbiosis. Although written from a perspective that has been positively perceived as omitting “both racial ‘essentialism’ and the blamethe-victim ideology,”50 his stance can, finally, also be criticized for being tinted by a “moralistic fervor.”51 Despite these flaws, the concept of the ghetto-prison symbiosis nevertheless represents a useful analytical tool. By expanding common perspectives on contemporary exclusion processes in the US, it demonstrates how they move beyond the spatial confinement of residents to specific urban areas. In contrast to research that focuses exclusively on the perimeter of “the ghetto,” the symbiosis

  47 Ibid., 103. 48 Among the correctional facilities that Wacquant included in his research are the Los Angeles County Jail and the Pennsylvanian Graterford Penitentiary. 49 Janet Abu-Lughod criticizes this aspect in Wacquant’s research on “urban ghettos,” suggesting “to move beyond the Chicago case into more comparative studies.” See Abu-Lughod, “The Specificity,” 362. Paul Jargowsky, moreover, opposes Wacquant’s basic definition of “ghetto,” among other reasons because it already includes a priori assumptions about causes and effects of segregation that would limit the possibilities of empirical research. See Jargowsky, “Response,” 161. 50 Abu-Lughod, “The Specificity,” 357. 51 Sharon Zukin, “How ‘Bad’ Is It? Institutions and Intentions in the Study of the American Ghetto,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 22, no. 3 (1998): 513.



320 | K RISTINA G RAAFF

also reveals economic motivations incorporated into the linkage between the two locations. Expanding on Wacquant’s view by giving room to examine how the symbiosis actually plays out in the two locations on a daily basis, the streetprison symbiosis attempts to mark a shift in perspective, placing a focus on the everyday practices, perceptions, and narratives of those directly concerned by street and prison life. This change in perspective also reveals the many discrepancies that can be found when examining how those who are affected by the street-prison symbiosis consider and use the locations and integrate them into their daily life. Tracing these varied stances can thus also help to challenge an approach prone to “moralistic fervor.” Finally, drawing upon the contemporary and still-developing genre of street literature allows for the examination of the street-prison linkage in its most recent form, including the latest developments of the country’s prison population that has more than doubled since 1990.52

IV. S TREET L ITERATURE AND THE N ARRATIVE S TREET -P RISON S YMBIOSIS Jihad, an author who himself has spent over seven years in various federal prisons for his involvement in the crack trade, is among the writers who illustrate how streets and prison are interlinked and this linkage particularly impacts lower-class African Americans.53 Processing his own street and incarceration experiences, his first novel Street Life,54 published in 2004, narrates the comingof-age story of the African American protagonist Lincoln, who grows up in a housing project in East Atlanta from the 1970s to 1990s. The first-person account opens with a visual description of the neighborhood that reflects postindustrial inner-urban neglect through public housing’s overpopulation and lack of maintenance:

  52 Lauren Glaze, Todd Minton, and Heather West, “Adult Correctional Populations, 1980–2008,” Bureau of Justice Statistics (2009). 53 Jihad (author, motivational speaker), “Personal Interview,” December 2, 2009, at author’s (K. Graaff’s) apartment in Harlem. 54 Initially, the text was self-published as an autobiographical account by Jihad’s own company Envisions Publishing Atlanta in the year of 2001. It was called Wake Up Everybody: The Life of a Player, and he began to pen it while still incarcerated. Urban Books then published an edited version of this first edition under the title Street Life.



T HE STREET -PRISON S YMBIOSIS | 321

[The apartments’] walls were as thin as in a house of cards, and the units were firetraps waiting for a spark. They were bug-infested, rat-infested, and too-many-of-us-infested. [...] Live electrical wires were exposed, units were boarded up, ghetto Picassos decorated the hallway walls, ceilings were falling in, and diapers and broken bottles littered the project grounds.55

With the selling of crack tragically being perceived as the only lucrative and self-esteem boosting practice—“the projects is a dope man’s paradise. Where else can a black man be king?”56—the protagonist Lincoln soon becomes involved in the illicit business. The streets, providing immediate financial rewards and a feeling of independence, turn into Lincoln’s main space of action and mental reference point, possessing an attraction that he compares to an addiction: “The streets were my heroin.”57 Even when serving brief stints in prison his “main focus was getting back on the streets”58—to which he immediately returned when bailed out, resuming his position in the flourishing drug business. Only after he receives an eleven-year prison sentence does Lincoln give up his intention of deploying the streets as a business ground for preparing for a life in confinement. Due to his physical distance from the urban neighborhood, his eventual conversion to Islam, and surging interest in political literature—processes of change that in many ways resemble those of Malcolm X’s incarceration experience as depicted in his autobiography—Lincoln undergoes a change of perspective that allows him to develop an understanding of the homology and connectedness between inner-urban and prison life. He thus draws clear parallels between degrading living conditions in overpopulated, sweltering, and poorly maintained housing projects and those in overcrowded prisons: “so hot, we all slept on the cold metal floors of our cells [...].”59 Also critical to reassessing his own development is his awareness of how the institution of prison specifically targets African Americans from urban highpoverty areas who are shut out from the nation’s “mainstream” economy and forced to rely on the informal sector of the street. In this way, Lincoln experiences first-hand race-related differences in sentencing for crack and cocaine, the introduction of a conspiracy law “where physical evidence wasn’t needed to con-

  55 Jihad, Street Life (Deer Park, New York: 2004), 13. 56 Ibid., 108. 57 Ibid., 79. 58 Ibid., 226. 59 Ibid., 276.



322 | K RISTINA G RAAFF

vict,”60 and the replacement of parole with a mandatory minimum sentence, guaranteeing that every federal prisoner would serve at least 85 percent of the imposed sentence.61 Street Life moreover takes up Wacquant’s assumption that the high-poverty areas in today’s metropolises no longer serve “as reservoir[s] of cheap and pliable labor”62 as they previously did during the era of industrial manufacturing, and that prison has instead taken over the function of a supplemental apparatus to extract lowest-cost labor from the incarcerated. Like Wacquant, the protagonist Lincoln considers the obligatory work in prison within the context of a longer history of African American confinement by detecting similarities to the forced labor of slavery: Once enslaved, all inmates were forced to work for $5 to $40 a month. Federal prison factories such as UNICOR were modern-day plantations. Talk about slave wages. This was the highest paying job inside the prisons. As an incentive, the salaries ranged from $.40 to $1.15 per hour. Inmates manufactured whatever products the prisons were contracted to make. We made products like shoes, clothes, mattresses, helicopter harnesses, bullet-proof vests, office furniture, and much more. These products were massproduced and sold to the U.S. Department of Justice and the federal government, causing small businesses to fold because they couldn’t compete with prison slave labor.63

Without a doubt, the analogy between former slavery and contemporary prison work risks leveling out major differences between the two institutions. Applying, however, the aspect of the economic profitability of the slavery system to that of today’s prisons can provide valuable insights into the functioning of contemporary US correctional facilities and the maintenance of urban segregation processes. Hence, the more punitive criminal justice policies—introduced in the “War on Drugs” campaign under President Nixon in 1971 and further enhanced during following presidencies64—led to a stark increase of the country’s number

  60 Ibid., 254. 61 Ibid., 290. 62 Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis,” 105. 63 Jihad, Street Life, 291. 64 The beginning of mass incarceration can be dated to the early 1970s, when President Richard Nixon introduced the “War on Drugs” campaign that established task forces to fight drug crimes on street level and a “tough-on-crime” rhetoric that persists to this day. However, this trend was further enhanced during the following presidencies. President Reagan thus initiated the Anti-Drug Abuse acts that established mandatory



T HE STREET -PRISON S YMBIOSIS | 323

of prisoners, bringing about an overpopulation in correctional facilities as well as higher state expenditures.65 As a response, privatization of existing and newly built prisons was again made possible in 1979 after having been ruled out as unconstitutional for almost a century.66 This allowed for the housing of a growing number of inmates at supposedly lower costs.67 Since the 1980s, privately organized prison management firms like Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group have built and operate an increasing number of the nation’s prisons.68 As facilities are paid on a “per-prisoner, per-day basis,”69 it is safe to assume that institutions hold more interest in maintaining a high number of inmates instead of working on their rehabilitation and reintegration into society. Due to this “warehousing approach” almost twothirds of the recently released will be charged with new crimes and sent back to prison within three years.70 The continuing back and forth between street and prison life is further precipitated by stricter parole and probation monitoring, as well as the “three-strikes” law introduced by a number of states during the Bill

    minimum sentencing of ten years for first time possession of minimal drug amounts. See Kennedy, Race, 364–65. Since the sentencing guidelines for crack, which is more prominent in black communities, are much harsher than those for cocaine, the enacted laws produced a disproportionately high number of African American inmates. Although crime rates began to decline in the late 1980s, the number of prisoners continued to rise in the 1990s, largely due to Clinton-era three-strikes laws. See Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 55. 65 Amy Cheung, “Prison Privatization and the Use of Incarceration,” The Sentencing Project (2002): 1,http://www.sentencingproject.org/detail/publication.cfm?publication _id=86. 66 David W. Miller, “The Drain of Public Prison Systems and the Role of Privatization: An Analysis of State Correctional Systems,” ProQuest Discovery Guides (2010): 3. 67 The maintenance and expansion of private prisons is usually defended with cost efficiency arguments. Research to date, however, has not conclusively demonstrated that private prisons indeed operate at lower costs than public prisons. See Cheung, “Prison Privatization,” 1. 68 As of the year 2000, more than 150 correctional facilities in twenty-eight states have been turned into for-profit organizations. See Ibid., 1; and Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: 2003), 97. 69 Kelly Patricia O'Meara, “Prison Labor Is a Growth Industry,” Insight on the News, May 24, 1999, 14. 70 Patrick Langan and David Levin, “Recidivism of Prisoners Released in 1994,” Bureau of Justice Statistics (2002).



324 | K RISTINA G RAAFF

Clinton administration, which gives extended mandatory sentences to people on their third felony conviction. Taking into account that the majority of prisoners come from “a handful” of chronically underfunded “urban neighborhoods,”71 when prison-spending budgets are simultaneously being diverted to the rural prison areas, the high-poverty urban neighborhoods turn into crime-producing areas that may themselves be considered as economically useless but are relevant as to providing a constant supply of inmate labor force. Correctional facilities thus largely contribute to the maintenance and persistence of the spatialization of inner-urban poverty. As Jihad well exemplifies in Street Life, quoting the prominent prisoner and author George Jackson, especially African American men who are involved in illicit street businesses have hence been “conditioned to accept the inevitability of prison”72 as a part of their life. The novel’s protagonist Lincoln, however, represents an exception. Eventually managing to positively deploy his time away from the streets, he draws not his religious conversion and his newly discovered interest for reading and writing to become a politically aware individual. Upon his release Lincoln returns to the same Atlanta neighborhood he came from. However, he does not return to the street economy. Instead he becomes a role model—a character seldom found in street literature narratives, which usually provide deterrent examples. He begins to work in a local business to support his community’s infrastructure as well as to educate youth on the same misguided path he used to be on. Narrated from an obviously didactic stance, the protagonist Lincoln thus manages to break his own street-prison symbiosis that, in the novel, is largely connected to him gaining literacy. Furthermore Jihad himself—like other street literature authors—claims literacy as the prerequisite for his reentry into society and cites the popular novels as a possible medium to reach and educate an audience less familiar with the activities of reading and writing. Taking up the saying that “the best way to keep a secret from a black man is to put it in a book,”73 Jihad thus stresses the necessity of reading in particular for a group that has historically been denied equal participation in society through the denial of literacy.

  71 Gonnerman, “Million Dollar Blocks,” 27. 72 Jihad, Street Life, 331. 73 Jihad, “Personal Interview.” Jihad also deploys the expression in Street Life, when Lincoln’s fellow inmate, a Muslim named Smithbay, explains to him that one of the main problems of the urban black youth is their lack of interest in reading. Jihad, Street Life, 253.



T HE STREET -PRISON S YMBIOSIS | 325

The obvious breaking with the cycle of imprisonment as depicted in Street Life, however, represents a rare outcome in the genre. Usually stories exhibit how the characters’ illicit activities lead to their failure, either in form of incarceration or death. A typical example is the protagonist Malik in J. M. Benjamin’s novel My Manz and ‘Em, self-published by the author in 2007, who himself has spent over twelve years in state and federal prison for his involvement in the drug trade.74 Like the author, the novel’s protagonist grew up in the West Second Street housing projects in Plainfield, New Jersey and is familiar with various illicit activities, having “hustled most of his teenage years all the way into adulthood.”75 The linkage between prisons and streets stands at the center of the thirdperson narrative that opens with Malik being arrested and sentenced in 1996 for ten years due to his participation in a murder and robbery. Picking up Malik’s story at the end of his prison sentence, My Manz and Em focuses on Malik’s attempted re-entry into society. Having not only converted to Islam but also having changed from an ill-tempered into a more introverted and thoughtful person, Malik returns with the intention of living a “regular” life. He wants a job in the “mainstream” economy and to detach himself from his former drug crew, who did not support him during his incarceration. Malik’s choice for an alternative route, however, is problematized by his return to a high-poverty area inextricably linked to the prison apparatus. Offering no alternatives to illicit street practices, he perceives his neighborhood as “designed [...] for you to go back.”76 With the permanent influx of former prisoners, “each block always had one or a few of their boys come home and bring that flavour back to the hood”; here, street and prison culture are mutually dependent with former inmates even enjoying a certain reputation for “looking healthy and bright like so many other brothers who came from prison after doing time.”77 Since prison experiences have turned into a positive attribute that guarantees a better reputation on the streets, the street-prison linkage is not only been accepted in the novel as a given but is also perpetuated by the victims themselves. The high number of black males incarcerated is particularly reflected in the neighborhood’s nightlife where “women [...] out- numbered the men by three to

  74 J. M. Benjamin, “Personal Interview,” June 24, 2010, A New Quality bookstore in Plainfield, New Jersey. 75 J. M. Benjamin, My Manz and 'Em (Plainfield, NJ: 2007), 152. 76 Ibid., 226. 77 Ibid., 112. Presumably, J. M. Benjamin’s quote primarily refers to inmates spending a lot of time working on their bodies while being incarcerated, since food and health care that are provided in US prisons are usually substandard.



326 | K RISTINA G RAAFF

one.”78 This ratio partially explains most novels’ gender relations that find expression in few wealthy drug dealers who financially support and maintain relationships with several women, a constellation usually accepted by all parties. While the state’s presence upon Malik’s release is reduced to the parole office, where the high number of former convicts are processed “like you were at a busy fast food restaurant,”79 the “reintegration program” is mostly covered by former partners in crime, who make sure that upon their return, ex-convicts “get set up lovely when [...] [they] touched.”80 Reconnecting to the networks on site—which are often the only ones available—usually includes the provision of “start-up” money as well as a job offer in one of the local drug operations and thereby represents a central element in the perpetuation of the street-prison symbiosis. Initially convinced that he would not return to the drug dealing business, Malik applies for numerous jobs in the “regular” economy. However, due to his prison record he is unable to find legal employment—a barrier most formerly incarcerated African Americans face.81 When pressure from his parole officer increases, Malik finally associates with his former inmate friend Justice, who had built up a major local crack trade since his release from prison. Having begun “to question his capabilities as a working man”82 during his unsuccessful job search, Malik perceives his return to the street business as a failure, increasing the likelihood of becoming incarcerated again. He also, however, associates it with masculine independence and self-assurance: “He was now feeling himself. The more he spoke [about him reentering the business] the more alive he began to feel. This was a feeling that he had missed, and it felt good to him.”83 Apart from being the only employment option offered to him, Malik also connects drug selling to a certain entrepreneurial freedom: “I don’t need an interview with no boss. I’m my own boss, make my own hours, and I pay myself. I know, ain’t no longevity in this shit and I’m not trying to make a career out of it either, I’m just trying to stack some paper, so I can live comfortably.”84 The perceived entrepreneurial liberty, however, is fleeting. Deeply involved in the fights over local drug territories, Malik falls back into the “street mentality,” killing not only a former crew member for denouncing him

  78 Ibid., 117. 79 Ibid., 47. 80 Ibid., 51. 81 Pager, Marked, 33, 68, 146. 82 Benjamin, My Manz and 'Em, 179. 83 Ibid., 242. 84 Ibid., 256.



T HE STREET -PRISON S YMBIOSIS | 327

and bringing about his last arrest but also avenging the eventual murder of his drug partner Justice. Having been under surveillance by the Drug Enforcement Administration since his return from prison, however, Malik is arrested again, and this time sentenced for 33 years. His arrest affirms the thoughts of the judge, who, having released him only six months ago, believed that he would in fact see Malik again. It was almost guaranteed he thought. With Malik being a young black male, limited job skills and qualifications, minimum education, a felony conviction on his jacket, and not to mention a twenty-year back number he had on parole he was bound to return. [...] Recidivism was what kept the prisons operating. Prison was a revolving door for many.85

Closing with a didactic epilogue characteristic for street literature cautionary tales, J. M. Benjamin draws upon his own street and prison experiences not only to retrospectively authenticate his narrative but to also obtain the necessary authority, allowing him to address those who are “faced with similar situations as Malik, growing up in poverty stricken environments.”86 Despite acknowledging the unequal conditions that most from these urban neighborhoods are confronted with, Benjamin challenges especially the “ex-offenders and individuals who [...] are still living the street life”87 to not become conditioned by the environment, but instead to “find a new profession, and a new product” that allows them to eventually break with the street-prison cycle.

V. S TREET L ITERATURE AND THE M ATERIAL S TREET -P RISON S YMBIOSIS For several street literature authors, their own novels have turned into that alternative product allowing for their entrance into legal business ventures and helping to steer those with a prison record away from the return to illicit economies. Among those formerly incarcerated writers who have successfully managed to transfer their entrepreneurial skills from illegal activities to the book business are the authors of the previously discussed novels. Upon their release, J. M. Benjamin and Jihad founded their own self-publishing companies (Real Edutainment Publishing and Envisions Publishing respectively) that comprise the organization

  85 Ibid., 31. 86 Ibid., 367. 87 Ibid., 368.



328 | K RISTINA G RAAFF

of the entire book production process ranging from editing and designing to the marketing and distribution of their novels.88 Both authors display a similar entrepreneurial perseverance, necessary for their earlier involvement in the drug business. They also, however, deploy their experiences and connections to the street economy and prison system on several other levels. As especially J. M. Benjamin points out, on a personal-psychological level, fiction writing that contains clear autobiographical components serves a therapeutic function, allowing for the processing of past prison and street experiences.89 On a narrative level, both authors primarily refer to the street-prison linkage in their novels to raise awareness and a political consciousness among their readers. They portray the two institutions variously as an oppressive apparatus, a transitory stage, or a deterrent material reflection of the characters’ state of mind. As their novels are thus centrally addressed to those who can relate to the described characters, the street-prison connection is, finally, also found on a distribution and marketing level. As Jihad confirms, he personally ships large parts of his books to prisoners. The books are often paid for by relatives or out of the prisoners’ commissary accounts. Essential for keeping prisoners informed about his new publications are advertisements that Jihad places in magazines with high prisoner readership, like Don Diva, XXL, or King Magazine. At the same time, Jihad also serves the street market by ensuring that his books are available on street-vending stands such as the ones in Harlem and downtown Brooklyn and he is constantly traveling the country for book presentations and signings.90 J. M. Benjamin also established himself through his presence at public spots and clearly acknowledges the parallels between drug and book selling: “I go out

  88 Apart from the self-publishing company, since his return J. M. Benjamin also founded A New Quality Publishing that also publishes books by other street literature authors. He also opened A New Quality Literary Lounge and Boutique in his hometown Plainfield, a multimedia store that centrally focuses on the selling of street literature novels. Jihad, moreover, established the Wake-Up Everybody Foundation that collects funds for the education of black youth, generated through Jihad’s self-help guides, book selling, and speaking events. Jihad, “Personal Interview”; Benjamin, “Personal Interview.” 89 J. M. Benjamin and Randy Kearse, From Incarceration 2 Incorporation: The Rise, Fall and Rise Again Of . . . (Plainfield: 2008), 74. 90 Jihad, “Personal Interview.”



T HE STREET -PRISON S YMBIOSIS | 329

there and grind, just like before—I just switched my product.”91 Hence, adding these alternative distribution practices to the common wholesale and book-chain market allows these authors to address two groups—prisoners and residents of high-poverty neighborhoods—that were hitherto rather neglected by the book distribution market. With both authors also working as motivational speakers, visiting correctional facilities, schools, and community institutions to address topics such as literacy, cultural awareness, and the venture into entrepreneurialism, they undoubtedly aim to prevent recidivism and the subsistence of the symbiosis between streets and prison.92 The new cultural infrastructures that were built with the continuing output of street literature stories, however, also depend on and to some extent even contribute to the maintenance of the close linkage between prison and streets. This becomes visible when considering for instance the street literature publishers that cater particularly to writers with prison experiences. Hampstead Publishing is among these firms, established by Susan Hampstead in 2004. Hampstead is also the co-founder of the aforementioned prisoner magazine Don Diva. Having initially planned to write a street literature novel herself, she realized that there were “too many talented people incarcerated”93 who were lacking the necessary infrastructure to get their book out. She thus established a small-sized independent publishing house, located in New Jersey, that currently has five formerly or presently incarcerated authors under contract. As she confirms, in agreement with other independent publishers, most received submissions stem from prisoners, who centrally enhance the diversification of the genre and its market development outside of prison, and therefore contribute in large part to the genre’s

  91 Kevin Coyne, “Ex-Con Back in the ’Hood, Hustling His Novel Now,” New York Times, November 27, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/nyregion/nyregion special2/25colnj.html. The existing parallels between the so-called “hustling” of drugs and novels have been widely acknowledged in the street literature scene. They reach as far as authors naming their publishing firms after their former gangs, as prominent writer and former convict Vickie Stringer did with Triple Crown Publications, which today is among the largest independent street literature presses. See David Wright, “Streetwise Urban Fiction,” Library Journal 131, no. 12 (2006). 92 Benjamin and Kearse, From Incarceration 2 Incorporation; Jihad, “Inspirational Student, Teacher and Speaker,” http://www.jihadwrites.com/speaker.html. 93 Susan Hampstead, “Telephone Interview,” December 12, 2009.



330 | K RISTINA G RAAFF

continuing existence.94 According to Hampstead, prisoners count among the most grateful authors, usually refraining from negotiating offered book deals out of thankfulness for being heard at all. Furthermore, they are also very marketable because their prison record can be deployed as a publicity tool for the buyers back on the streets for whom narratives “feel more authentic from a person that is incarcerated, or was incarcerated.”95 Although publishers thus ensure the literary presence of prisoners beyond the correctional facilities—thereby paving a way for a potential legal post-incarceration occupation—they, nevertheless, also embrace the street-prison linkage because many novels’ success precisely depends on their autobiographical underpinning. Although not comparable to the aforementioned forms of organized inmate labor, within the street literature scene one can also find tendencies resembling what Wacquant has described as the extraction of cheap labor from prisoners. Especially incarcerated first-time authors do not see themselves as being in a position to negotiate publishing contracts, with the result that many sell their narratives for less than what they are worth. In several cases, prisoners’ manuscripts have been published under the names of already established nonincarcerated writers or publishers, not always with the consent of the original author.96 Among the (in)voluntary ghostwriters are many prisoners serving life

  94 Ibid; Wahida Clark, “Personal Interview,” December 15, 2009, in the office of her publishing house Wahida Clark Publishing; Hickson, “Email Interview” July 13, 2010. 95 Hampstead, “Telephone Interview.” Susan Hampstead, however, also points out the drawbacks connected to the publishing of imprisoned writers. Since they are not able to be present for events such as readings and book signings, sales numbers for street literature novels by imprisoned authors tend to always be below those that can promote their book in person. For this reason, Hampstead began to not only give book presentations and autographs in lieu of the incarcerated authors; she additionally began to sign up authors who were not in prison at the time of book publication. Considering, however, the high reentry rate of former prisoners, some of her authors unexpectedly returned to prison. 96 Among the most discussed cases is the publisher and author Teri Woods. According to exchanges on book discussion forums, for example Allreaders.com or Thumperscorner.com, Teri Woods heavily relied on material written by various male prisoners that she gave out as having produced herself, among them the True to the Game and Dutch series. See the forums http://www.allreaders.com/ Board.asp?listpage=2&BoardID=31769 and http://www.thumperscorner.com/discus/ messages/36042/33032.html. In a remarkable move, Kwame Teague, the claimed



T HE STREET -PRISON S YMBIOSIS | 331

sentences, presumably because they will never become direct competition on the outside street literature market and due to the fact that, being surrounded by a permanent stream of newly arriving prisoners, they can constantly draw upon new street crime material for upcoming books. To a certain extent, correctional facilities thus function as “literary factories” for the production of gritty stories for the outside street literature market. Readers, finally, also have their share in affirming the linkage between street and prison life as can be exemplified by reception studies conducted with incarcerated female street literature readers.97 Often coming from the same highpoverty areas or being themselves incarcerated, many of them prefer those stories that draw upon traceable street crimes and do not explicitly criticize existing conditions, such as the symbiosis and its racial component. Instead many rather use the novels as “a reminder of home”98 and as a way to stay abreast of recent developments in their communities, especially the latest street slang and clothing styles. Also those who claim to particularly enjoy the exaggerated portrayals of moneymaking and the characters’ conspicuous spending of the earned drug money do not openly display a critical understanding of the existing linkage between street and prison.99 The novels’ negative impact is also supported by those who admit that they avoid tales that do not point out alternatives to the destructive lifestyle, since they make them feel trapped in a negative mindset.100 Nevertheless, it is impossible to generally predict decisive readings or effects brought about by the more uncritical narratives. Many readers thus also deploy the negative role models as counter examples or transform them into positive templates by using them to articulate their own injustices.101

    messages/36042/33032.html. In a remarkable move, Kwame Teague, the claimed author of the Dutch series, organized the self-publishing of the series’ finale from inside prison, which is now available under his name at selected street stands and street literature bookstores in Harlem. 97

Megan Sweeney, Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women's

98

Ibid., 148.

99

Ibid., 153.

Prisons (Chapel Hill: 2010).

100 Ibid., 148. 101 Ibid., 159, 162, 171.



332 | K RISTINA G RAAFF

VI. C ONCLUSION Examining how the genre of street literature relates to the symbiosis between high-poverty urban neighborhoods and the US’s prison system—a symbiosis that can be considered as the most recent form of spatial, social, economic, and political exclusion especially targeting African Americans—leads to ambiguous findings. Many of the narratives critically deal with the mutual impact of street and prison life and contribute to creating awareness for the contemporary processes of exclusion that are inherent to the symbiosis. Others, however, exemplify the protagonists’ criminal behavior and incarceration as a given and—despite the unpredictability of reading practices—therefore contribute to the association of African American dwellers in high-poverty neighborhoods with criminality, suggesting that a close linkage between streets and prison is indeed necessary. At the same time, the continuously expanding genre promotes literacy among people from marginalized spaces and has brought about new cultural infrastructures, including street vending stands, independent publishers, printing and distribution firms. Representing a relevant alternative source of income especially for former prisoners, these new entrepreneurial niches can undoubtedly help to reduce recidivism. However, since incarcerated writers centrally contribute to the supply of new narratives, and street and prison experiences also represent important marketing tools, the genre’s existence heavily relies on the great number of authors and readers constantly oscillating between the two locations. Nevertheless—regardless if street literature supports or challenges the two correlating institutions—the existence of a black cultural expression that is infused by the linkage between street and prison life on all levels indicates the extent to which it represents a major part of contemporary urban segregation processes affecting especially African Americans. By expanding Wacquant’s concept of a ghetto-prison symbiosis to a street-prison symbiosis, this essay has aimed at exemplifying a shift in perspective, giving examples of how diverse and contrary the intertwined locations can be perceived, used, and represented by those who inhabit them or are directly confronted by them. The shift is also intended to illustrate how, to an even greater extent, “the streets” express the inextricable linkage to the prison system since the term—in contrast to “ghetto”— no longer refers to other, more affluent parts of the city. Not only in relation to the prison system but also as a supplement to the biased term “ghetto,” “the streets” can thus represent a useful tool to focus on the daily practices of the disenfranchised that are a response to urban segregation processes in twenty-firstcentury America.





Urban Ethnicity, World City, and the Hookah: The Potential of Thick-Thin Descriptions in Urban Anthropology A LEXA F ÄRBER

“Caution–Water Pipe” was the title of a study published by the FriedrichshainKreuzberg Bezirksamt (district office) in July 2007 about young people’s water pipe (or hookah) consumption in the urban district of Berlin with a population of approximately 270,000. The district office is alarmed. While the young customers and the proprietors of the eighteen surveyed cafés and stores played down the harmfulness of smoking water pipes, the district maintained that the health risks associated with smoking water pipes are as serious as those of smoking cigarettes.1 Half a year later, the federal state of Berlin, too, established a ban on smoking in restaurants and cafés on January 1, 2008. At this time, the daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel considered how the future of the water pipe cafés was at stake and was surprised about the urban complexity of this consumer product. While directories listed ninety-six restaurants, cafés, and bars that offered “shishas” (the term most commonly used in Berlin for water pipes),2 the true number of establishments offering water pipes was assumed to be twice as high.3

  1

Bezirksamt Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, ed., Vorsicht Wasserpfeife (Berlin: 2007), 11, http://www.berlin.de/ba-friedrichshain-kreuzberg/verwaltung/org/planleit/ wasserpfeife.html.

2

On the different terms for and types of pipes, see Kamal Chaouachi, Le narguilé: Anthropologie d’un mode d’usage de drogues douces (Paris: 1997); Kamal Chaouachi, Tout savoir sur le narguilé: Societé, culture, histoire et santé (Paris: 2007).

3

Cay Dobberke, “Rauchverbot; Keine Ausnahme für die Wasserpfeife,” Der Tagesspiegel, January 4, 2008. In fact, it is impossible to ascertain a precise number using



334 | ALEXA F ÄRBER

On the websites that count and rate such venues, such as Shishaguide, ShishaForum, or Pimp My Pipe, Berlin always has the most entries—and the most controversial ratings—pointing to the significance of water pipes for Berlin’s culture of consumption, especially among its youth.4 Since 2003, the water pipe has blazed “multilane” trails into the urban consumption landscape, a trend which tobacconists as well as “shisha” shop and café owners have confirmed, and, in the process, the range of products and services linked to it has become increasingly differentiated. The fact that the consumer product “water pipe” and its various potential contexts have become more widespread and differentiated is not remarkable in and of itself: this is merely a part of the capitalist system of goods and can, for example, also be observed in the case of coffee (from coffee-roasting establishments to “coffee to go”) during this same time period.5 What is remarkable, however, is the degree to which the “hookah” has entered into the symbolic economy of the city of Berlin. A float competition during Berlin’s popular summer festival “Carnival of Cultures” in 2004—when a youth club from the district of Neukölln won the “best float” category for a float depicting a smoking water pipe as the vehicle of “Fusion e.V.”—demonstrates the cultural prominence of the water pipe. This

    the numerous websites available because of substantial fluctuation in the hospitality industry. 4

It is not only the names of the websites, such as Pimp My Pipe or Pimp My Shisha that point to water pipe consumption as a predominantly youth-culture phenomenon, in this case echoing MTV’s Pimp My Car format. The forums of the websites mirror the enactment of practices of distinction relating to the city or district. For example, the forum on the website Shishaforum.de, organized by urban districts, not only knowledge about the neighborhood is exchanged and thereby made a topic of discussion but style and taste as well. The site uses a rhetoric of classification partly designed to exaggerate, using types of tobacco, ambiance, service, and patrons of individual establishments as distinguishing features. See Alexa Färber, “Zone B. Ein Haiku mit Anmerkungen,” in Orte – Situationen – Atmosphären. Kulturanalytische Skizzen, ed. Beate Binder et al. (Frankfurt/M.: 2010), 267–74.

5

The success of coffee-roasting establishments, coffee bars, and “coffee to go” began in Berlin at approximately the same time as that of water pipes (about 2003). On the US market, among others, see William Roseberry, “The Rise of Yuppie Coffees and the Reimagination of Class in the United States,” American Anthropologist 98, no. 4 (1996): 762–75. Kamal Chaouachi, in Le narguilé and Tout savoir sur le narguilé, examines the symbolically complementary meanings of the water pipe and coffee as well as their simultaneous cultural proximity.



U RBAN ETHNICITY , W ORLD C ITY,

AND THE

HOOKAH | 335

was also the year with the largest audience at the carnival to date, with approximately 1.8 million viewers in addition to roughly 5,000 participants. The award committee’s explanatory statement for selecting the “hookah” float read, “Neukölln’s new cultural icon.”6 Urban anthropological research on festivals such as the summer carnival in Berlin has demonstrated that a certain “cultural plausibility” is required for ethnically marked products and their meanings to be “transacted” within the city’s symbolic economy.7 The ambivalence between creative self-invention and definition appropriate for the market, recently described by John L. and Jean Comaroff as “ethnicity, inc.,” certainly manifests itself here.8 But this alone is not a sufficient explanation of the presence of the water pipe in the urban space. Studying difference in the forms of ethnicity and the urban spaces of opportunity is closely linked with urban research. This link holds true especially for US urban research, from Robert E. Parks and the early works of the Chicago School to the classic case studies by Herbert J. Gans or Ulf Hannerz. It holds equally true for the British social anthropology studies that initially focused on non-European fields of research, but were later also conducted “at home,” sparked by Abner Cohen in the 1970s. In this essay, I present the relationship between ethnic representation and urban culture in the late modern, post-industrial city in the form of an ethnographical chapter on the water pipe as a consumer product. The ethnographic approach here is partly provoked by the conceptual proposal of this volume, namely, “thick space” and “metropolitanism.” For “ethnoscientists,” the term “thick space” invariably elicits the terminological reflex “thick description.” When asked to comment on thickness in terms of rich (re)construction of meaning, cultural meaning, or even symbolic surplus in the ethnosciences, one cannot avoid referring to the paradigm of interpretive ethnology formulated by Clifford Geertz which—to this day and across disciplinary boundaries—encapsulates the hermeneutic approach of cultural analysis. As Geertz writes:

  6

Karneval der Kulturen, Dokumentation der Preisträger des Wettbewerbs (Berlin,

7

Michi Knecht and Peter Niedermüller, “The Politics of Cultural Heritage: An Urban

2004). Approach,“ Ethnologia Europaea 32, no. 2 (2002): 89–104; Michi Knecht and Levent Soysal, eds., Plausible Vielfalt. Wie der Karneval der Kulturen denkt, lernt und Kultur macht (Berlin: 2005). 8



John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc. (Chicago: 2009).

336 | ALEXA F ÄRBER

Our double task is to uncover the conceptual structures that inform our subjects’ acts, the ‘said’ of social discourse, and to construct a system of analysis in whose terms what is generic to those structures, what belongs to them because they are what they are, will stand out against the other determinants of human behavior. In ethnography, the office of theory is to provide a vocabulary in which what symbolic action has to say about itself […] can be expressed.9

Thick description offers this potential in the form of a cultural analysis. Geertz again: “The essential vocation of interpretive anthropology is not to answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answers that others […] have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said.”10 The following description in terms of the cultural analysis of a consumption landscape that is grounded translocally and has evolved around the water pipe in cities such as Berlin provides such a prospect. Since ethnic representations or potentially ethnifying meanings in urban space are considered to be important “pieces of evidence” for the cultural role of “world cities,” I would first like to sketch out which (partial) research perspectives (and results) these concepts offer, employing the terms “urban ethnicity” and “world city.” The research questions that terms such as “urban ethnicity” have raised over time display a shift away from an interest in practices leading to homogenizing cultural group identities and toward identity policies and strategies that are understood today to be much more situational. The various concepts of “world city” deal with more than the inevitable center-periphery relationships that are implemented by globally networked local groups of actors. They explicate the active and ambivalent roles of ethnically entrepreneurial actors who create value out of cultural difference in the symbolic economy of the cities. Research perspectives that, in contrast, focus on the transfer of products (rather than on the transfer of meaning), use an entirely process-based, situational concept of ethnicity. In addition, these different approaches correspond with the interests of a thick description oriented toward meanings or a thin description oriented toward practices (of meanings). I would like to present this diversity of perspectives using the example of the consumer product of the water pipe. I will pursue its potential as a product with “ethnic” meaning in Berlin’s “landscape of taste” using the paradigm of urban

  9

Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: 1973), 27.

10 Ibid., 30.



U RBAN ETHNICITY , W ORLD C ITY,

AND THE

HOOKAH | 337

ethnicity, and its everyday, consumption-oriented metropolitan form. In addition, I follow the paths the goods—water pipes and water pipe tobacco—take to the city, to the extent permitted by the scope of my research. Finally, I would like to ask to what degree these two analytical approaches could contribute to elucidating the term thick metropolis. In the final analysis, it must be able to explain to what degree difference structures the extent and forms of social participation in the metropolis. The questions to be asked are: In which way does the articulation of difference contribute to people’s inclusion in or exclusion from urban society? In short, which spaces of opportunity are opened up through the articulation of difference, and where do their boundaries lie? Which economic, social, cultural, and symbolic resources are available for this purpose in a “thick metropolis”?

I. U RBAN E THNICITY : L OCALLY S PECIFIC , B ACKGROUND -S PECIFIC , AND G ENERATION -S PECIFIC I DENTITY P RACTICES [W]e must remember that ethnicity is a matter of degree. There is ethnicity and ethnicity. —ABNER COHEN11

“Urban ethnicity”12 refers to a field of tension within the city. Within it, ethnicity finds its expression in the spatial structuring of ethnic-cultural difference, in the segregation and in the reproduction of urban underclasses.13 As a research perspective, “urban ethnicity” opens up a multidisciplinary field in which the power of political regulation and articulations or the opportunities to appropriate space in one’s own way are up for debate.14 But only in the rarest of cases is the

  11 Abner Cohen, “Introduction: The Lesson of Ethnicity,” in Urban Ethnicity, ed. Abner Cohen (London: 1974), xiv. 12 For Cohen, the city is less a social fabric that transcends the nation state, than a mirror and magnifying glass for analyzing the nation state’s underlying social relationships. 13 For a summary, see Peter Niedermüller, “Stadt, Kultur(en) und Macht. Zu einigen Aspekten ‘spätmoderner’ Stadtethnologie,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 3 (1998): 279–301. 14 Aygen Erdentug and Freek Colombijn, eds., Urban Ethnic Encounters: The Spatial Consequences (London, 2002); Alisdair Rogers and Steven Vertovec, eds., The Urban Context. Ethnicity, Social Networks and Situational Analysis (Oxford: 1995).



338 | ALEXA F ÄRBER

powerful urban representation of “white ethnicity,” which does not recognize itself as such, the object of study.15 Within an urban society, ethnicity can then be considered to be both a means of distinguishing ethnic minorities and a problem of marginalization or integration. In both cases, urban ethnicity becomes the social and political function of a cultural order of urban society, according to the hypothesis developed by studying US and Western European cities. The current starting point for understanding the relationship between urban culture and ethnic representation is identity politics, in which ethnic affiliations are symbolically orchestrated and negotiated. An analysis of identity politics provides a thick description of this cultural order’s multifaceted layers of meaning. With a view to the cultural web of meanings, social relationships then sometimes meld overly quickly to create social cohesion in the form of a neighborhood, a community, or a primordial ethnic community. Others examine locally specific spaces of opportunity as a construction of local ethnic communities, cultures of class differences, or powerful and contested meanings of social participation and representation in the city, in which thick description must capture collective identity-making as if it were a still photograph, in both the research and writing process.16 Cultural anthropologist Regina Römhild argues that the dynamic of ethnification is generation specific. Concerning (urban) self-organization on the part of immigrants and their descendants, she recognizes different tactics of “selfethnification.” For many migrants recruited as Gastarbeiter (“guest workers”), she writes, “joining together on their own terms in migrants’ clubs and religious organizations” served as “place[s] of communal support.”17 Today, these clubs are often viewed as “symbol[s] of self-seclusion and withdrawal from society.”18 Younger generations of migrants or descendants of migrants “no longer [feel] directly addressed by such forms of ethnic self-representation.”19 Instead, these

  15 See the highly interesting study by Wendy Shaw on Sydney: Wendy Shaw, Cities of Whiteness (Malden, MA: 2007). 16 See the various forms of “Hispanic” identification in two neighborhoods of Albuquerque. Eveline Dürr, Identitäten und Sinnbezüge in der Stadt. Hispanics im Südwesten der USA (Münster: 2005), 185. 17 Regina Römhild, “Fremdzuschreibungen – Selbstpositionierungen. Die Praxis der Ethnisierung im Alltag der Einwanderungsgesellschaft,“ in Ethnizität und Migration. Einführung in Wissenschaft und Arbeitsfelder, ed. Brigitta Schmidt-Lauber (Berlin: 2007), 157–78. 18 Ibid., 170. 19 Ibid.



U RBAN ETHNICITY , W ORLD C ITY,

AND THE

HOOKAH | 339

generations’ collective blueprints of identity are, on the one hand, oriented toward the “transnational culture of a young, Mediterranean diaspora.”20 On the other hand, “new forms of self-organization [have] emerged that tackle the continuing power of ethnic exclusion through employing irony, art and subcultural protest.”21 Contrasting two types of water-pipe cafés supports this observation.22

II. T HE ARABIAN C OFFEE H OUSE In terms of aesthetics, the type of Arabian coffee house found in Berlin initially presents itself as mostly “Oriental.” That is, featuring furnishings such as brass lamps, lengths of fabric draping from the ceilings, and cushioned seating, as well as murals or “Orientalizing” paintings.23 Alongside this décor, however, are often plain restaurant chairs, as well as additional fluorescent lighting, with the open window frontage decorated with flashing strings of lights forming silhou-

  20 Ibid., 171. 21 Ibid. 22 In addition to long-term ethnographic surveys in Berlin (since 2003), the following sources provide the numerical foundation for the types of establishments mentioned here and the overview of them: an Internet forum specializing in water pipes that collects addresses across Germany and permits users to comment on them (Shishaguide.info); another interactive Internet forum focusing on services (Qype. com); an online business directory for Berlin (Berliner-adressen.de); the online directories of Berlin’s two city magazines (Tip-berlin.de and Zitty.de); as well as the printed edition (2010) of the Arabian business directory for Berlin Dalil Magazin. The number of establishments in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg was compared with the result of the study by the district authority of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg (2007); there was a difference of three. Overall, this area of business activity is subject to major fluctuations (business closures or changes of ownership), which is why any quantitative statement can only be a momentary snapshot. 23 A discussion of the symbolic baggage of the water pipe would be beyond the scope of this article. Three horizons of meaning, however, are evoked in the various contexts: the aesthetic Orientalism of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, the hippie culture of the 1960s and 1970s, and today’s tourism culture. Mass tourism to Turkey and Egypt is, for instance, linked to perceptible exoticism. For a theoretical introduction to the critical concept of Orientalism, see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: 1979).



340 | ALEXA F ÄRBER

ettes of hookahs. More importantly, alcohol is not served, and there are no belly dancing events. The proprietor of—in his words—“the oldest water pipe café in Berlin” emphasizes precisely this difference, thereby distancing himself with a combination of concern and disdain from the many neighboring establishments in Neukölln.24 For this reason, this “original Arabian coffee house” presents itself not only as morally unobjectionable, but also as “authentically Arabian” (which may also mean “traditional”).25 The clientele of this “Arabian coffee house” is mostly an older generation of male migrants from the Middle East and Turkey, although women do smoke water pipes here on occasion, and not all of the clientele have a migration background. In addition to consuming water pipes, tea, Arabian coffee, and nonalcoholic cold drinks, patrons play board games or watch 1950s and 1960s Arabiclanguage programs on the television. It is a place where people drop in for a while as part of their everyday routine, have a brief conversation with the proprietor, or sit with a small group of neighbors. As the proprietor told me, as late as 2004, his goal was to contribute to the social life of the neighborhood. Six years and two unsuccessful attempts to establish additional coffee houses later, he presented a more pessimistic view, in part because of the new, competing hookah bars. These types of coffee houses are few and far between in the city. They can be found only in the former working-class districts Neukölln and Wedding, in parts of Kreuzberg and Tiergarten, and in western Charlottenburg and Schöneberg. In addition, Neukölln and Wedding are areas distinctly marked as socially adverse and are considered “problem districts” in Berlin because of their high unemployment rates and high “proportions of foreigners.”26 Emphasizing the

  24 The following references to conversations with proprietors of water pipe cafés or traders are based on the fieldwork I have been conducting in Berlin since 2003. These informal conversations and participant observation are documented as field notes and minutes. I did not conduct formal interviews in this context. 25 The polarized controversies about Islam in European cities and the symbolic ascriptions made in them provide another layer of meaning that cannot be elaborated here. 26 Accordingly, the study prepared for the district Neukölln in 2008 comes to a negative conclusion: “While unemployment declined between 2001 and 2006 in Neukölln as a whole, it increased among foreigners by 0.6 percentage points. This is a stark contrast to the decline of 1.7 percentage points among Germans. The average proportion of the unemployed among the foreigners in Neukölln was 21% in 2006, compared with 14.5% among the Germans.” Hartmut Häußermann et al., Die Entwicklung der Verkehrszellen im Bezirk Neukölln 2001–2006 (Berlin: 2008), http://www.berlin.de/



U RBAN ETHNICITY , W ORLD C ITY,

AND THE

HOOKAH | 341

originality of this type of water pipe café as an “Arabian coffee house” counters this social marginalization with a morally charged ethnic marking as a frame of reference. At the same time, the existing differentiation and competition in the immediately surrounding neighborhood is the product of a high degree of entrepreneurial activity that, in turn, highlights the great significance entrepreneurship, as a form of gainful employment, holds in this milieu,27 and which characterizes the entire hospitality sector and is very common, especially among children of immigrants.28 The Oriental Lounge I In contrast to the “Arabian coffee house,” patrons do not frequent the “Oriental lounge” on a daily basis or during the daytime. Here, the water pipe is consumed as a special consumer product during the evening hours in a trendy ambiance specifically targeted toward a predominantly young, but not juvenile, clientele. The providers of this type of consumer culture are young Berliners, often with a family migration history, who locate their cafés in areas populated and frequented to a considerable degree by the young and trend conscious. This selection of locale also points to the second important target group of such establishments: tourists who are familiar with the water pipe in their home cities. Indeed, water pipe cafés emerged in many larger European and US cities in the time period described here, and they can also be observed in Mediterranean cities such as Istanbul, Beirut, or Tel Aviv. Mobile users have integrated the consumption of water pipes into their cosmopolitan lifestyle, a lifestyle that is to be flaunted and lived in the publicness of the urban space.

    imperia/md/content/baneukoelln/allgemeingoedecke/neuk__llner_entwicklung_gutach ten.pdf. 27 The statistical office of the federal states of Berlin and Brandenburg provides the following figures for the year 2009: 16.3% of people were self-employed among the working population in total and a considerably higher percentage of people were selfemployed among the working population of “non-German citizenship” (23.5%) compared to self-employed among German citizens (15.3%). Amt für Statistik BerlinBrandenburg (ed.), Statistischer Bericht A I 11 – j / 09; Ergebnisse des Mikrozensus im Land Berlin 2009, (Potsdam, 2009). 28 Maria Kontos, “Übergänge von der abhängigen zur selbständigen Arbeit in der Migration. Sozialstrukturelle und biografische Aspekte,” in Arbeitsmigration. WanderarbeiterInnen auf dem Weltmarkt für Arbeitskraft, ed. Thomas Geisen (Frankfurt/M.: 2005), 217–36.



342 | ALEXA F ÄRBER

Providers of this type of water pipe consumption compete with one another not by emphasizing the “authenticity” of what they offer, but rather by advertising the “refining” or specializing of it. For example, the proprietor of a lounge described his establishment’s special feature as being the opportunity to smoke tobacco with certain flavors not available elsewhere—tobaccos he purchases in a specialty store in Neukölln.29 In addition to the distinction of the tobacco flavor, interior decoration and ambiance are the decisive markers of difference, whereas the pipes’ unhygienic design is hardly addressed at all. Lounges are distinguished by low seating areas decked out with cushions. These lounge suites offer a sort of private space created by (transparent) curtains. These “private spaces” do not serve to separate the genders (as is the case in some traditional restaurants offering water pipes and family areas), but rather to evoke imaginations of the “Oriental,” which in turn suggests seclusion and discretion. The nightlife atmosphere of this type of lounge is underscored suggestively by playing on the relationships between private-public and discretion-indiscretion in spatial terms. Usually, these lounges are also linked to gastronomic establishments, and they serve alcohol as a matter of course, especially cocktails during “happy hours.” Kreuzberg is one of the urban districts where these “Oriental lounges” are located,30 where the water pipe steps out of the (symbolic) terrain of social marginalization and into one where it encounters other “trendy cosmopolitan products.” The water pipe does not stand for a specific, ethnically marked culture or a social group perceived in a negative way, but rather for cultural diversity—with a touch of “Oriental culture.” In this sense, it is a product that repre-

  29 This specialized knowledge is frequently presented in the form of explanations on the menu and is supported by oral communication. These various forms of “argumentation” (in writing, orally) are highly local; namely, they depend on the business concept in question. See. Marylin Halter, Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity (New York: 2000), 104. 30 This formerly marginal district of West Berlin, located near the Berlin Wall, is experiencing a renaissance in the neighborhoods where a range of enterprises and goods based on cultural diversity has established itself due to the area’s successful alternative culture and the relatively high proportion of longtime resident Turkish residents in the general population (in 2003, almost 10% since the mid-1960s). See Rainer Ohliger and Ulrich Raiser, Integration und Migration in Berlin. Zahlen – Daten – Fakten (Berlin: 2005), 13. From 1989 to the mid-1990s, Barbara Lang observed a symbolic enhancement of the district, which, however, has not been reflected in its social structure as a whole. Barbara Lang, Mythos Kreuzberg. Ethnographie eines Stadtteils 1961–1995 (Frankfurt/M.: 1998).



U RBAN ETHNICITY , W ORLD C ITY,

AND THE

HOOKAH | 343

sents both the “Orient” per se as well as an image of Berlin as a city becoming more metropolitan. Acceptance of global transformations and connections is expressed in the professionalization and localization of the consumer product, whereby it is translated aesthetically not into a playful spectacle of “Turkish” or “Arabian” ethnicity, for example, but of cosmopolitan “Orientality.” Both the “Arabian coffee house” and the “Oriental lounge” demonstrate that ethnicity in the urban space certainly can develop horizons of meaning relevant for everyday life. Urban ethnic representation is, then, a mode of meaning for public images and self-images; it offers approaches for positioning oneself and others that extend beyond historically established collective affiliations and are (biographically) variable. For this reason, historian Claire Zalc argues in her history of “foreign” businesses in France for “une histoire des trajectoires,” (a history of trajectories) rather than for reducing such businesses to the history of their provenance.31 Urban ethnic representation, then, articulates itself historically in locally specific, as well as background- and generation-specific terms, and moreover in the cultural production or “ethnic” economies.32 It is no coincidence that the market and (urban) ethnicity are linked in this way. John L. and Jean Comaroff maintain that The rise of ethno-commerce in the age of mass consumerism is having counterintuitive effects on human subjects, cultural objects, and the connection between them. While the commodification of identity is frequently taken as prima facie evidence of the cheapening of its substance, the matter has never been quite so straightforward. It has become yet further complicated of late, with the ever more active investment of capital in diversity. 33

How “productive” this connection, which the Comaroffs simply call “ethnicity, inc.,” is in urban economies can be demonstrated using the example of the latemodern and postindustrial city. The altered urban labor market and the associated societal transformation, as well as the localization of the postindustrial city within the process of intensified economic globalization, have resulted in processes of gentrification, differentiation of cultural consumption, and practices of festivalization, in which consumable ethnic diversity is actively enacted as

  31 Claire Zalc, Melting Shops: Une histoire des commercants étrangers en France (Paris: 2010), 107. 32 Comaroff and Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc., 28. 33 Ibid., 28.



344 | ALEXA F ÄRBER

themed environments,34 landscapes of tastes,35 or in non-everyday events.36 These enactments appear overly powerful; their self-legitimizing potential is interlocked with the commodification of the staged cultural identities in an extremely paradoxical manner. For this reason, the city as stage does not merely disambiguate the diversity of cultural meanings; it also renders social differentiations unproblematic by banishing real conflict offstage. This culturalization of difference has frequently been criticized as an ethnifying way of both fixing and downplaying real social discriminations.37 In addition, this suggests a perspective that focuses on connections—the competition between cities—in which urban ethnicity as a central component of urbanity is the object of cultural transfers. In the ethnosciences, this idea has been especially important in the discussion revolving around the late modern “world city,” in which “ethnic culture” is considered an important indication of these cities’ cultural potential.

III. W ORLD C ITIES , C ULTURES OF C ONSUMPTION , E VERYDAY C OSMOPOLITANISM In the 1980s and 1990s, interest in the city on the part of economists and social scientists revolved around defining a model of “global cities”38 and the “world city.”39 The different positions in this debate all approached the phenomenon of

  34 Hilje van der Horst, “Multicultural Theming: Pacifying, Essentializing and Revanchist Effects,” in Placing History: Themed Environments, Urban Consumption and the Public Entertainment Sphere, ed. Susan Ingrim and Markus Reisenleiter (Vienna: 2003), 175–200; Wun Chan, “Finding Chinatown: Ethnocentrism and Urban Planning,” in City of Quarters: Urban Villages in the Contemporary City, ed. David Bell and Mark Jayne (Burlington, VT: 2004), 173–87. 35 Rolf Lindner and Lutz Musner, “Kulturelle Ökonomien, urbane ‘Geschmackslandschaften’ und Metropolenkonkurrenz,” Informationen zur modernen Stadtgeschichte 1 (2005): 26–37. 36 Gisela Welz, Inszenierungen kultureller Vielfalt. Frankfurt am Main und New York (Berlin: 1996); Knecht and Soysal, Plausible Vielfalt. 37 See Stephan Lanz in reference to Berlin, for example. Stephan Lanz, Berlin aufgemischt. Abendländisch – multikulturell – kosmopolitisch? (Bielefeld: 2007). 38 Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: 1991). 39 John Friedmann, “The World City Hypothesis,” in World Cities in a World System, ed. Paul Knox and Peter Taylor (Cambridge: 1995), 317–31.



U RBAN ETHNICITY , W ORLD C ITY,

AND THE

HOOKAH | 345

a strengthening of urban centers and their transnational connections mostly via economic, statistically recorded criteria that is quite a flimsy basis for argumentation when viewed from an ethnological perspective. Yet, even in the revision of the “world city debate,” it became apparent that this controversial category could not be founded solely upon the availability of classical economic resources (population, size of industrial and trade missions, etc.) in the cities in question. At that time, Anthony King emphasized the cultural, constructive character of this theoretical model, thereby referring to the reproducibility of the “world city” as a scientific “cultural representation.” King wrote: “That the construction of the category ‘world city’ is based primarily on an interpretation of some aspects of what are referred to as ‘economic data’ does not disguise the fact that ‘world city’ is essentially a cultural construct, constituted at a particular time and in particular spaces of the Western academy.”40 This addressed a cultural aspect of the model of the “world city” (that must be considered a prerequisite in order for the model to be transferred successfully to other spheres of discourse) and contributed to a kind of self-reflexivity in the practice of urban policy. In addition, the hypothesis of the symbolic economy has contributed to enhancing cultural meaning. Culture—in its city-specific form—is that resource for the “world city” of late modernity, which is converted into symbolic capital and exploited in cities’ symbolic economies.41 Without the economic signifycance of the global economic centers at their disposal, “world cities” attempt to portray themselves as cultural places and stages of a global world.42 These metropolises follow a “new logic of creating added value” in which both the symbolic and the cultural economy of the city in question are supported.43 The “world city” model offered by cultural anthropology, for which Swedish cultural anthropologist and urban researcher Ulf Hannerz provided the decisive im-

  40 Anthony King, “Re-Presenting World Cities: Cultural Theory/Social Practice,” in World Cities in a World System, ed. Paul Knox and Peter Taylor (Cambridge: 1995), 216. Cf. also John Friedmann who emphasizes the programmatic aspect of the “world city hypothesis”: The “world city hypothesis […]. is primarily intended as a framework for research. It is neither a theory nor a universal generalization about cities, but a starting point for political enquiry.” Friedmann, “The World City Hypothesis,” 317. 41 Sharon Zukin, The Culture of Cities (Oxford: 2005). 42 Niedermüller, “Stadt,” 248–49. 43 Lindner and Musner, “Kulturelle Ökonomien,” 32.



346 | ALEXA F ÄRBER

pulse,44 observes precisely this form of economic enhancement of culture and thinks through this type of city starting from its points of intersection. World cities ensure that they can be recognized as “cultural marketplaces” and transfer centers and are tied to specific groups of actors and their translocal practices of connection. Hannerz mentions four groups of actors that contribute to the specific cultural role of world cities: the international business community, artists, tourists, and migrants. In addition, among the most relevant and influential actors in a world city are those who actively shape the city’s character through their involvement, for example, in urban planning or academic discourses.45 Urban ethnicity and the cultural role of the world city overlap here so that they are capable of providing the material that thick description requires in the search for webs of meaning and their effectiveness for the self-explanation of the city and its population. At the same time, a research perspective oriented toward specific places, neighborhoods, and collective identities is complemented by one that examines the diverse, mobile groups of actors. This intersection of research perspectives, otherwise considered to be a competition between the local and the global, is where multilocal, ethnically marked, and everyday cultures come into view in the form of restaurants, markets, and music scenes, which draw upon translocal cultural transfers from the “world cities.” Consumer cultures come into focus here, as well as the products, spatial practices, and forms of conviviality connected to them.46 Ethnically marked products and the “scenography” of their sale/consumption materialize the tension between the local and the global (in the form of the knowledge that they require and produce), and provide a material form for the cosmopolitan features of a city.47 The cosmopolitan type of water pipe lounge renders legible the possible contribution of these businesses for the production of cosmopolitan meaning. These establishments find a sounding board in the urban districts that are permeated with tourism, are largely gentrified, or are fairly well off. (In Berlin, this includes

  44 Ulf Hannerz, “The Cultural Role of World Cities,” in Humanising the City? Social Contexts of Urban Life at the Turn of the Millennium, ed. Abner Cohen and Katsuyoshi Fukui (Edinburgh: 1993), 67–84. 45 King, “Re-Presenting,” 216. 46 Anne Raulin, L’ethnique est quotidien: Diasporas, marchés et cultures métropolitaines (Paris: 2000); Antoine Pécoud, “Entrepreneurship and Identity: Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Competencies Among German-Turkish Businesspeople in Berlin,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30, no. 1 (2004): 3–20. 47 Ibid., 18.



U RBAN ETHNICITY , W ORLD C ITY,

AND THE

HOOKAH | 347

parts of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain as well as neighborhoods in Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg, and Charlottenburg). At the same time, this potential, which relies on “multiple cultural ties” and which can be considered to be “cultural capital in the ‘ethnic economies’ of the immigrant societies”48 is transformed into a popular youth-oriented consumer culture or “everyday cosmopolitanism” in many places.49 The Oriental Lounge II In Berlin, a variant of the “Oriental lounge” is most often rooted in self-employment and partly established on a family-based economy. Accordingly, the business model is oriented toward diverse opportunities for consumption, thereby attracting a fairly wide range of young people, many of who have a background of migration from Arabian countries or from Turkey, or who have parents born in Russia or Germany. The young customers,50 who, in case of doubt about their legal age, are asked by the service staff for identification, usually come in pairs or groups of one or both genders. They often share one or two water pipes, which are sometimes offered at especially low prices—women can sometimes smoke for 3.50 Euros between 5 and 7 p.m., for example. Consumption of food and drink depends on the time of day (the lounges are open either all day or from the late afternoon until approximately 3 a.m.) as well as the patrons’ convictions and lifestyles. Alcohol is forbidden, for example, to practicing Muslims. Nevertheless, women wearing headscarves for religious reasons also count among the patrons. Others drink cocktails or, especially on weekends, more expensive alcoholic drinks, such as a bottle of vodka with several cans of Red Bull. In addition to this (economic) space of opportunity, the broad scope of sociability possible here is remarkable. The term “chilling” is often used for this form of conviviality—relaxing, getting away from it all, and more than anything, it is a way of spending time together with a circle clearly and closely circumscribed by the water pipe and handing around its hose. Smoking in a café opens up the possibility of meeting and sharing in an innocuous way, out of which “something more can develop,” either for everyone together or for individuals

  48 Römhild, “Fremdzuschreibungen,” 173. 49 Ibid. 50 The quantitative survey in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg came to the conclusion that overall, girls smoke water pipes less than boys (but they smoke slightly more cigarettes). Bezirksamt Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, Vorsicht Wasserpfeife, 16.



348 | ALEXA F ÄRBER

(jointly moving on to another activity, achieving a certain position in a clique, getting closer to someone, etc.). The guests draw the curtains of the private spaces, which are always in high demand and are sometimes accentuated spatially by platforms, depending on the degree of intimacy they desire—which is not always welcomed by the proprietors. Drawn back, the curtains become part of the decor. Gender-segregated space and its transgression as addressed in literature on the Orientalist regime of gazes plays a prominent role in this context,51 thus giving rise to another horizon of meaning for the water pipe: the touristic realm of voyeuristic experience. This is evoked through the Orientalizing and exoticizing elements of the decor (lengths of fabric draped from the ceiling, the patterns of the fabric covering the cushions, private spaces, wooden tables) and particularly through objects that reference Pharaonic Egypt. Pictures of sphinxes, statues of Anubis, hieroglyph drawings on papyrus, and so on are commonplace collectables and heighten the atmosphere of exoticism that has been made part of everyday life. But the question of the dimension of ethnic significance remains ambiguous, despite references to the “authenticity” of the tobacco products, the menu, and the decor. In some places, the ambiance suggestive of an Egyptian vacation is disrupted by a map of Palestine mounted on the wall. The explanation by a young Arabic employee working in a lounge whose private spaces are especially high in demand illustrates how “ethnic elements” are brought into play in this form of social conviviality. In response to my question of where the patrons come from, he said that actually everyone came here: Arabs, Turks, Russians, but also tourists. On weekends, he noted, bouncers worked the door to keep the Arabs out in particular—they only caused trouble. In this case, too, it would be wrong to interpret offering and consuming products that are elsewhere marked ethnically solely as identifying with an ethnically defined culture. As in all three types of establishments described here, a practice of distinction is in effect, whereby the products offered for consumption and actually consumed hold the promise of individual, symbolic distinction “sur mesure” or “à la carte.”52 In addition, in a clearly delineated urban field, these consumer products carry the potential for strategic and inte-

  51 The nineteenth-century European pictorial representations of the exotic-foreign Orient convey the impression that the water pipe supports the thematization of the imagined relations between the genders by fitting into both gender-separated spheres in equal measure. Kamal Chaouachi provides an overview of the water pipe in aesthetic Orientalism. Chaouachi, Tout savoir sur le narguilé, especially 59–64. 52 Raulin, L’ethnique, 14.



U RBAN ETHNICITY , W ORLD C ITY,

AND THE

HOOKAH | 349

grative practices within which social positions in urban society may be articulated. “Ethnic culture” in the form of goods becomes a symbolic resource in the “world city” only if the groups of actors mentioned weave them into profitable contexts, thereby contributing to the image—and the imaginary—of the city.53 The groups of actors mentioned by Hannerz and King can access these spaces and practices as consumers, for example, to highly varying degrees. However, the consistency of ethnic markings also appears to depend on the approach of the research itself. Studies that trace the idea of cultural transfer or “cultural flow” as proposed by Hannerz et al.54—and examine the condition and form of linkages between cities—come to the conclusion that the significance of ethnic collectivity proves to be highly situational, if not non-existent.

IV. G ROOVED C HANNELS OF A T RANSLOCAL E CONOMIC P RACTICE Against this background, the rules of delineating both routines and spaces of negotiating an economic practice are interesting in ethnographic and culturalanalytic terms. These rules, which Theodore C. Bestor, following Geertz,55 called “grooved channels,” are channels with which traders must grapple anew every day and which lead them “again and again through familiar settings to regular partners in accustomed arenas of trade.”56 The form of networking is up for negotiation and is therefore of cultural-analytic interest; the variously in-

  53 Alexa Färber, “Urbanes Imagineering in der postindustriellen Stadt. Zur Plausibilität Berlins als Ost-West-Drehscheibe,” in Selling Berlin: Imagebildung und Stadtmarketing von der preußischen Residenz bis zur Bundeshauptstadt, ed. Thomas Biskup and Marc Schalenberg (Stuttgart: 2008), 279–96. 54 A geopolitical constellation—between the periphery and the center—is inscribed in the idea of the “cultural flow” and its significance for the role of world cities, which has frequently been criticized as a Eurocentric distortion. See Arjun Appadurain, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: 1998); Theodore Bestor, “Supply-Side Sushi: Commodity, Market, and the Global City,” American Anthropologist 103, no. 1 (2001): 76–95; Theodor Bestor, Tsukiji, The Fish Market at the Centre of the World (Berkeley: 2004). 55 Clifford Geertz, “The Bazaar Economy,” The American Economic Review 68, no. 2 (1978): 28–32. 56 Bestor, “Supply-Side,” 51.



350 | ALEXA F ÄRBER

volved actors, actants, and physical settings must be observed at each step following the rhythm of activities. In his study of the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, Bestor calls attention to those rhythms that make the fish market the hub of the universe only during market hours: “When the marketplace is in full swing, Tsukiji is the centre of the world for the fifty thousand people who do business there each day, and for fishers and food traders around the globe.”57 Global tuna fish distribution, based here, demands that the local fish traders accept an (ethnic and) cultural attribution of the product as an element of a “Japanese” cuisine, which they themselves regard with skepticism, but indulge for economic reasons. Notes Bestor: “Although the professional knowledge and skills of a Tsukiji trader may incline him to be skeptical of many of these culturally relevant attributes, nonetheless, he and his colleagues are the agents of the process; they can resist its imperatives only at their peril.”58 Using the example of the “grooved channels” taken by water pipes and water pipe tobacco to the consumption opportunities in a city such as Berlin, one of several “grooved channels,” can be hinted at here through highlighting some of the “intersections” that shape this path and speak to their powers of definition as well. In part, these crossroads or nodes have powers of transformation in the sense of helping constellations emerge in which both the goods and the traders are confronted with new classifications that substantially determine their further paths. In the context of customs, for example, the goods are transformed into legal or illegal goods. In the context of trade fairs and trade journals, various customer profiles and contexts of goods are addressed. These paths are mentioned, but only hinted at, not least because they are subject to differing degrees of secrecy. The flow of information is restricted, at times severely, ranging from trade secrets to investigation proceedings not open to public scrutiny.59 When café operators or merchants selling water pipes or water pipe tobacco in Berlin are asked where their water pipes come from, they give one of two possible answers: Syria or Egypt, or sometimes both, the difference located in

  57 Ibid., 50. 58 Ibid., 176. 59 My empirical work regarding this translocal aspect is still in its beginnings. The material analyzed here is founded upon repeated informal conversations (including telephone and e-mail correspondence) with wholesalers and retailers, importers, representatives of tobacco companies, tobacco trade groups, the Customs Investigation Office, and Customs Criminal Investigation Office. The material used is partly available to the public, or was made available in response to requests.



U RBAN ETHNICITY , W ORLD C ITY,

AND THE

HOOKAH | 351

the bowl of the water pipe, depending on the country of manufacture.60 For the most part, the tobacco comes from Egypt, Turkey, and Jordan. If we seek to trace the path of water pipes and water pipe tobacco to Europe, we must therefore either begin directly on the ground, in Cairo for example, where one of the largest importers of water pipes to Germany has its manufacturing facilities. This importer also imports tobacco produced in Egypt. Or the quest begins with statistics, in the foreign trade register, for example, where the products are registered, categorized, and counted. When analyzing these statistics, it can be ascertained quickly that smoking utensils and tobacco cannot be traced equally well. Water pipes, a part of a larger group of goods, which are “Final products, not mentioned elsewhere” (No. 896) in the foreign trade register, are not represented individually, and can therefore not be traced precisely as imported goods. Water pipe tobacco is in the category of “Raw tobacco and tobacco products” (No. 411), which includes a somewhat smaller group of products, compared with water pipes, but also does not provide exact figures about imports.61 The tobacco associations do not give exact numbers regarding imports of water pipe tobacco either. Nevertheless, the relevant trade journals of the tobacco industry do address the water pipe;62 some long-established wholesalers of tobacco products have included water pipe tobacco in their product lines or, like a tobacco producer in Lübeck, produce it themselves in Germany as a “niche product.” The water pipe itself is then considered more as a “giveaway.” The most important difference between the two goods, however, is that water pipe tobacco is subject to German food law and excise tax, and the water pipe is not. The responsibility for monitoring national taxation lies with the customs authorities. Accordingly, the customs authorities have a key function regarding the importation of water pipe tobaccos, if not to say: they are the gatekeepers on the goods’ journey to Europe or Germany. This is also the level where the difference between legal and illegal water pipe tobacco emerges, as well as corresponding categories of actors, such as traders (versus “gang members” or

  60 In a grocery store in Neukölln with one of the largest product lines of water pipes, a model from Dubai was pointed out to me in February 2010. Water pipes made by German manufacturers are also sold in head shops. Judging by their form and place of distribution, they tend to be designed for hashish consumption. 61 Foreign Trade Register: “Gliederung der Warengruppen und -untergruppen der Ernährungs- und der Gewerblichen Wirtschaft (Ausgabe 2002, Stand 2004)”. EWG2002Gliederung,property=file-1pdf: http://www.destatis.de 62 Tabakmarkt 12 (2007); Deutsche Tabakzeitung 43 (2008); Deutsche Tabakzeitung 17 (2009); Deutsche Tabakzeitung 52 (2009).



352 | ALEXA F ÄRBER

an “organization of water pipe tobacco smugglers”).63 As an official hinted in an informal conversation, it is certainly possible that illegal water pipe tobacco follows the paths to Europe already established by cigarette smugglers.64 Both categories of legal and illegal tobacco find their ways to the urban markets and can be identified by whether or not they bear a German revenue stamp. To a wholesaler of (legal) Egyptian tobacco, the difference is very simply the form of packaging and method of transport. In contrast to the small packages of legal tobacco, illegal tobacco “that some family member or other brings along from back home” is transported and stored in large white plastic buckets, which, stored together with other banned substances, keeps it moister than other tobaccos. Somebody then delivers these containers to the individual establishments in the city by car. The disassociation of the wholesaler from illegal practices articulated here is also an expression of a competitive market. From the perspective of the wholesaler, illegal practices are also linked to family-supported economic activities. His customers’ businesses, in contrast, were either too large and established to risk offering illegal goods or they were devout Muslims who did not want to earn money doing business illegally. The contested path that water pipe tobacco takes to the European and German market is what makes the water pipe particularly intriguing in the urban consumption landscape, at least for the actors involved in this negotiation of cultural significance.

V. T HE T HIN C OMPONENTS

OF A

“T HICK M ETROPOLIS ”

This essay aimed to take up approaches for examining “urban ethnicity” and the “world city”—tension-laden spaces of opportunity—and to do so in the classical mode of interpretive ethnology that reconstructs meaning that can be demonstrated locally, tracing how the observed actors explain their own worlds. This research approach, which Clifford Geertz called “thick description,” appears to be especially suited for a conception of “the thick space of metropolitanism” that

  63 “Organisation von Wasserpfeifentabak-Schmugglern gesprengt,” press release, Customs Investigation Office, February 22, 2010, http://www.zoll.de/DE/Presse/ Pressearchiv/2010/Zigaretten/zigaretten_node.html?spp=-1. 64 For an instructive anthropological portrayal of the paths, forms of mobility, and economic practices connected with smuggling electric products to Europe, See Alain Tarrius, “Les migrants afghans et leurs commerces dans les Balkans,” Diasporas: Histoires et société 9 (2005): 101–21.



U RBAN ETHNICITY , W ORLD C ITY,

AND THE

HOOKAH | 353

distinguishes itself by a surplus of meaning—a symbolically enriched surplus of urbanity, as the title concept of this volume might suggest. Concerning urban water pipe consumption, the interpretive approach of thick description opens up an ethnographic micro-level on which the symbolic practice and symbolic capital of the individual establishments provide insight into the symbolic potential of the urban space in which they are located. From this perspective, the described range of ethnicity, “Orientality,” and (everyday) cosmopolitanism, whose enactment can be differentiated partly along sociospatial lines, emerges—as does the potential of a city to make them tangible in their diversity. If we, however, follow a supply chain that commodifies ethnic difference situationally, it becomes clear that it is a translocal and often transnational field, consisting not of discrete ethnic communities, but rather is “multiply inhabited,” “multi-dimensional,” and a “lived social field.” As Claire Dwyer notes: “This is a space characterized by multiple strands involved in transnational networks with complex circuits of meaning fabricated from a range of social practices by differently positioned actors.”65 Reconstructing, deciphering, and representing the web of meaning for the cultural “other” characterizes the potential of thick description and has left its mark on the monographic ethnography and ethnographic essay genres. Since its inception, urban research has as well followed the formula of thick description with its interlinking of holistic aspirations and qualitative methods of data collection. For example, British social scientist Henry Mayhew’s surveys provided hitherto unfamiliar views “from the inside”; one reason why he is often considered one of the first ethnographers of the urban “avant la letter.”66 Classic studies about the “colonies” of the urban underclasses, neighborhoods populated by immigrants, and “urban villages” analyzed by US urban research further exemplify the plausibility of such a stationary, holistic, and still unavoidably

  65 Claire Dwyer, “Tracing Transnationalities Through Commodity Culture: A Case Study of British-South Asian Fashion” in Transnational Spaces, ed. Peter Jackson et al. (London: 2004), 75. 66 Terence Morris in reference to Mayhew, in Rolf Lindner, Walks on the Wild Side. Eine Geschichte der Stadtforschung (Frankfurt/M.: 2004), 16. Wayne Brekhus et al. refer to the fact that urban research from Henry Mayhew to William F. Whyte is characterized by a competition of arguments in which insufficient “thin” portrayals (e.g., for Mayhew, statistical surveys) are contrasted with “rich” material (e.g., surveys conducted by the criticizing researchers themselves). Wayne Brekhus et al., “The Need for Thin Description,” Qualitative Inquiry 11, no. 6 (2005): 861–79.



354 | ALEXA F ÄRBER

fragmentary ethnographic approach. As Rolf Lindner argues, “Such a research perspective may intensify selective tendencies, so the urban village may appear to be more closed and separate than it actually is.”67 In short, as Clifford Geertz pointed out as early as 1973 in the essay in which he coined the term, ethnographic thick description as cultural analysis is “intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.”68 In light of wider-framed hypotheses regarding world and global cities, and in light of translocal practices and contexts, what can be said about research perspectives oriented toward connections and networks in terms of “grooved channels” and the tracing of “commodity chains”? Alongside other factors, insights from representational theory about “partial truths”69 derived from ethnological thick descriptions have led to alternative selections of objects of study and methodological deliberations that intend to highlight openendedness and the processuality of cultural difference. This includes research perspectives focusing on connections as networks and their cultural forms, whether they follow the paradigm of “multi-sited ethnographies”70 as well as the various approaches employed by the anthropology of knowledge. Taking up the urban in translocal practices and representations nevertheless remains a challenge. For multi-sited ethnography, the multiplication of observable (cultural) transfers bundled in cities can turn into questions of the traceability of translocal versus local horizons of meaning. Studies using practicecentered “actor-network theory” approaches would first of all refuse to interpret meaning and would focus entirely on tracing the elements creating connections, the forms of links and transformations, as well as the materiality involved. This broad perspective could easily result in a “thin description” at the expense of depth.71 As virulent as the opposition is in terms of practical research for both approaches, so misleading it is theoretically. Long-term studies, such as the one by Bestor, demonstrate that the multitude of variable, global meanings of the marketplace can be made a topic of discussion with a locally anchored point of

  67 Lindner, Walks, 148; Gisela Welz, Street Life. Alltag in einem New Yorker Slum (Frankfurt/M.: 1991), 31. 68 Geertz, “Thick Description,” 29. 69 James Clifford, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus (Berkeley: 1986). 70 George Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95–117. 71 Following Gilbert Ryle, Geertz himself delineates thick description in contrast to thin description. Brekhus et al. refer to the existence of strategic thin descriptions.



U RBAN ETHNICITY , W ORLD C ITY,

AND THE

HOOKAH | 355

departure. And Bruno Latour’s study of Paris, the “invisible city,” also distinguishes itself precisely by a large number of thin descriptions of networks, which, moreover, aim at a form of thick description of the urban as a whole without forgoing thicker modes of representation, for example, such as photography.72 The trans/local concepts of “urban ethnicity” and “world city” support, in my opinion, thick-thin modes both of description and of gaining insight. Firstly, multiple practices that create meaning can be observed locally as well as translocally, and provide material for thick description, a mode of gaining insights in seeking self-descriptions. Secondly, the practices of producing meaning realistically require thin description in order to demonstrate the materiality of these meanings. Concerning the fragmentation of the city and ethnic-cultural diversity, it becomes apparent that thin description paradoxically contributes to the thickening of the “thick space of the metropolis” by making it possible to describe the many different aspects of urban ethnicity of a “world city.” In the end, a “doubled” thick-thin approach must be appraised in terms of the extent it can reveal the relationship of urbanity—that is to say, practices and representations that grapple with the spatially experienced and multifaceted fragmentations of urban lifeworlds— to practices and representations of ethnicity, in order to assess and illustrate practices of inclusion, exclusion, participation, and withdrawal so commonly associated with the articulation of ethnicity in urban contexts.

Translated from German by Sandra Lustig

  72 Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant, Paris: Ville Invisible (Paris: 1998); Bruno Latour, Eine neue Soziologie für eine neue Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: 2007), 142; Bruno Latour, “Can We Get Our Materialism Back Please?” Isis 98, no. 1 (2007): 138–42.





The Global, Imperial Metropolis: Ideas from 1873 Berlin T IM O PITZ

On the morning of September 2, 1873, loud noises were heard over the city, waking the inhabitants of Berlin. From the balcony of the Hohenzollern castle in the center of the city, a fanfare of military trumpets sounded, followed by a choir singing a Christian choral that merged into the ringing of all of the city’s church bells. What was announced with so much ado at eight o’clock in the morning was the opening ceremony for the city and the German nation’s main monument—the Berlin Victory Column, the Siegessäule—which celebrates the Wars of Unification, the three victorious wars that made a German nation-state possible.1 Standing just outside of the city’s old walls, a two-minute walk from Brandenburg Gate, the monument was an enduring contribution to Berlin’s skyline. Its square base contains four bronze reliefs on the outside and a monumental mosaic on the inside. Its three-part column is topped by an oversized, winged, and golden statue of a woman. The relatively brief but still opulent and well-planned opening ceremony was over by noon after the Kaiser, as the awarding authority and the center of the celebrations, observed a parade by his troops and then left to get back to his castle where a banquet later followed. The city had already experienced some recent and overwhelming celebrations of victories in wars.2 Still very well remembered were the parades follow-

  1

On the Victory Column (Siegessäule), see: Reinhard Alings, Die Berliner Siegessäule. Vom Geschichtsbild zum Bild der Geschichte (Berlin: 2000); Matthias Braun, Die Siegessäule (Berlin: 2000).

2

See: Helmut Engel, “’Durch sie ist die Gestalt der Dinge verändert und die Hoffnung auf eine bessere Zukunft begründet worden’” - Oder: Der Beginn der “’Via triumph-



358 | T IM O PITZ

ing the conflict with Denmark in 1864. Even more remembered was the splendid two-day parade after Prussia retained the upper hand against most of the rest of Germany and Austria in particular in 1866. They were only surpassed by the virtually ceaseless celebrations after the Franco-Prussian War in the first half of 1871, when one occasion was followed by the next one, culminating with the path-breaking, overwhelming, and long-remembered victory parade of June 16th. On this day, the whole town enthusiastically joined in the ecstatic celebrations with the new Kaiser and the finally united nation as a whole.3 Compared to these occasions, the day in September 1873, which stands in focus of this essay, seemed to be less enthusiastically celebrated, less widely attended, and in retrospect less important. It was quite “un-metropolitan” as well. Yet what I will argue in this essay is that this day, the feelings and arguments people expressed while attending or describing it, and the monument itself that was unveiled altogether did indeed represent a crucial turning point in Berlin’s history. In descriptions, memories, and symbols, a very special notion was transported that was quite new to Berlin. In its spatial scope, it reached far beyond prior events in the city. My main argument is that, on this day, the military opening ceremony for a war memorial signified the moment in time when Berlin arguably became global and thus could be called a “metropolis.” This “global moment” occurred with all its benefits and consequences, despite the fact that at first glance the day does not seem to represent a particularly global event but rather the opposite: the opening ceremony seemed to be torn between a regional Prussian component and a national German meaning.

    alis,’” in Via triumphalis. Geschichtslandschaft “Unter Den Linden”zwischen Friedrich-Denkmal und Schloßbrücke, ed. Helmut Engel and Wolfgang Ribbe (Berlin: 1997); Gottfried Korff, “Beim Anblick der Monumente im Wandel der Zeiten. Ein Beitrag zur Berliner Mentalitätsgeschichte,” in Engel and Ribbe, Via triumphalis; and Heinz Weidner, Berlin im Festschmuck. Vom 15. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin: 1940). 3

Klaus Tenfelde, “Adventus. Zur historischen Ikonologie des Festzugs,” Historische Zeitschrift 235, no. 1 (1982); Manuel Borutta, “Repräsentation, Subversion und Spiel: Die kulturelle Praxis nationaler Feste in Rom und Berlin, 1870/71 und 1895,” in Nationalismen in Europa. West- und Osteuropa im Vergleich, ed. U. von Hirschhausen and J. Leonhard (Göttingen: 2001). An invaluable source is: Deutscher Reichsanzeiger, Berliner Sieges-, Einzugs- und Friedenschronik des Jahres 1871. SeperatAbdruck aus dem Deutschen Reichs-Anzeiger und dem Königl. Preußischen StaatsAnzeiger (Berlin: 1871).



T HE G LOBAL, I MPERIAL M ETROPOLIS | 359

In my first section, using the example of the inauguration of Berlin’s Siegessäule, I will layout in more detail why and how this constituted a “global moment.” Building on this, in the following section, I will briefly generalize this idea and argue subsequently that any big city in nineteenth-century Europe was fated to become global at some point and that this development should be connected to the term “metropolis.” My point being that the “great” European cities around 1900 were global and imperial cities, for better and for worse, both in the obvious and in the hidden. A notion of globality in almost all aspects of the cities’ social, cultural, political, and built reality in fact is what made people then call these cities “metropolises” and what leads us today to still use this metaphorical yet ultimately undefined term when we speak of modern cities.4

I. T HE N ATION -S TATE , THE M ILITARY , AND A G LIMPSE OF G ERMAN E MPIRE : O PENING THE S IEGESSÄULE IN 1873 Berlin in 1873 was still a relatively obscure city, widely unnoticed by foreign politicians and mostly overlooked by foreign and domestic travelers alike.5 Of course, German unification almost two years earlier, which had made the city the German capital,6 was a widely observed and discussed event. The British Pre-

  4

For the contemporary, and relatively ubiquitous usage of the term “metropolis” in German context see, for example: Peter Alter, ed., Im Banne der Metropolen. Berlin und London in den zwanziger Jahren (Göttingen: 1993); Dirk Bronger, Metropolen, Megastädte, Global Cities. Die Verstädterung der Erde (Darmstadt: 2004); Dirk Matejewski, ed., Metropolen. Laboratorien der Moderne (Frankfurt: 2000).

5

Note that a specific “Berlin edition” of the well-known travel guide Baedeker came onto the market as late as about 1880. By 1885, it had already reached its fifth edition: Karl Baedeker, Handbuch für Reisende. Berlin und Umgebung (Leipzig: 1885). For Baedeker as a source see: Rudy Koshar, “‘What Ought to Be Seen’: Tourists' Guidebooks and National Identities in Modern Germany and Europe,” Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 3 (1998).

6

On Berlin as capital, see: Hans Herzfeld, “Berlin als Kaiserstadt und Reichshauptstadt, 1871–1945,” in Das Hauptstadtproblem in der Geschichte, ed. Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut (Tübingen: 1952); Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Kaisermacht und Bürgerstolz. Berlin als Hauptstadt des Kaiserreiches,” in Die Hauptstädte der Deutschen. Von der Kaiserpfalz in Aachen zum Regierungssitz in Berlin, ed. Uwe Schultz (Munich: 1993).



360 | T IM O PITZ

mier Benjamin Disraeli even stressed the far-reaching repercussions of the new state when he proclaimed: “There is not a diplomatic tradition which has not been swept away. You have a new world.”7 But in its core, Berlin itself did not alter much—a development concordant to the idea Otto von Bismarck had for the new German state that he characterized as being “saturized.” Belated Germany under his rule tried not to make any groundbreaking impact on international relations and the equilibrium of global power but rather pretended to stay put for the years to come.8 To be sure, after the unification, a brief economic upswing followed suit and a private speculation and building boom remodeled parts of the city of Berlin.9 Not too much, however, seemed to have changed to city’s appearance, especially as many public building projects did not reach beyond the planning phases yet. The most famous example was the case of the German parliament, the Reichstag building, which was not finished until 1894 though planning commenced with the foundation of the nation-state in 1871.10 Most buildings and places with public functions were simply taken over from Prussia, which was now “only” the most powerful part of a new united Germany. In addition, there was a practice of double use by regional and national authorities, a fact that made the young nation-state appear provisional in Berlin and in general.11 The best example for this not yet fully developed German nation-state that borrowed from its forerunner was Bismarck himself, who took the title of German chancellor and Prus-

  7

“Benjamin Disraeli on the ‘German Revolution’ (February 9, 1871),” German History in Documents and Images, http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm? document_id=1849; for the British view on the German unification, see: Klaus Hildebrand, “Großbritannien und die deutsche Reichsgründung,” in Europa und die Reichsgründung. Preussen-Deutschland in der Sicht der großen europäischen Mächte 1860–1880, ed. Eberhard Kolb (Munich: 1980).

8

On Bismark’s politics in the early phase of the Reich, see: Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Bd. 3. Von der “Deutschen Doppelrevolution” bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieg. 1849–1914 (Munich: 1995), 848ff. Also: Volker Ullrich, Die Nervöse Großmacht 1871–1918. Aufstieg und Untergang des deutschen Kaiserreiches (Frankfurt: 2007), 74–75.

9

Annemarie Lange, Berlin zur Zeit Bebels und Bismarcks. Zwischen Reichsgründung und Jahrhundertwende (East Berlin: 1976), 189ff.

10 On the Reichstag, see Michael S. Cullen, Der Reichstag. Die Geschichte eines Monumentes (Berlin: 1983). 11 Katherine Anne Lerman, “Bismarckian Germany,” in Imperial Germany 1871–1918, ed. James Retallack (Oxford: 2008).



T HE G LOBAL, I MPERIAL M ETROPOLIS | 361

sian prime minister, while of course also being foreign minister.12 This status of not having arrived and staying provisional seemed to be true for the mindset of the people inhabiting the city, too: their political orientation and the loyalties they expressed gave the impression of still relying mostly on Prussia and of rejecting new influences both from the new Germany or even places further afar to a large degree. Accordingly, almost no one would have attributed the status of “metropolis” to the city of Berlin, hence it was merely in the process of “becoming” a metropolis.13 Berlin somehow was the capital of the suddenly-most-powerful continental European power in disguise and contemporaries like the novelist Theodor Fontane asked: “Is Berlin a world city?” They themselves answered “yes and no,” thus expressing the confusing situation of being on the edge of something new which did not entirely start yet—at least in Berlin.14 The city pretty much seemed to remain the Prussian Spreeathen (Athens on the Spree),15 with many buildings shaped in a classical style, instead of becoming the true German capital representing the power of the nation-state to the world in a specific symbolic language.16 The opening ceremony for the Siegessäule, itself a Corinthian-style column that figuratively reconnected itself to Berlin’s eighteenth-century building traditions, can very much be seen as an example of Berlin’s status of being in between. It can also highlight the direction where things were headed to in the near future. The whole event was split between a Prussian component and a German one—as was the city of Berlin and Germany as a nation-state.17 But surprisingly, this not-so-long ceremony and the memorial unveiled during it also revealed a

  12 On Bismarck: Lerman, Bismarck (Harlow: 2004); Lothar Gall, Bismarck. Der weiße Revolutionär (Frankfurt: 1980). 13 Ruth Glatzer, Berlin wird Kaiserstadt. Panorama einer Metropole 1871–1890 (Berlin: 1993). 14 Theodor Fontane, “Berlin wird Weltstadt,” in Sämtliche Werke. Aufsätze. Kritiken. Erinnerungen. Vol. 4, Autobiographisches, ed. W. Keitel (Munich: 1973), 1042. This translation, as all translations from German to English in quotes in this chapter, are my translations. 15 Richard Dietrich, “Von der Residenzstadt zur Weltstadt. Berlin vom Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zur Reichsgründung,” in Das Hauptstadtproblem in der Geschichte, ed. Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut (Tübingen: 1952). 16 On Berlin in later years, see: David Clay Large, Berlin (New York: 2000). 17 E.g., see the account of Christopher Clark, Preußen. Aufstieg und Niedergang 1600– 1947 (Bonn: 2007). See especially chapters 15 and 16.



362 | T IM O PITZ

glimpse of we might want to call the “global dimension of Berlin,” a dimension that also foreshadowed the future of the German nation-state. After its noisy beginning, the celebrations continued with Kaiser Wilhelm I leaving his castle and progressing in a carriage along the traditional street of parades, Unter den Linden, toward the site where the memorial had been built, the Königsplatz (King’s Square). Simply in the fact that the Kaiser, who was at the same time the King of Prussia, went to a place called King’s Square to open a national memorial for wars fought for a nation—when there had not yet been a nation—shows the event’s potential for confusion. Moreover, the memorial was paid for with money that partially came out of the Prussian budget. The same is true for the monument itself. The planning phase started as early as 1861 after Prussia’s victorious war against Denmark. A rather small piece resembling an oversized vase was proposed. But the early plans were twice quickly swept away by the reality of forging a nation-state through war and the concept was changed after the continuous victories against Austria, which lead to the North German Confederation, and the finally again after the victory that resulted in the German nation-state. Around 1867, the column design was agreed upon, but only after 1871 was it definite that the monument would have to be German rather than Prussian.18 This of course left the question of how to represent three consecutive wars in one memorial unanswered, a fact of special importance when considering the fact that most of the smaller German states sided against Prussia in 1866 but were very well “German” allies against France only four years later. Of course, this troubled background of the monument and its inauguration was based in the complicated prehistory of a German nation-state. For the duration of German history up to that point, it was unclear what and where a Germany would be; there was neither a natural territorial boundary nor a structure for such a state.19 These all were almost unanswerable questions only finally

  18 Klaus Dettmer, “Die Grundsteinlegungsurkunden der Siegessäule. Drei Begründungen für ihren Bau und einen für ihren Standortwechsel,” Berlin in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Jahrbuch des Landresarchivs Berlin 3 (1984); Reinhard Alings, Monument und Nation. Das Bild vom Nationalstaat im Medium Denkmal – Zum Verhältnis von Nation und Staat im deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1918 (Berlin: 1996), 135ff. 19 On the complexity of this question, see: James J. Sheehan, “What is German History? Reflections on the Role of the Nation in German History and Historiography,” Journal of Modern History 53, no. 1 (1981). Also see the underlying narrative in: David Blackbourn, History of Germany 1780–1918: The Long Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. (Oxford: 2005).



T HE G LOBAL, I MPERIAL M ETROPOLIS | 363

settled in the immediate unification process in the period of 1866 to 1871.20 This complex situation is still reflected in the Victory Column: the statue topping it is identified as “Borussia,”21 the symbol for Prussia or “Germania,”22 the symbol for Germany as well. But in parallel with the Gordian knot of German history being very much solved by military force, the question of what to call the lady standing on top of the Victory Column was answered by soldiers, too. War made the state possible and on top of the monument the embodiment of victory, a “Victoria,” was to be seen. Thus, it can be said, the ability to solve the inner antagonisms of German history belonged—especially in the eyes of most of the contemporaries—to one institution in particular: the military.23 It was the soldiers' task to bring the German states together in one unified nation-state and accordingly it was the military that dominated the visual arrangement of the monument and its opening ceremony. With a look at the Königsplatz on that inauguration day, we see celebrations that were arranged with the Kaiser in the center occupying a throne under a baldachin-like tent that was sided with terraces for the nobility and high-ranking politicians and generals. The tent faced the monument. The square as a whole was framed by temporary stands for about two thousand invited spectators. In addition to a festoon in black, white, and red that ran around the column, there were only soldiers. The entire space around the monument was filled with them standing in formation, ready to provide the acoustic and visual background to the celebrations. So when Kaiser Wilhelm I arrived at the scene, the “tambours beat” and the elaborately dressed audience joined into a “thousand-voiced hooray.”24 The official program, which was laid out by a planning commission, then watched the soldiers perform their honneurs to the monarch directly after the uncloaking of the monument.25

  20 On unification, see also: Ronald Speirs and John Breuilly, eds., Germany's Two Unifications: Anticipations, Experiences, Responses (Basingstoke: 2005). 21 One example: Provinzial-Correspondenz 11, no. 36 (1873). 22 One example: Dioskuren 18, no. 35 (1873), 277. 23 With huge impact on German history as a whole: Ute Frevert, Die kasernierte Nation. Militärdienst und Zivilgesellschaft in Deutschland (Munich: 2001); Wolfram Wette, ed., Schule der Gewalt. Militarismus in Deutschland. 1871–1945 (Berlin: 2005). 24 “Die Feier des 2. September” in Provinzial Correspondenz 11, no. 36 (1873). 25 HA Rep 151 Finanzministerium I C 8324, Vol. I. 1863 – 1906. Die Siegesdenkmäler zu Berlin, Düppel und Alsen, Bl. 94.



364 | T IM O PITZ

Before the unveiling, the only words of the entire ceremony were spoken by the protestant pastor of the Prussian army, Dr. Thielen, 26 in a speech that actually was labeled as a “prayer.” In this, he thanked God for the victory in war and in the decisive battle (Entscheidungsschlacht) of Sedan and asked for longevity for the new fatherland.27 Directly after this, Reich Chancellor Otto von Bismarck turned to the Kaiser who then waved his sword—and the red cloak that had covered the column’s base fell. The monument was officially inaugurated and the ceremony ended with Wilhelm I and the other officials awaiting a parade of the attending troops. The troops made their way in formation from Königsplatz, where at the exit the kaiser greeted them, and marched to the Tempelhofer Feld (a field) in the south. Taking this direction, they returned on the official route of the great 1871 parade that had started where the streets that lead away from the barracks at the field touched the city borders. By leaving the privilege of using the core of the via triumphalis, Unter den Linden,28 to the Kaiser alone, just as at the beginning of the 1871 parade, the opening ceremony of the Siegessäule obviously was designed to create a connection between the two events. It was centered on the monarch who was presented to the public as the nation’s primary military leader. What on first sight seems obvious—a memorial for victories being related to a victory parade—becomes extremely important when we keep in mind the complex background of the Victory Column. To follow in the path of the parade was a clear statement for a German, national interpretation of an intrinsically Prussian monument. It can be understood as a first hint that what appeared to be Prussian on first glance on September 2, 1873 could very well be seen as German, too. While some observers commented that the celebrations had a “distinctively Prussian painting,” and concluded, “today’s fest can only be a Prussian one,”29 many others disagreed sharply and described the inauguration as “an

  26 On Thielen: Arbeitsgemeinschaft der heimatkundlichen Vereine in Mülheim an der Ruhr, ed., Historisch bedeutsame Persönlichkeiten der Stadt Mülheim a. d. Ruhr (Mülheim an der Ruhr: 1983), p. 79–81. 27 Similar accounts in: W. Wassermann, Die Enthüllung des Sieges-Denkmals zu Berlin am 2. September 1873. Vollständige Darstellung der Geschichte und Ausführung des Denkmals, seiner Reliefs und Gemälde, sowie der Enthüllungsfeierlichkeiten (Berlin: 1873). Also: J. L. Fernbach, Illustrierte Festzeitung zur Enthüllung der Sieges-Säule am 2. September 1873 (Berlin: 1873). 28 Engel and Ribbe, Via triumphalis. In here, of course: Werner Knopp, “Kulisse der Macht im Kaiserreich.” 29 “Ich bin ein Preuße, kennt ihr meine Farben,” in Germania, 3 September 1873.



T HE G LOBAL, I MPERIAL M ETROPOLIS | 365

example of unity for all the German people.”30 In fact including both sides was exactly what the organizers had aimed for—even though they used surprising instruments to reach their aims. Most notably, they decided to “confine the military attendance to Prussian soldiers only” as the planning protocols reveal—but with the intention of being considerate toward the other German states who had also been opponents in the context of the Victory Column.31 This clearly highlights the intended function of the Berlin Siegessäule: far from being a Prussian monument it was rather presented as a milestone of the militaristic German nation-state (which of course stood under Prussian predominance). Such a way of casting the monument was only possible trough using the extremely positive reputation of the army—which again was predominantly Prussian but was already perceived as something unifying and essentially German. Right after German unification and of course the victorious war with France, everyone was willing to agree that the army itself had become the foundation of the new state.32 Around 1871, the army encapsulated everything the German nation-state stood for: soldiers were the reason for its existence, they were at the imagined “core of the society.”33 Most hopes, wishes, and ambitions for the state were connected with them as well.34 This is the main reason why both the iconography of the monument and its opening ceremony intensively

  30 Über Land und Meer 16, Vol. 31, no. 3, 56. 31 On this aspect, see the planning documents of the Prussian treasury: Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußische Königreich (StAPK), HA Rep 151 Finanzministerium I C 8324 Vol. I, Die Siegesdenkmäler zu Berlin, Düppel und Alsen, Bl. 85ff. 32 See: Ralf Pröve, Militär, Staat und Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: 2006). Here especially p. 41– 42. 33 As Thomas Nipperdey puts it, the army was core to both state and society. See Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte. 1866–1918. Bd. 2. Machtstaat vor der Demokratie (Munich: 1992), 201. 34 Frank Becker, Bilder von Krieg und Nation. Die Einigungskriege in der bürgerlichen Öffentlichkeit Deutschlands 1864–1913 (Munich: 2001), 342ff. See also: Nikolaus Buschmann, Einkreisung und Waffenbruderschaft. Die öffentliche Deutung von Krieg und Nation in Deutschland 1850–1871 (Göttingen: 2003); Alexander Seyferth, Die Heimatfront 1870/71. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft im Deutsch-Französischen Krieg (Paderborn: 2007).



366 | T IM O PITZ

focused on the military and its recent victories—just as so many more small monuments did all over the country.35 The fact that the intention to present the Siegessäule as a national monument apparently succeeded can be understood from the Kaiser’s words that were published from his office a couple of days later. In them he thanked his subjects for the successful “national” fest without mentioning “Prussia” at all. Instead he insists on the importance of the day for the entire Kaiserreich (empire) and expresses his happiness about the “patriotic acclamations” he had heard.36 In addition, some observers noted the wide reaches the event had within the nation: “While thousands from all parts of the fatherland really participated in [the inauguration ceremony], hundreds of thousands were joining in with their spirits and posted congratulations and telegrams to the Kaiser.”37 The display of Wilhelm I in uniform with his soldiers in connection with the Siegessäule as a distinctively national monument in fact seemed to have worked quite well. It even boosted a half-private initiative of West Prussian notables who tried to make the anniversary of the victory in Sedan into a national holiday. After the column’s inauguration had been held on that day, the now officially called “Sedan Day” became very popular and was, especially in Berlin, always connected with military parades just as it had been when the monument was first unveiled.38 With the help of many soldiers, invoking the cementing glue of militarism, the column on Königsplatz became the very symbol for the most powerful annual commemoration of military victory and for the founding of the German nation-state in the early period of the Kaiserreich.39

  35 Annette Becker, “War Memorials: A Legacy of Total War?,” in On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871, ed. Stig Förster and Jorg Nagler (Cambridge: 1997). 36 Wassermann, Enthüllung des Sieges-Denkmals, 12. 37 J. J. Dirke, Das Siegesdenkmal in Berlin. Zum Besten des Invalidendank’s (Barmen: n.d.), 15. 38 Fritz Schellack, “Sedan- Und Kaisergeburtstagsfeste,” in Öffentliche Festkultur. Politische Feste in Deutschland von der Aufklärung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. D. Düding, P. Friedemann, and P. Münch (Reinbek: 1988); Ute Schneider, “Einheit ohne Einigkeit. Der Sedantag im Kaiserreich,” in Inszenierungen des Nationalstaats. Politische Feiern in Italien und Deutschland seit 1860/71, ed. S. Behrenbeck and A. Nützenadel (Cologne: 2000). 39 This seems to be of special importance as the early Kaiserreich is often portrayed as a state without traditions: Theodor Schieder, Das deutsche Kaiserreich von 1871 als Nationalstaat (Göttingen: 1992). See especially p. 82–83. On the legacy of the Sieges-



T HE G LOBAL, I MPERIAL M ETROPOLIS | 367

In fact, soldiers were central not only to the nationalization of the Siegessäule and its inaugural celebrations, they were also the key component that lent force to claims for the global importance to the new German state. Since September 2, 1873, people reading the inscription heading the memorial’s southern façade—which read, “The thankful fatherland to the victorious troops”—and looking at the depictions of victorious battles were automatically reminded of where the victories were won. None of the places actually shown on the frescoes at the column’s base were dedicated to a place within the borders of the new German nation-state. The German state was fought for outside Germany; the unification was an entirely transnational process and the image of an aggressive and successful German army subsequently had its impact in Europe and around the world.40 What came into being in 1871 was a huge empire with large minorities living in the border regions, such as French-speaking inhabitants of Alsace and Lorraine in the west, the Danish-speaking peoples in the north, and above all a large Polish-speaking population in the east. The Kaiserreich thus was both a multiethnic empire41 and a superpower.42 Whereas the former fact led to various projects of internal colonization, especially within the “actual German colony”43

    säule and “Sedan Day,” see: Walter Benjamin, Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (Frankfurt: 2006), 16–17. 40 Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, “Die europäischen Staaten und die Gründung des Deutschen Reiches,” in Reichsgründung 1870/71. Tatsachen. Kontroversen. Interpretationen, ed. T. Schieder and E. Deuerlein (Stuttgart: 1970); Dennis Showalter, The Wars of German Unification (London: 2004). 41 Especially: Phillip Ther, “Deutsche Geschichte als imperiale Geschichte. Polen, slawophone Minderheiten und das Kaiserreich als kontinentales Empire,” in Das Kaiserreich transnational. Deutschland in der Welt 1914–1918, ed. S. Conrad and J. Osterhammel (Göttingen: 2004). See also his theoretical approach: Ther, “Beyond the Nation: The Relational Basis of a Comparative History of Germany and Europe,” Central European History 36 (2003). 42 Classic account: Ludwig Dehio, Deutschland und die Weltpolitik im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: 1955). See also: M. Epkenhans and G. P. Groß, eds., Das Militär und der Aufbruch in die Moderne, 1860–1890. Armeen, Marinen und der Wandel von Politik, Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft in Europa, den USA sowie Japan (Munich: 2003). 43 See: Sebastian Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Munich: 2006).



368 | T IM O PITZ

in the Polish east,44 the latter encouraged a vigilant great-power policy. This fact was noted by historians especially for the later days of the Kaiserreich,45 but was known by most Germans as early as 1871 and so they demanded using the military strength to the nation's advantage. What followed were implicit threads like Julius Rodenberg’s when he described the Victory Column and the Victoria topping it: “and she will fly again—against the West—against the East—who knows?”46 And the Kaiser himself stressed at the banquet dinner which was held after the column's inauguration that now as “a German Empire has claimed its space on the stage of the world” the use of its power was always possible and no one would shy away from “striking the sword.”47 That this potential use of power was indeed seen in a more global perspective, too, highlights another episode from the inauguration ceremony where a quite small institution was introduced to profit from the army’s prestige. The German navy, virtually nonexistent and with no relevant mission in the Unification Wars,48 surprisingly was included in the celebrations. A unified German maritime force had practically just been founded and was, in striking contrast to the army,49 not organized on a federal basis but rather directly controlled from the nation-state’s offices in Berlin.50 And coming out from behind their desks, the admirals were invited to the opening ceremony—even though they had not too much to with it. The planning committee decided after a brief discussion on the role of the navy in the ceremony: “We believed it to be correct to incorporate

  44 Christopher Clark, ed., Kulturkampf in Europa im 19. Jahrhundert (Leipzig: 2003); Kristin Kopp, “Constructing Racial Difference in Colonial Poland,” in Germany's Colonial Pasts, ed. E. Ames, M. Klotz, and L. Wildenthal (Lincoln, NB: 2005). Also see Wehler’s classic account in: Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Krisenherde des Kaiserreichs 1871–1918. Studien zur deutschen Sozial- und Verfassungsgeschichte (Göttingen: 1970). 45 A classic narrative is: Volker Berghahn, Der Tirpitz-Plan. Genesis und Verfall einer innenpolitischen Krisenstrategie unter Wilhelm II (Düsseldorf: 1971). 46 Julius Rodenberg, Bilder aus dem Berliner Leben (Berlin: 1987), 52–53. This is part of the essay “In den Zelten” published in 1882. 47 See reports in: Provinzial Correspondenz 11, no. 37, 6 September 1873. 48 See Lawrence Sondhaus, Weltpolitik: German Sea Power before the Tirpitz Era (Annapolis, ML: 1997), 94. Also: Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870–1871 (Cambridge: 2003). 49 In general: Pröve, Militär, Staat und Gesellschaft. 50 David H. Olivier, German Naval Strategy 1856–1888: Forerunners to Tirpitz (London: 2004).



T HE G LOBAL, I MPERIAL M ETROPOLIS | 369

them into all aspects.”51 This seems to be an accurate decision if the Siegessäule is to be understood in national and even more so in global terms. Even in 1873 Germany, it was a common assumption that it was the fleet that was internationally visible and awe-inspiring.52 Already in these years, the German public demanded that the greatest German warships “cross the farthest oceans with the German flag raised, to protect Germany and German interests.”53 This points back to the small but quite active pro-colonial lobby in the early Kaiserreich and before.54 This lobby dreamed of possessing colonies and desperately wanted to make “Germany powerful to the outside.”55 Such expansionist ambition also explains why there were many navy admirals attending the inauguration ceremony for the Siegessäule and also makes it understandable that in this context there was talk of the “baptism of fire of the young navy.”56 In this respect, the Siegessäule stands as a symbol for German ambitions that did not stop at the newly erected borders of the nation-state. And with the nationalistic Bürgertum (bourgeoisie) traditionally being much more sympathetic with the navy than with the army, which was long associated with the aristocracy, positioning navy soldiers at the ceremony can also be seen as yet another hint toward a national reading of the monument and as an incorporation of the bourgeoisie into the fold of the new nation-state. However, most contemporary commentators favored yet another perspective on the Siegessäule, as they put the monument into direct comparisons with other monuments worldwide to boost the reputation of both the nation-state and of its

  51 GehStAPK; HA Rep 151 Finanzministerium I C 8324, Bl. 85. 52 Generally on marines and publicity: Jan Rüger, The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire (Cambridge: 2007). 53 Die Gartenlaube, no. 52 (1873), 841. The quote is taken from a piece entitled “Berliner Straßenbilder” which portrays a walk by Prince Adalbert through the Brandenburg Gate toward Königsplatz. 54 M. P. Fitzpatrick, “A Fall from Grace? National Unity and the Search for Naval Power and Colonial Possessions 1848–1884,” German History 25, no. 2 (2007); Fitzpatrick, “Imperialism from Below: Informal Empire and the Private Sector in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 54, no. 3 (2008); Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism 1848–1884 (New York: 2008); F. L. Müller, “Imperialist Ambitions in Vormärz and Revolutionary Germany: The Agitation for German Settlement Colonies Overseas, 1840–1849,” German History 17, no. 3 (1999). 55 Die Gartenlaube, no. 52 (1873), 842. 56 Hoffmeister, Siegesdenkmal, 46.



370 | T IM O PITZ

capital. This reading of course can be categorized as both nationalist and global at the same time and started out as a simple comparison. “With its height, the monument surpasses all other monuments which can be seen in parallel with it,” wrote an architectural newspaper.57 It added that, “London’s Trafalgar column looks quite weak against the mass of our victory memorial.”58 This debate echoed the general discourse on Berlin as a world-city,59 and clearly underlined that the scale of comparison for the city of Berlin had irreversibly grown from intra-German competitors (Vienna, Hamburg, Frankfurt) to a more and more European if not world-spanning view.60 Here, the Siegessäule was presented as an internationally visible “memorial for Germany’s power and greatness” and as a “lighthouse for the fame of German weapons.”61 Through pushing this point, contemporaries made it clear that for them, military might and the architectural status of a city both directly reflected upon the prestige of a nation in the world. Exemplary commentary came from Die Gartenlaube, a journal, which was sure that now with the great Victory Column, “Berlin will be made a metropolis in architectural terms and does not need to shy away from comparisons with London, New York, or Paris anymore.”62 Accordingly, most commentators in 1873 concluded that now that the nation-state had been founded and that it left its “colossal” footprint in the city,63 Berlin was truly a “world city” competing with other great cities of the world as much as the German nation-state was competing with the other major (imperial) powers of the world.64 That this assessment, from today’s perspective, had far wider implications than most contemporaries would have acknowledged can be illustrated with yet another episode involving the Siegessäule. It is one of the paradigms of postcolonial studies that “metropole” and “periphery” have to be analyzed as “one

  57 Deutsche Bau-Zeitung 4, no. 35 (1870), 280. 58 Ibid. 59 Benedikt Goebel, Der Umbau Alt-Berlins zum modernen Stadtzentrum. Planungs-, Bau- und Besitzgeschichte des historischen Berliner Stadtkerns im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: 2003), 41–42. 60 G. Brunn and J. Reulecke, eds., Metropolis Berlin. Berlin als deutsche Hauptstadt im Vergleich europäischer Hauptstädte 1871–1939 (Bonn: 1992). 61 Die Dioskuren 18, no. 33 (1873) 262. 62 Die Gartenlaube, no. 3 (1872), 48. 63 On the word of the day, “colossal” (kolossal), see: Lange, Berlin, 236. 64 We do find the term “world city” in almost every article on Berlin at that time, e.g.: Die Gartenlaube, no. 52 (1873), 840.



T HE G LOBAL, I MPERIAL M ETROPOLIS | 371

single field”65—and thus when global entanglements are connected with one column in Berlin, there needs to be another twist. Within the context that contemporaries interpreted their victory memorial, we find the founding of a German nation-state, which to a large degree resembles the continental empires. We also see dreams of global maritime presence and a comparison with the great cities of the world. As we know today of course, the flip side to global power, continental empire, as well as overseas imperialism was colonialism, global inequality, forced labor, migration, and racist, (social-)darwinist ideologies. The Germans of 1873, however, might not have been aware of these implications— although it was indeed already visible right in front of their eyes, built into the Siegessäule. Its building process as such was very much a transnational undertaking that fostered far-reaching labor migration with material and people not only consciously chosen from “all German lands” but also coming from all over Europe—most notably glass mosaic artists from Venice.66 Much more astonishing, however, is the visual evidence represented by the column itself. There, on two of the four bronze frescoes covering the base, Africans are visible as beaten French colonial soldiers. These soldiers, so-called Zuavs and Turcos, were indeed part of the French army, albeit a very small part. In the German representations of the war, however, they were omnipresent and can essentially be understood as a way to make the German victory more impressive. Their presence highlights for the German public both that the war was won against a world-spanning empire and that it was won against enemies who were discursively constructed as “very scary and ruthless.”67 The monumental interior painting by Anton von Werner is quite explicit in its depiction, which amongst other things displays black soldiers that are meant to show “rape of the Germania through the French and the African Hordes in their service” in a

  65 Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper (Berkeley: 1997). 66 Hoffmeister, National-Siegesdenkmal, 19. 67 On this see: Christian Koller, “Von Wilden aller Rassen niedergemetzelt.” Die Diskussion um die Verwendung von Kolonialtruppen in Europa zwischen Rassismus, Kolonial- Und Militärpolitik (1914–1930) (Stuttgart: 2001). Also: William F. Gutteridge, “Military and Police Forces in Colonial Africa,” in Colonialism in Africa 1870–1970: Vol. II; The History and Politics of Colonialism 1914–1960, ed. L. H. Gann and P. Duignan (Cambridge: 1982). With perspective on German discourse: Amadou B. Sadji, Das Bild des Negro-Afrikaners in der deutschen Kolonialliteratur (1884–1945). Ein Beitrag zur literarischen Imagologie Schwarzafrikas (Berlin: 1985).



372 | T IM O PITZ

somewhat drastic way.68 What these images highlighted, however, was the imperial reality that the German nation-state and Berliners had arrived in following unification in 1871. They pointed to both an “exotic world” that Germany was now demanding a fraction of,69 as well as to an imperial hierarchy that Germans began to conceptualize themselves as on top of.70 They are a glimpse of the massive acceleration in globalization to come and that would irrevocably change the world and all the people living in it. To be sure, we are only talking of bronze effigies, but they dimly foreshadow the “colonial metropolis” Berlin71 as much as they are one of the first glimpses of the “Age of Empire” in the city of Berlin.72

II. C ITIES G LOBAL : T HE M ETROPOLIS Looking closely at Berlin’s Siegessäule in 1873 allows us to identify a moment of transition, from Prussian to German-national belonging and from a quite regional to a relatively global scale. It was a moment that, from then onward, the city and the German nation as a whole would never again able to disentangle from global connections and imperial ramifications, not to speak of the fact that a German nation-state such as it was, with all its inherent confusions, was set in stone, too. This moment was dominated by the presence of the military, the idea and celebration of the nation-state and its realization through the force of the soldiers. While building the column on Königsplatz did not specifically trigger any particular event, a thorough analysis of its opening ceremony reveals developments that are quite prescient in light of Germany’s imperial trajectory. Furthermore it should be noted on a general level that encountering the described developments in a city like Berlin at this point of time does not come

  68 Provinzial Correspondenz 11, No. 36, 4 September 1873. 69 On the exotic, see: A. Honold and K. Scherpe, ed., Mit Deutschland um die Welt. Eine Kulturgeschichte des Fremden in der Kolonialzeit (Stuttgart: 2004); K. Kopp and K. Müller-Richter, eds., Die “Großstadt” und das “Primitive.” Text - Politik – Repräsentation (Stuttgart: 2004). 70 The point that imperialism is intrinsically connected to the founding of the nationstate is also strong in the good account of Dirk van Laak, Über Alles in der Welt. Deutscher Imperialismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: 2005). 71 U. van der Heyden and J. Zeller, eds., Kolonialmetropole Berlin. Eine Spurensuche (Berlin: 2002). 72 Narrative on this epoch: Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (London: 1987); R. Aldrich, ed., The Age of Empires (London: 2007).



T HE G LOBAL, I MPERIAL M ETROPOLIS | 373

as too much of a surprise—quite the opposite. The nineteenth century was a time of great transitions that touched every aspect of peoples’ lives and altered the general structures of societies. It was, bluntly speaking, the “birth of the modern world.”73 Territories were ever increasingly and more exclusively organized as nation-states or were dependent on them as, for example, colonies.74 Both these nation-states and their colonies were on the one hand most often directly connected to the potential use of force or originated straight out of war.75 On the other hand, these developments created both an intellectual, economic, and political “world of nations,” erecting national borders while effectively reaching beyond them on various levels in the same instance.76 Concomittantly, with industrialization still gaining pace and the transport revolution well under way, globalization had irrevocably commenced by the year of 1873.77 All these developments did not leave the worlds’ cities unchanged. Quite the opposite, cities were on the forefront in bringing all the changes together in one location. In the age of globalization, “the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ have been difficult to disentangle.”78 To a large degree, with globalization itself gaining momentum, cities practically embodied all the aspects described above; they were the very locus of globalization so to speak.79 From a certain point in time onward, big cities inevitably entered the global realm. This point, in most cases, was in the nineteenth century and its prefixes

  73 Chris A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World: 1780–1914; Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: 2004). 74 T. Baycroft and M. Hewitson, eds., What Is a Nation? Europe 1789–1914 (Oxford: 2006). See also: C. S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (2000). 75 M. H. Geyer and C. Bright, “Global Violence and Nationalizing Wars in Eurasia and America: The Geopolitics of War in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 38, no. 4 (1996). 76 Christopher L. Hill, National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France, and the United States (Durham, NC: 2008). 77 Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Geschichte der Globalisierung. Dimensionen, Prozesse, Epochen (Munich: 2004). Also see: B. Mazlish and A. Iriye, eds., The Global History Reader (London: 2005). 78 Very helpful: Kathleen Wilson, “Introduction: Histories, Empires, Modernities,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: 2004). Here, page 15. 79 Cf. David Clark, Urban World/Global City (London: 2003); D. Massey, J. Allen, and S. Pile, eds., City Worlds (London: 1999).



374 | T IM O PITZ

were national, militaristic, and imperialistic.80 Obviously there had to be cities that were pulled into this development earlier and more intensively—most notably European cities of the western North-Atlantic who had a long-standing history and tradition in global connections that also were part of an empire,81 such as London.82 In addition, the big port cities were part of this system earlier than most other cities and were more deeply affected as well. In the German case, the best example is posed by Hamburg.83 But from this time onward, there was no way to avoid partaking in this development. In the last decades before World War I, all bigger European/Western cities, and of course also cities that stood in direct connection to these cities, such as Shanghai,84 had access to and had been integrated into a global system. Within the West, this system politically worked on national terms. Outside of the national boundaries, the terms were imperial. Scholars have described where these developments led to in the following centuries for more recent cities. The whole idea of an “imperial city,” which has been particularly well developed for cities in the period from about 1900 until 1930, builds on the fact that “if the imperial city was at the center of the world, the empire was now at the heart of the urban experience.”85 As an analysis of the opening ceremony of the Siegessäule has demonstrated, there were already glimpses of empire in 1873 Berlin—even though Germany traditionally stands

  80 On the nineteenth century as period of transition and globalization, see Jürgen Osterhammel’s magesterial account: Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: 2009). 81 This is not intended to be a Eurocentric development model but rather to indicate different timelines in one global process. See here in general: Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: 2000); S.N. Eisenstadt, ed., Multiple Modernities (New Brunswick: 2002). 82 On London, for example: David Gilbert and Felix Driver, “Capital and Empire: Geographies of Imperial London,” GEOJournal 51 (2001); Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven: 1999). 83 Lars Amenda, Fremde - Hafen - Stadt. Chinesische Migration und ihre Wahrnehmung in Hamburg, 1897–1972 (Munich: 2006). 84 Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Global Shanghai 1850–2010: A History in Fragments (New York: 2009). 85 Felix Driver and David Gilbert, “Imperial Cities: Overlapping Territories, Interwinded Histories,” in Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity, ed. Felix Driver and David Gilbert (Manchester: 1999), 3.



T HE G LOBAL, I MPERIAL M ETROPOLIS | 375

as the imperial “late-comer.”86 Visible here are traces of a German Empire as well as the early entanglement with the colonial world.87 That Berlin, as the host of the Congo conference in 1884, became the center of this world and finally the heart of a German Empire proper in only ten years time is telling enough.88 Social scientists today engage in debates on “world cities”89 and “global cities.”90 While both are mainly concerned about today’s centralization of control-functions in a global system of cities, we can still make them applicable while thinking about historical urbanism. As has been stated, for example, about New York: “All features of global cities had already made their appearance in New York City before the last quarter of the 19th century.”91 And some of these claims also hold true for 1873 Berlin around the Siegessäule, as we have seen. The city was seen by contemporaries as being in one global system with London and New York. It was trying to compete and impress, especially in its new status as the German capital in a time of national capitals as international symbols and showcases.92 Meanwhile, the nation-state was intensifying its efforts to centralize functions in its capital Berlin, too, as did many other fields of the Ger-

  86 Lewis H. Gann, “Marginal Colonialism: The German Case,” in Germans in the Tropics: Essays in German Colonial History, ed. A. J. Knoll and Lewis Gann (New York: 1987). See also Winfried Speitkamp, Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte (Stuttgart: 2005); Horst Gründer, Geschichte der deutschen Kolonien, 4th ed. (Paderborn: 2000). 87 See, to sum up: E. R. Dickinson, “The German Empire: An Empire?,” History Workshop Journal 66 (2008). 88 E. Bendikat, ed., Imperialistische Interessenpolitik und Konfliktregelung 1884/85. Dokumentation zur Rezeption der Berliner Westafrika-Konferenz von 1884/85 (Berlin: 1985). 89 P. L. Knox and P. L. Taylor, eds., World Cities in a World-System (Cambridge: 2000). 90 Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: 1991). Also important as an overview: Neil Brenner and Roger Keil, eds., The Global Cities Reader (New York: 2006). 91 This is maybe the most important account that tries to use the “global cities”-approach for historical research and argumentation: Janet L. Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Cities (Minneapolis: 1999), 2. 92 See generally: Theodor Schieder, “Einige Probleme der Hauptstadtforschung,” in Hauptstädte in europäischen Nationalstaaten, ed. Schieder and G. Brunn (Munich: 1983); Andreas W. Daum, “Capitals in Modern History: Inventing Urban Spaces for the Nation,” in Berlin–Washington, 1800–2000: Capital Cities, Cultural Representation, and National Identities, ed. Daum and C. Mauch (Cambridge: 2005).



376 | T IM O PITZ

man public life, for instance the press.93 This can very well be seen as the beginning of bringing global tasks and responsibilities to Berlin. Summing up, we can state that in the decades leading up to 1900, the cities of the West stepped into a global system consisting of nation-states. These states acted as imperial powers toward parts of the globe that were not organized under the principle of the nation. The cities at that time underwent a process of centralization and concentration that especially hit the capitals and the major cities. These were positioned in a global competition with other cities in other nationstates. These competitions were mainly based on all kinds of reputation, for example in the architectural field. That this rivalry also led to a boost in military representation94—which again was mainly done in the respective cities95—does not come as a surprise in times that were also characterized by its massive militarization and armament.96 All this together was the time when “cities made modern Europe.”97 It was the “time of the metropolis,”98 too. I would suggest using this term “metropolis,” or perhaps, as this volume suggests, the term “metropolitanism” to describe the place (the important, big Western city), the process (globalization, industrialization, nationalization, militarization, imperialization), and the time (starting from roughly the second half of the nineteenth century) altogether. Or put differently, it was the interrelation of the processes dealt with in this essay—which became possible for the first time in a certain period—through which the cities of the West began to develop into something new and different. This “different” thing was the “metropolis.” When Heinz Reif was summing up a long debate with the simple conclusion that there must be something “more” to the metropolis in comparison with other cities (and

  93 Ursula E. Koch, Berliner Presse und europäisches Geschehen 1871 (Berlin: 1978); Rudolf Stöber, Deutsche Pressegeschichte (Konstanz: 2005). 94 Jakob Vogel, Nationen im Gleichschritt. Der Kult der ‘Nation in Waffen’ in Deutschland und Frankreich, 1871–1914 (Göttingen: 1997). 95 One example for this military culture outside of Berlin: Tobias von Elsner, Kaisertage. Die Hamburger und das Wilhelminische Deutschland im Spiegel öffentlicher Festkultur (Frankfurt: 1991). 96 Good account for Germany: Förster and Nagler, Road to Total War; F. Boemeke, R. Chickering, and S. Förster, eds., Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–1914 (Cambridge: 1999). 97 Andrew Lees and Lynn Hollen Lees, Cities and the Making of Modern Europe, 1750– 1914 (Cambridge: 2007). 98 Clemens Zimmermann, Die Zeit der Metropolen. Urbanisierung und Großstadtentwicklung (Frankfurt: 2000).



T HE G LOBAL, I MPERIAL M ETROPOLIS | 377

I would see this “more” in terms of global entanglements on imperial basis),99 he might in fact have pointed to something “earlier.” What I have tried to lay out in this essay through the example of Berlin took hold in all other German and European cities in the same way, only a few decades later. A distinct combination of national belonging and global entanglement can be diagnosed for cities over the globe only half a century later, not to mention today—but metropoles, in the truest sense of the word, already existed. In addition, one more aspect makes the term “metropolis” perfectly suited for the cities I tried to describe: the sense of hierarchical relations that has been inherent to the word since Greece antiquity. The term originally described a mother city in the Greek heartland from which one or more colonies all over the Mediterranean spread. Obvious here is the hierarchy—one city, the metropolis, founds other cities and is stands in front of them both in terms of power and time. For the usage of the term here, the hierarchy can be understood in a twofold way. First, there is hierarchy in relation to other cities; as we have seen already in 1873 Berlin there seemed to be layers of comparison for cities, but the metropolis stands above the other cities only to be compared in its own league. Second, the Greek origins of the term “metropolis” points to the power relation between the center – the metropolis – and its periphery—which, as my argument goes, in the nineteenth century was ultimately the globe as such. And traces of people, things, and processes from around the globe can be found in the metropolis.100 As we have seen through the example of colonial soldiers in 1873 Berlin, the metropolis had entered the global field and was furthermore on the verge of seeking domination in this field. Control functions, political and military power, and economic supremacy were already centralized in the big cities of the West in the nineteenth century. These constituted one single “field” together with the colonized and dependent world, although this field was highly polarized. As the Greek origin of “metropolis” suggests, the European metropoles were the center and they were there first. This is a claim holds true for the metropolis of Berlin from about 1873 onward and similar claims can be made and substantiated for every other major European city in relative temporal proximity.

  99

Heinz Reif, “Metropolen. Geschichte, Begriffe, Methoden,” CMS Working Paper Series 001 (2006). See also Reif in this volume.

100 See Ignacio Farías and Susanne Stemmler, “Deconstructing ‘Metropolis’: Critical Reflections on a European Concept,” in this volume.





Contributors

Bender, Thomas, teaches history at New York University. He is the author of several books, including The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea, Community and Social Change in America, and the co-edited volume Urban Imaginaries (both 2007). He has held Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, he has also been a Getty Scholar, and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton. He is an advisory board member for both the Transatlantic Graduate Research Program (2005-2010) and the International Graduate Research Program (2012-2014). Brantz, Dorothee, is Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Center for Metropolitan Studies at the Technical University Berlin. She also heads the International Graduate Research Program Berlin-New York-Toronto “The World in the City: Metropolitanism and Globalization from the Nineteenth Century to the Present.” (2012-2014). She received her PhD from the University of Chicago and has held fellowships at the Free University of Berlin, the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., and the University of Cologne. She has published numerous articles and edited books on the role of animals and the environment in the transformation of urban space. Disko, Sasha, has been associated with the Center for Metropolitan Studies at the Technical University Berlin since 2008, where she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Transatlantic Graduate Research Program (2008-2010) and held a guest professorship for Gender and the City (2010-2011), co-sponsored by the Sociology Department. She received her PhD in History from New York University in 2008. Her research interests and publications focus on the social history of motorization and mobility.



380 | T HICK S PACE

Dümpelmann, Sonja, is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University. She is the author and editor of several books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century landscape architectural history, most recently of an edited volume, The Cultural History of Gardens in the Age of Empire (2012). Her published work includes essays on landscape architecture in fascist Italy, the transatlantic transfer of design ideas, and pioneering female landscape architects. Currently she is exploring the points of contact between technology and landscape architecture, focusing in particular on powered aviation. Färber, Alexa, is Professor of Urban Anthropology and Ethnography at HafenCity University in Hamburg. She received her Ph.D. from the Humboldt University of Berlin. She has served as an advisory board member of the Transatlantic Graduate Research Program. Her research interests include methodologies of ANT and urban research, urban imagineering, Islam in urban space, and “low-budget urbanity.” Recent publications include Weltausstellung als Wissensmodus. Ethnographie einer Repräsentationsarbeit (2006) and. (ed.) Stoffwechsel Berlin. Urbane Präsenzen und Repräsentationen (2010). Farías, Ignacio, is a researcher at the Social Science Research Center Berlin and associate researcher of the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales of the Universidad Diego Portales, Chile. He was a fellow at the Transatlantic Graduate Research Program 2005-2007 and received his PhD in 2008 in European Ethnology at the Humboldt University Berlin. His research has focused on urban tourism, marketing and consumption spaces, urban disasters, controversies and city reconstructtion processes, and studio spaces and processes in creative industries. He is coeditor (with Thomas Bender) of Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies (2010). Frahm, Laura, is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM) at the Bauhaus University Weimar. From 2005–2007 she was doctoral fellow at the Transatlantic Graduate Research Program and she received her PhD from Humboldt University Berlin in 2008. Her most recent book publication is Jenseits des Raums. Zur filmischen Topologie des Urbanen (2010). She will join the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University in Fall 2012. Graaff, Kristina, is a teaching and research fellow in the American Studies Department at Humboldt University Berlin. From 2008-2010 she was a fellow at the Transatlantic Graduate Research Program. She was recently a visiting



C ONTRIBUTORS | 381

scholar at Fordham University and at the Bronx African American History Project. Her areas of research include African American popular fiction, prison writing and the U.S. penal system. Among her most recent projects is the anthology Urban Street Vending in the Neoliberal City: A Global Perspective on the Practices and Policies of a Marginalized Economy (Forthcoming 2013). Höhne, Stefan, is a teaching and research fellow in the Department of Cultural Studies at the Humboldt University Berlin. He was a fellow at the Transatlantic Graduate Research Program 2008-2010. His research interests include historical anthropology, urban studies, and cultural theory. Recent publications include “Tokens, Suckers und der Great New York Token War,“ in Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung (2011) and “A New Frontier below the Metropolis – Stratification, Circulation and the Invention of the Modern Vertical City around 1900,” in Edges, edited by Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett (Forthcoming). Kaschuba, Wolfgang, is Director of the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University Berlin. His research foci include daily routines and civilization in European modernity, national and ethnic identities, and urban and metropolitan studies. He has published widely on everyday history and folk culture and is the co-editor of numerous volumes, including Urban Spaces after Socialism. Ethnographies of Public Spaces in Eurasian Cities. (2011) and Ort. Arbeit. Körper. Ethnografie Europäischer Modernen (2005). He is a DFGExpert and an advisory board member of the Transatlantic Graduate Research Program and the International Graduate Research Program. Kemper, Jan, is a teaching and research fellow at the Department of Human Geography at the Goethe University Frankfurt/M. He was a fellow at the Transatlantic Graduate Research Program 2008-2010. He is the co-editor (with Transatlantic Graduate Research Program alumna Anne Vogelpohl) of the volume Lokalistische Stadtforschung, kulturalisierte Städte. Zur Kritik der “Eigenlogik der Städte” (2011). His research interests include the methodology, conceptual structure, and history of urban social studies and transformation processes in the present-day labeling of social reality as “urban.” Mayer, Margit, teaches comparative and North American politics at the Free University of Berlin. She is on the advisory board of both the Transatlantic Graduate Research Program and the International Graduate Research Program. Her research focuses on urban and social politics and social movements. She has published on various aspects of contemporary urban politics, urban theory,



382 | T HICK S PACE

(welfare) state restructuring and social movements. She co-edited Urban Movements in a Globalising World, Cities for People not for Profit (2000), and Neoliberal Urbanism and Its Contestations (2011). Opitz, Tim, studied history, modern German literature, and politics at the Free University of Berlin as well as at the University of Sussex at Brighton. He was a doctoral fellow at the Transatlantic Graduate Research Program (2008-2010) and is completing his dissertation on military parades in imperial Berlin. His research interests combine colonial, military, urban, and imperial history. Currently he is a Teach First Fellow at a high risk Secondary School in Berlin Neukölln. Platt, Harold L., is Professor of History at Loyola University of Chicago. He has published extensively on technology, the city, and the environment. His most recent book is Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (2005). His is currently writing a book on urban planning since 1945 from comparative and environmental perspectives. Reif, Heinz, is a historian. He was the founding director of the Center of Metropolitan Studies at the Technical University Berlin and director of the Transatlantic Graduate Research Program (2005-2009). Before coming to Berlin in 1986, he worked as a museum director in Essen and taught at the University of Bielefeld. His research centers on the social history of German industrial cities as well as postindustrial renewal projects. He is the author and editor of several books, among them on bourgeois living in suburbia and the history of Oberhausen in the Ruhr. He is currently pursuing a project on German communal politician Ernst Reuter's impact on the reform of Turkish cities. Rodger, Richard, is Professor of Economic and Social History at Edinburgh University. He was editor of Urban History from 1987–2007, and co-editor of 40 books with a strong European emphasis published in Ashgate’s Historical Urban Studies series. He has published widely on the urban history of Britain since 1800, with a particular interest in housing, property and landownership, including his prize-winning book The Transformation of Edinburgh: Land, Property and Trust in the Nineteenth Century (2001). Recent research includes various works on public health, and social and environmental justice Rodger was elected to the Academy of Social Sciences in 2004. Stratigakos, Despina, is Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University at Buffalo. An architectural historian with an overarching inter-



C ONTRIBUTORS | 383

est in gender and modernity in European cities, she is the author of A Women’s Berlin: Building the Modern City (2008), a history of a forgotten female metropolis and winner of the 2009 German Studies Association DAAD Book Prize. Stratigakos has also published on the public image of women architects, the gender politics of the Werkbund, connections between architectural and sexual discourses in Weimar Germany, and exiled Jewish women architects in the United States. She lectures publicly on issues of diversity in architecture. Stemmler, Susanne, is a cultural theorist and independent scholar. She received her PhD from the University of Düsseldorf in French Studies. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Metropolitan Studies from 2005 to 2007 and then Head of the Department for Literature and Humanities at the House of World Cultures Berlin from 2008 to 2012. She was previously a lecturer in French and Media Studies at the University of Düsseldorf. Her research interests include transnational culture and globalization, urban culture, and Francophone literature. Wagner-Kyora, Georg, is a historian of modern Germany and is associated with the Center for Metropolitan Studies, Berlin. He has written on housing politics in the Federal Republic of Germany and on technical professions in the twentieth century, and led a research project on postwar reconstruction. He taught in the faculty of history at the Leibniz University Hannover and in the Historical Urban Studies Department at the Center for Metropolitan Studies for many years. He currently teaches history at the Mariengymnasium in Jever.