urban theory and the urban experience (1)

U R B A N T H E O RY A N D T H E U R B A N E X P E R I E N C E

Urban Theory and the Urban Experience brings together classic and contemporary approaches to urban research in order to reveal the intellectual origins of urban studies and the often un-acknowledged debt that empirical and theoretical perspectives on the city owe one another.

From the foundations of modern urban theory in the work of Weber, Simmel, Benjamin andLefebvre to the writings of contemporary urban theorists such as David Harvey and ManuelCastells and the Los Angeles school of urbanism, Urban Theory and the Urban Experience traces thekey developments in the idea of the city over more than a century. Individual chapters exploreinvestigative studies of the great metropolis from Charles Booth to the contemporary urbanresearch of William J. Wilson, along with alternative approaches to the industrial city, rangingfrom the Garden City Movement to the new urbanism.

The volume also considers the impact of new information and communication technologies, andthe growing trend towards disaggregated urban networks, all of which raise important questionsabout the viability and physical and social identity of the conventional townscape. Urban Theoryand the Urban Experience concludes with a rallying cry for a more holistic and integrated approachto the urban question in theory and in practice if the rich potential of our cities is to be realised.

For the benefit of students and tutors, frequent question points encourage exploration of keythemes, and annotated further readings provide follow-up sources for the issues raised in eachchapter.

This book will be of interest to students, scholars, practitioners and all those who wish to learnmore about why the urban has become the dominant social, economic and cultural form of thetwenty-first century.

Simon Parker is Lecturer in Politics at the University of York, UK.

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U R B A N T H E O RY A N DT H E U R B A N E X P E R I E N C E

Encountering the city

Simon Parker

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First published 2004by Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

2004 Simon Parker

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised 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 publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataParker, Simon, 1964

Urban theory and the urban experience: encountering the city/Simon Parker.p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.1. Cities and towns. 2. Cities and towns Philosophy. 3. Sociology, Urban.

4. Sociology, Urban Philosophy. I. Title: Urban theory and the urbanexperience. II. Title.

HT151.P35 2004307.76dc21 2003008627

ISBN 0415245915 (hbk)ISBN 0415245923 (pbk)

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

ISBN 0-203-47178-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-78002-7 (Adobe eReader Format)

For Esm, May Beth and Lily

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C O N T E N T S

List of figures xList of tables xiList of exhibits xiiAcknowledgements xiii

1 ENCOUNTERING THE CITY 1Why does urban theory matter? 2The development of urban theory 4The plan of the book 5

2 THE FOUNDATIONS OF URBAN THEORY: WEBER, SIMMEL, BENJAMIN AND LEFEBVRE 8Introduction 8Max Weber: the city in history 9Georg Simmel: the culture of the metropolis 13Walter Benjamin: the exegetical city 15Henri Lefebvre: the production of the city 19Conclusion 23Further reading 24

3 THE CITY DESCRIBED: SOCIAL REFORM AND THE EMPIRICAL TRADITION IN CLASSIC URBAN STUDIES 27Introduction 27The sinful city: urban investigation as social reform 28Urban studies and the Chicago School of Sociology 39Conclusion 47Further reading 49

4 VISIONS OF UTOPIA: FROM THE GARDEN CITY TO THE NEW URBANISM 51Introduction 51Planning utopia: the civic revivalism of Ruskin, Howard and Unwin 52

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The Garden City Movement 53A reluctant modernism: planning the American Dream 59The functional city 61The new urbanism 65Conclusion 70Further reading 71

5 BETWEEN THE SUBURB AND THE GHETTO: URBAN STUDIES AND THE SEARCH FOR COMMUNITY IN BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR 74Introduction 74In search of traditional community 75Cities for people: Jane Jacobs and the case for the dense metropolis 78The sociology of sprawl: suburbs, new towns and edge cities 80The new community studies: social capital and civic empowerment 84The polarised city: gentrification and ghettoisation 86Living in the ghetto: the racialised city in the US 89The globalising ghetto? The British and European experience 94Conclusion 96Further reading 97

6 URBAN FORTUNES: MAKING SENSE OF THE CAPITALIST CITY 100Introduction 100The capitalist city in the work of Engels and Marx 101Pavements of gold: the commodification of urban space 103The capitalist city and globalisation 111Conclusion 117Further reading 118

7 THE CONTESTED CITY: POLITICS, PEOPLE AND POWER 120Introduction 120Approaches to the study of urban politics and urban governance 121Local and global: the re-scaling of urban government 129Power from below? the changing face of urban social movements 131Conclusion: theories of urban politics and urban theory 135Further reading 136

8 FROM PILLAR TO POST: CULTURE, REPRESENTATION AND DIFFERENCE IN THE URBAN WORLD 138Introduction 138Urban cultures 138Sex in the city: gender and sexuality in the urban experience 143Heterotopia or bubbling cauldron? Cultural and ethnic identities in the

modern metropolis 146The city as text: reading the urban condition 147

C O N T E N T Svi i i

Hybridity, virtuality and the postmetropolis 152Conclusion 155Further reading 157

9 PUTTING THE CITY IN ITS PLACE: URBAN FUTURES AND THE FUTURE OF URBAN THEORY 159Introduction 159East of Helsinki, south of San Diego: the majority urban world 161The informational city: linking the virtual and material urban worlds 164The new ecology of the city: sustainability and the urban future 167Experience teaching theory: from Chicago to LA to Ground Zero 169A manifesto for the city 170Conclusion: the urban experience and the future of urban theory 173Further reading 176

Glossary 177Notes 179Bibliography 185Index 204

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C O N T E N T S ix

F I G U R E S

1.1 Henry C. Becks design for the 1933 London Underground System 23.1 A character from Henry Mayhews London Labour and the London Poor 293.2 Five Cents a Spot. A lodging house in a New York immigrant quarter 323.3 Charles Booth in his study, 1902 333.4 Part of Charles Booths descriptive map of London poverty (1897) 343.5 Jane Addams with the children of the Hull-House settlement 383.6 Burgesss concentric zone view of 1920s Chicago 424.1 The Three Magnets, from Ebenezer Howards Garden Cities of To-morrow 534.2 The Raymond Unwin designed Garden City of Letchworth 554.3 Ebenezer Howards Social City incorporating a larger central city linked to satellite

garden cities 564.4 Ebenezer Howard 574.5 Greenbelt, Maryland (original town plan) 584.6 Greenbelt, Maryland. View of cinema and apartment houses 594.7 Le Corbusiers Unit dhabitation apartment block, Marseilles, France 624.8 Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) 644.9 Frank Lloyd Wright 65

4.10 Peter Calthorpes criteria for new towns 674.11 Middlemarsh Street in Poundbury, Dorset, England 69

5.1 Burnt-out buildings in Harlem, New York City 928.1 The Venetian HotelCasino complex, Las Vegas 1518.2 The Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles 1549.1 Public housing development, Amsterdam, the Netherlands 171

TA B L E S

5.1 Comparison of homicide rates in selected cities, 19982000 946.1 Urbanisation rates of the ten highest and ten lowest Human Development Index

ranked countries, 19752015 1137.1 Key features of governance 129

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E X H I B I T S

3.1 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor 293.2 Profile of Charles Booth 334.1 Profile of Ebenezer Howard 575.1 Peter Willmott and Michael Young, Family and Class in a London Suburb 765.2 Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers 775.3 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities 795.4 Joel Garreau, Edge City. Life on the New Frontier 845.5 Butler and Robson, Gentrification in Brixton 885.6 Loc Wacquant, Inside the Zone 946.1 The City of London 1147.1 City slogans 1267.2 Ed Soja, Squatting in Amsterdam 133

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

I wish to thank my colleagues in the Department of Politics at the University of York (UK) for allowing mea sabbatical term during which I was able to focus on the writing of this book. Thanks are especially due tomy colleagues Roger Pierce and Jon Parkin for supplying valuable sources. I would also like to thank partici-pants in the Political Science Workshop at the University of York and the members of the graduate programmeon the Contemporary European City for helping me to sharpen my understanding of the urban experience.The issues and themes in this volume have benefited from discussions with Larry Bennett, Bob Catterall,Pierre Clavel, Roger Keil, Todd Swanstrom and Peter Terhorst. John Foot and Martin Bright have beengenerous hosts and supportive friends during my periodic sojourns in London. I would especially like to thankmy editor at Routledge, Andrew Mould, for his support and encouragement throughout this project, andalso the anonymous referees who offered valuable suggestions and constructive criticism on previous drafts ofthe manuscript. In accepting sole responsibility for the arguments that follow, I wish to distance any of theabove from my occasionally impetuous decisions to ignore their sensible advice.

Acknowledgement is hereby given to Londons Transport Museum for permission to use the photographof Henry C. Becks 1933 diagrammatic map of the London Underground on page 2; to the Museum of theCity of New York for the photograph by Jacob Riis on page 32; to Mrs Norman-Butler and the Universityof London Library Special Collections for permission to reproduce the photograph of Charles Booth on page33; to Swarthmore College Librarys Peace Collection for use of the photograph of Jane Addams on page 38;and to the University of Chicago Press for permission to reproduce the concentric zone diagram by EdwardBurgess in Figure 3.6 on page 42. I also wish to thank the director of the British Architectural Library, RIBA,London, for permission to reproduce the images in Figures 4.2, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6, 4.8 and 4.9, PrincetonArchitectural Press for permission to reproduce Peter Calthorpes Criteria for new towns in Figure 4.10 onpage 67, and also the Architectural Association Photographic Library and the individual photographers forpermission to reproduce the images in Figures 4.7, 4.11, 5.1, 8.1, 8.2 and 9.1.

Finally, this book would not have been written without the love and support of my wife Esm and mydaughters May Beth and Lily. Their forbearance and solidarity has been a constant motivation and inspira-tion to me. I dedicate this book to them with my sincere thanks, love and admiration.

A note to readers: terms highlighted in bold may be referred to in the glossary on pages 1778.

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When the distinguished American urbanist LewisMumford asked what is a city? his focus was on thegreat renewal of urban society in Europe and theWestern World from the tenth century onwards and,especially, the massive expansion in the number andsize of cities since the industrial revolution of thenineteenth century. Since Mumford posed that ques-tion just before the Second World War only Londonand New York had populations approaching eightmillion. At the start of the twenty-first century therewere 22 megalopolises with eight-figure popula-tions, while the rate of urbanisation has been soconsiderable in the last fifty years that the majorityof the worlds population now live in cities. But inall this time have we come any closer to under-standing the nature of the urban experience? Inparticular, have we produced satisfactory answers to

Mumfords supplementary questions on the nature ofthe relationship between politics and the city, thefactors that have led to the development of certainurban forms, and the role that the city plays in rela-tion to its wider region and, indeed, to the widerworld (Mumford, 1938: 1011)?

This book aims to provide a response to these ques-tions through a critical examination of the ways inwhich different urban commentators, investigatorsand visionaries have tried to grapple with these issuesover the past 150 years or so. The chronology isimportant because it spans the period that manysocial scientists and cultural theorists identify as the era of modernity. It is this interface betweenmodernity and how we both think about, and live in,the city that is the master narrative of this volume,but before anticipating the specific themes of the

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1

E N C O U N T E R I N G T H E C I T Y

You have to be out there all day to be sure of getting it. The remission. The pay-off that makesurban life worth enduring.

Iain Sinclair, London Orbital

At the beginning of the twentieth century some 10 per cent of the worlds population dwelt in towns orcities.

In 1975 this figure had risen to 37.8 per cent of the worlds population. In 1995 the figure had reached 45.3 per cent of the worlds population. By the year 2006 every second human being is expected to live in urban settlements. By the year 2030 over 60 per cent of the worlds population will be urbanised.

book, it is important to explain the purpose of theoryin the context of urban studies and why it has morethan an academic value to the present and futureprospects of city life.

WHY DOES URBAN THEORYMATTER?

Theory . . . does not flow above everyday life in adetached way: It comes from some place, and it is theresponsibility of analysis to return it there.

(Liggett and Perry, 1995: 2)

Too often theory is presented as an inaccessiblelanguage available only to a highly select and self-referential community of scholars and writers. Butjust as the bourgeois gentilhomme in Molires epony-

mous farce was speaking prose even though he didnot realise it, all of us who live in, work in, or visitthe city engage in unconscious theoretical activity ona daily basis.

Let us take the example of a shopping expeditionto Londons West End to illustrate how theory canmake sense of an everyday urban experience. If webegin at our local suburban Underground station weare confronted with a map familiar to millions ofLondoners and foreign tourists (see Figure 1.1). Butwhat we see is not, of course, an accurate scaled downdiagram of hundreds of miles of track, platforms andwalkways, but a topographical abstraction aimed atreducing to its most basic linear form a highlycomplex engineering system. We know that thedistance between the suburban stations is a good deal longer than those in the centre of the capital,

E N C O U N T E R I N G T H E C I T Y2

Figure 1.1 Henry C. Becks design for the 1933 London Underground System. Copyright Transport for London, courtesy of Londons Transport Museum

but the important measure for the London Under-ground passenger is sequential (how many stops must I travel?) or temporal (how many minutes toPaddington?) rather than distantial (how many milesdo I have to go?). Hence, spatial representations areshrunk or stretched to fit the intelligible spaghetti ofHarry Becks 1933 Underground Map.

Becks Underground Map can be considered froma number of theoretical angles, each of which isdiscussed in more detail in later chapters:

As representational space (the imagined city of theUnderground provides us with a powerful mentalimage of London to set alongside other familiarplace markers such as Big Ben, Nelsons Column,St Pauls Cathedral, Buckingham Palace, Picca-dilly Circus, Tower Bridge and so forth).

As symbolic space (the London Undergroundcircle and bar motif immediately conjures up anentire system of destinations and rail networks ina single instantly recognisable sign).

As a narrative space (each station stop and eachtube line tells a different story for each passenger where I go to work, where I go to shop, whereI go to watch sport).

As cultural trace (the classic quality of Becks1930s map incorporates with it nostalgic associ-ations of that period such as families shelteringon Underground platforms during the wartimebombardment stressing the unity of Londonand Londoners).

As commodity fetishism (wear the T-shirt, drinktea from the mug!).

As an example of state intervention in the urbaneconomy (the London Underground was one of thefirst examples of a publicly owned wide-area masstransit system).

As a hidden map of the dual city (for example,seventy years on from the Underground systemdescribed in Becks map, one of Londons poorestboroughs, Hackney, is still not served by a singleunderground station, while wealthy Kensingtonand Chelsea have six within a short distance ofeach other).

As a product of the rational design of highmodernity (Le Corbusier would have appreciatedthe spur and grid-like quality of Becks design,although he would have deplored the complexengineering required to protect the citys ancientfoundations from crumbling).

But what practical benefits can we derive from thistheoretically enriched way of seeing the city, and isthis any more than an interesting academic under-taking? Paradoxically, the first people to think aboutthe cities in what we might describe as a sociologicalperspective were not academics but social reformers.Neither Engels, Mayhew, Mearns and Booth inBritain nor Riis or Adams in the US had universityjobs, but they changed the way people saw the cityby making the invisibility of poverty visible for theaffluent classes whose money and power decided thefates of the poor majority. However, none of theseearly urbanists believed that moral imprecations wereenough to achieve their objectives, realising thatevidence especially scientifically defensible evidence that showed the general cost to society of povertywas worth more than a thousand sermons.

Of course, the theoretical pretensions of the earlyurban reformers were not as far reaching as those thatcame after them (with the possible exception ofEngels), but that is not to say that their work did nothave important theoretical as well as policy implica-tions. Jane Addams work in the settlement housemovement provided an important frame of referencefor the professional sociologists of the Chicagoschool in the 1920s and 1930s, just as Booths work on London poverty paved the way for the estab-lishment of the social sciences at the London Schoolof Economics. The findings of these men and women helped to shape the worldview of generationsof researchers and administrators who incorporatedmany of their ideas into the welfare policies ofgovernments around the world.

The link between urban theory and urban policy,I would argue, is just as strong today as it was in theearly decades of the twentieth century. If we considera recent policy document such as that produced bythe UK governments Urban Task Force under the

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E N C O U N T E R I N G T H E C I T Y 3

chairmanship of the architect, Lord Rogers of River-side, it is evident how much the report has beeninfluenced by arguments in favour of dense cities, bydebates on what constitutes an archetypal sustainablecity, by research on how business and city residentscan co-exist harmoniously, and how we might tacklethreats to the quality of urban life such as crime, poor public services and social exclusion (Urban TaskForce, 1999). Each one of these debates has a reso-nance in and, often, a direct input from, a diverserange of urban theories that have helped planners andpolicy makers understand the urban complex.

Even in the US, where urban policy has a morechequered history than in northern Europe, profes-sional urbanists working out of policy research bodiessuch as the Russell Sage Foundation, the BrookingsInstitute or the Heritage Foundation have long beenengaged in blue skies thinking that has influencedthe legislative programme of successive federal gov-ernments. Politicians on Capitol Hill are familiarwith concepts such as ghettoisation, sprawl, smartgrowth and social capital, and are anxious to seewhat benefits can be derived for their constituents by making cities work better. Knowledge of howprevious investigators and thinkers have engagedwith the urban complex, and how cities can best beconceptualised as integrated economies, as sites ofsocial and political identity, as territories of conflict,and as incubators of innovation and creativity is vital if the long-term future, not just of urban com-munities, but of global society as a whole is to besecured.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF URBANTHEORY

Let us, for the time being, make the audaciouspresumption that the case for urban theory has beenargued and won why do we talk of theory in thesingular and why prefer the adjective urban to city,why not for example talk of theories of the city? It is important not to get too hung up on semanticsand, indeed, I use the term city and urban, or evenmetropolitan throughout this volume almost inter-

changeably. But the term urban theory has becomeaccepted in academic circles as shorthand for a rangeof perspectives and interpretations of the urban worldthat aim, in their different ways, to provide a generalunderstanding of city life that goes beyond thecontingent and the local, while retaining a focus onthe essential characteristics of the urban experience.Urban theory can, thus, be considered as a subset ofsocial theory, but for all the shared conceptual vocab-ulary that social theory and urban theory possess, thelatter is distinguished by its conviction that social,cultural, economic and political life is different in thecity compared to other types of societies, howeverprecarious and endangered the non-urban world maybe. So the first distinction that we ought to note isthat urban life is neither universal nor ubiquitous andthat, as a consequence, it poses particular theoreticalproblems for those who wish to understand itscomplex of activities and functions better.

All urban theory, I would contend, deals with oneor more aspect of what we might call the Four Csof the urban experience culture, consumption, con-flict and community interpreted in their broadestsense. Hence, culture includes systems of belief,together with the physical built environment (build-ings, bridges, streets and parks), the contents andmeans of communication (newspapers, books, tele-vision, radio, the Internet, etc.), as well as traditionalcultural production (art, theatre, literature, orchestralmusic) and popular culture (movies, fashion, comicbooks, popular music).

Consumption refers not just to the consumption of goods and services, but also to the nature of theexchange and the means by which such goods andservices (private and public) are produced. Conflictrelates not just to visible, physical violence, such asriots or civil disorder, but to less visible struggles over resources (for example, between urban residentsand developers), but also between social classes and different interest and status groups. Communityinvolves all aspects of the social life of cities, from the size of the population to its distribution,demographic make-up, and changing characteristicsover time. Community is also a value-term forcontiguous association that bears with it a series


of assumptions about how we, as humans, should livein close confine with one another. Bearing all four ofthese Cs in mind I want briefly to explain the waysin which different theorists and theories have workedthese themes into an explanation of the urban experi-ence, and how these encounters with the city relateto the general plan of the book.

THE PLAN OF THE BOOK

This volume is both a thematic study of urban theoryin its several aspects and an attempt at a genealogyof urban knowledge over the past 150 years or so.Because I believe it important not to privilege onenarrative above the other, I have tried as far as I canto make the individual chapters chronologicallyconsistent. However, in order to preserve the concep-tual framework of the book I have felt it necessary tointroduce certain writers and figures who wereimportant to the early development of urban studies,in later chapters. I have indicated wherever possiblethe relevant sections that provide a context for morerecent analyses.

In Chapter 2 I explore the foundations of urbantheory through the writings of four thinkers who, Ibelieve, have had the greatest influence on genera-tions of students of the city. All four could be said tohave developed our understanding of what Mumforddescribes as the culture of cities. For Max Weber itis the culture of the built environment and its histor-ical development from the ancient cities of Greeceand Rome, Mesopotamia and Asia to the medievalcities of Europe that offers a benchmark for measuringthe expansion of that other crucial C consumption.Cities are, above all, market settlements and places ofcommerce and trade, and this is a view with whichGeorg Simmel would agree although for Simmelthe cultural novelty of cities emerged not so muchfrom their form as from the social mores, habits and self-reflexivity of their inhabitants. Simmels view of the metropolis is of a society that has achieved the escape velocity from tradition and thetimeless world of what a contemporary German soci-ologist Ferdinand Tnnies termed the Gemeinschaft

into the pulsating, industrialised mass-society of the Gesellschaft. This fascination with modernity and the new life-world it offers for the urban citizenis shared by Walter Benjamin who was uniquely ableto study consumption and culture through the lensof a historical materialism that, in its FrankfurtSchool variant, saw conflict as existing not only inworkplace struggles between capitalists and workersbut, as Marx wrote, in the very surface appearance ofthings or in the reflections of shop windows andthe lapidaries of cemeteries.

The final member of the quartet, Henri Lefebvre,shares with Benjamin a dialectical understanding of the urban experience drawn from his readings ofMarx and Engels, while combining it with the anti-historicist philosophy of Heidegger and Nietzsche.Lefebvre almost single-handedly rescues Marxismfrom its obsession with the temporal by insisting onthe spatial dimension of class conflict, not only in aphysical sense, but socially and imaginatively. Inmany ways, Lefebvres philosophy is a geography ofhope because, taking inspiration from revolutionarymovements in art and politics such as surrealism andsituationism, he believed that a better alternative tothe class-divided city is possible if we can only thinkbeyond the realm of commodified space.

This belief in the possibility of a better worldcertainly animated the investigations of the urbaniststhat we encounter in Chapter 3, but whereas Weber,Simmel, Benjamin and Lefebvre all invoke com-munity but rarely meet it face to face, the empiricalresearchers and urban sociologists who pioneered thesocial mapping of the city went out of their way toencounter real communities, or worked directly toimprove their conditions. The study of communitiescame to define urban research in the social sciences in Britain and America for decades afterwards, butcritics alleged that this was at the expense of a properunderstanding of the nature of conflict, and a failureto grasp the cultural limits to the sorts of urbanutopias that many were openly or implicitlypropounding.

The search for an alternative urban culture to theindustrial city of dreadful night took the new scienceof town planning in two very different directions.

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The anti-metropolitans, led by John Ruskin andEbenezer Howard in Britain, and Frederick LawOlmsted in the US were convinced that the mass,industrial metropolis celebrated by continentalEuropean writers such as Benjamin and Simmel wasa social and economic disaster. They urged govern-ments and local authorities to build new garden citycommunities within reach of the big cities, butsurrounded by a belt of green parkland and pasture.Le Corbusier and his disciples in the architecturalschool that was to become known as the ModernMovement were in favour of such parkland cities, but they rejected the medieval village model in favourof an even more ancient prototype; that of the stilt-supported lakeland dwellings of PalaeolithicSwitzerland. Both competing images of the city wereto find their realisation in actually existing towns andarchitectural developments, so, in a very real sense,these urban theories (which is, in essence, what any town plan begins life as) changed the face of cities in a more visible way than applied sociologicaland ethnographic theories. Here again, though, themeaning of community has owed more to norma-tive assumptions than evidence-based research, andthe assumption that bad places and bad buildingsmake for bad communities is at the core of anti-modernist architectural movements such as newurbanism.

The attention of urban sociologists in Britain and the US after the Second World War continued to focus on urban communities but, increasingly, as victims of economic change and disaggregation rather than viable societies in their own right. Threearchetypes emerged from this research the decliningtraditional urban community, the emerging sub-urban community, and the proliferation in the US ofthe black ghetto. Consumption features as a factorin these studies as a shift to an automobile-basedservice economy accelerates the pace of suburban-isation and sprawl and accentuates the urban dividebetween the citys haves and have-nots. Welfare statepolicy in Britain and other European countries helped to ameliorate and slow the pace of economicpolarisation among city residents compared to theUS, but the trend towards convergence is clear and

unmistakeable. Urban theorists, thus, began to focuson racial segregation and economic deprivation in the US, while in Britain and Europe the attention has been more on the contest for urban living spacebetween different social groups. These locationalstruggles between the affluent and the socially ex-cluded can be measured in terms of the index ofgentrification, and in the more hostile law enforce-ment policies towards vagrants, commercial sexworkers and the homeless that frequently followsmiddle-class incursion into poorer neighbourhoods.

These physical and social characteristics of conflictand consumption need to be understood in the widercontext of the political economies of the modern city. Chapter 6 brings together some of the mostimportant writing on the nature of the capitalist cityfrom its origins in the work of Engels and Marx tothe more recent work of David Harvey, ManuelCastells and Saskia Sassen. Those with a particularinterest in Marxist theories of the city should starthere before reading the sections on Benjamin andLefebvre in Chapter 2. This chapter is principallyconcerned with a fifth set of C words commoditiesand commodification. In Marxist theory, in contrastto neo-classical economics, commodities do not refersimply to tradable goods, but to services, productsand artefacts that are the result of an exploitativerelationship between labour and capital. A commod-ity contains a surplus labour value (or that part of the exchange value of a good or service that theemployer has not paid the worker), and commodifi-cation is the process of transforming an object orservice from a use value to an exchange value inother words by making its value marketable. Thisconceptualisation of productive relations being mani-fested through materialism (i.e. in the form of moneyand fixed or non-liquid capital assets) is fundamen-tally important to the work of Benjamin andLefebvre, and also Simmel (though unlike Marx hesees exchange value as being distinct from use value).Materialism has also continued to be the most influ-ential approach among students of contemporaryurban political economy.

Theories concerning the dynamics of urbanisation,the spatial division of labour, the urban question,


the information revolution and the globalised net-work city all have, at their core, an assumption that capitalist markets and relations of production are the chief propellants of new urban configura-tions. The political economy of cities also provides acrossover point for those who are interested in thework of cities and those whose focus is more on themanagement of cities and conflicts around private and collective resources. In Chapter 7 we concentrateon the political city what are the necessary condi-tions for its administration, why is there such avariety of governance models and why are there somany theories for explaining them? But, becauseurban politics is not simply about the doings of CityHall, we also need to consider the political processesbehind the re-scaling of urban government atvarious levels and Mumfords still relevant questionabout the relationship between the city and theregion. Conflict and community come together inan examination of urban social movements, whatmotivates urban dwellers to combine around acommon cause and what patterns of political mobil-isation we can observe between cities. Finally, how dowe relate the who gets what, when and how worldof urban political theory to the birds eye view of thecity that the most ambitious urban theory represents?

In the penultimate chapter we return to the themeof urban culture with a focus on the increasinglydiverse types of social identities found in the city, and the ways in which representation and meaning or what we might call urban discourse are trans-mitted and interpreted. We explore the works of key thinkers on urban culture including Mumford,Zukin, Sennett, Habermas, Bourdieu and Foucaultand examine how the art of living in cities has been developed through bourgeois urbanism, why it

is allegedly under threat from middle-class suburban-ism, and the ways in which cosmopolitanism andcultural diversity are re-inscribing urban culture inthe new urban borderlands. The growing recogni-tion of cultural practice as a defining feature of the urban experience has been accompanied by theso-called culture turn in philosophy and aesthetictheory. In this chapter, we test its claims to offer a more satisfactory reading of contemporary urbanforms and behaviour associated with postmodernismthan conventional social theory. Finally, we survey the practice of postmodernity through the study ofthe symbiotic cultural forms of architecture andcinema.

The concluding chapter has three main purposes it tries to see whether the urban theories and accountsof the urban experience that we have encounteredbring us any closer, if not to a holistic understandingof the city then, at least, to an identifiable commonground from which we can plot future research ques-tions and initiatives. The second section picks up onissues that have been implicit, or even absent, inwestern urban theory until recent times. Here, weconsider questions such as the special theoreticalproblems posed by urbanism in the developing ormajority urban world, the challenge of urban sustain-ability in the face of continuing environmentaldegradation and urban population growth and loss,together with the long-term impact of new tech-nology on the future viability of towns and cities. Inthe final section I pose some questions for futureresearch in urban theory and suggest how urbanistsmight build on the rich heritage of existing urbanknowledges while bringing fresh insights into thefascinating and ever changing world of the urbanexperience.

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INTRODUCTION

At first sight, the intellectual concerns and develop-ment of the four writers under consideration in thischapter appear to have little in common. Max Weberwrote some of his most important contributions tosociology and sociological theory in the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries, while HenriLefebvre began writing on the city in the 1930s and continued to produce important contributionsright up to his death in 1991. Simmel and Benjaminon the other hand are, perhaps, rather easier tobracket. Both hailed from Berlin, and both were what,today, we would call inter-disciplinary thinkers.They were as familiar with the major debates inphilosophy as they were with the hugely exciting and far-reaching developments in every aspect ofartistic and creative endeavour in the early decades of the twentieth century. However, although, likeBenjamin, it is hard to pigeon-hole Simmel as essen-tially a sociologist, the latter certainly saw himself as a pioneering social scientist, even though he failed to achieve the same academic recognition as Weber, Tnnies or Durkheim. Walter Benjamin, alsoremained an outsider to the academic establish-ment, although he did at one time have aspirations to

become a university professor. The fact that he neversucceeded in this endeavour is partly attributable toBenjamins notorious discomfort at working withinprescribed disciplinary boundaries, and his work, in asense, constituted a reproach to the methodologicallyconservative world of traditional philosophical andsocial enquiry.

However, while the critical perspectives of all fourthinkers may have widely varied, it is their treat-ment of the city as an object of critical reflection that makes their work of continuing relevance to contemporary urban studies. This is not to say that the contribution made by each author is equivalenteither in quantitative or qualitative terms. MaxWebers essay on the city is the only direct accountof urban society produced by a classical sociologist(Durkheim and Marx both failed to give the city anyspecial attention), and for that reason alone Webermust certainly be included among the key classicalwriters on urban morphology. But it is not as a histor-ian of urban society that Weber is principally known,so much as the author of the monumental studies on the origins of capitalism The Protestant Ethic([1905] 1985) and on the modern state and the socialorder in Economy and Society ([1922] 1968).

Perhaps even more than Weber, the work of Georg

2

T H E F O U N D AT I O N S O F U R B A N T H E O RY

Weber, Simmel, Benjamin and Lefebvre

It is often said: stones instead of bread. Now these stones were the bread of my imagination,which was suddenly seized by a ravenous hunger to taste what is the same in all places and allcountries.

Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street

Simmel is profoundly concerned with modern metro-politan life but, like Weber, he only directly addressesthe nature of urban life in one, brief, but much quoted essay The Metropolis and Mental Life(Simmel [1902] 1950). Simmels magnum opus, ThePhilosophy of Money ([1907] 1990) was written withthe city as a permanent backdrop for his analysis of the processes and nature of commodities andexchange, but the urban environment remains alargely undeveloped theme in this book. AlthoughWeber and Simmels social circles intertwined, thereis little in the academic record that suggests a corres-pondence of ideas, but, as David Frisby remarks, thisis largely due to the fact that, before 1900, Simmelwould not have regarded Weber as a colleague of the new discipline of sociology, although Weber doesacknowledge the importance of Simmels work in The Protestant Ethic (Frisby, 1987: 423). Indeed,Simmel remained largely silent on the work of EmileDurkheim (as did Weber), which suggests that thesociological community in these early years was rathermore like an archipelago of distant islands than thenetworked global academy it is today.

Although the links between these writers mightseem a slender foundation on which to construct anew theory of urban society, as this chapter seeks toexplain, it is the adoption of the city as the micro-cosm for modern society in general that is importantand distinctive in their work. Both Benjamin andLefebvre gave a special place to the culture, valuesand rhythms of the city in a series of writings thathave inspired subsequent generations of urbanists. If one can identify a common intellectual source itwould surely be that of Marxism, but neither was aslavish devotee to official Marxist accounts of thenature of class society promulgated by figures such as Trotsky or Lukacs. Benjamin remained scepticalabout the deterministic claims of historical mater-ialism, while Lefebvres reflections on the city werestrongly flavoured by a critical engagement withphenomenology (especially the work of Merleau-Ponty) and with the philosophies of Nietzsche andHeidegger. However different these thinkers intel-lectual backgrounds and outlook might have been, it is undoubtedly the case that each writer was

attempting to grapple with the transformation of thecity wrought by the advent of modernity.

In Webers account, the explanation offered isevolutionary, the modern city is seen as a special and sophisticated form of the medieval or renaissancecity, and he believed that all the components of whatwe recognise as urban society were in place by thesixteenth century in much of northern Europe.Simmel is more preoccupied with differentiating thecity from non-urban society (or the country), and inhis reading the city is a rather exclusive society ofself-reflexive urbanites that constitute in many waysa new historical community with very different moresand values to traditional society. Benjamin also wantsto stress the distinctiveness of urban culture, but itis the possibilities the city offers for re-inventingitself and the lives of its citizens that gives urban life its peculiar quality. Intimacy and anonymity areequally present in urban exchange (whether it be inthe shopping arcade, the caf or the brothel), and forBenjamin this sets urban society and its constella-tion of writers, artists and poets apart from both clas-sical and provincial society. Lefebvres urban imagi-nation tends more towards meta-level analysis than Benjamins, but their philosophical anchoringsin the commercialised world of spectacle and spaceare remarkably similar. However, Lefebvres interestin the everyday dynamics of the urban process, aspires towards a more universal formulation of thestructures and systems common to metropolitan lifein general. As such Lefebvre provides the most im-portant link between classical urban theory and thenew urban studies that have developed in recentdecades (Harvey, 1989; Soja, 1989; Shields, 1991;Gottdiener, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1996, 2000; Brenner,1997, 2000; Kipfer, 1998; Borden et al., 2000).

MAX WEBER: THE CITY INHISTORY

Webers account of the city owed much to his under-standing of the transition from antique society tofeudalism and from feudalism to capitalism and it builds on his interest in forms of pre-modern

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T H E F O U N D AT I O N S O F U R B A N T H E O RY 9

capitalism and the comparative sociology of religion(Nippel, 1995). Weber had been working on the soci-ology of urban development since 1889, but whatKaesler regards as the unfinished essay The City wasprobably written between the years 191113 and was posthumously published in the 1922 edition of Economy and Society under the title Die Stadt. In the fourth edition of Economy and Society edited by Winckelmann, the essay is translated as Non-legitimate domination (typology of cities) (Kaesler,1988: 42). Although Weber does refer to aspects ofurban organisation in other parts of Economy andSociety such as the division of labour, bureaucracy and religion, the point is usually to territorialise and historicise the sociological phenomenon underconsideration.

Webers geographical compass is extraordinarilywide, taking in not only the whole of Europe andRussia but also the cities of ancient China, southernAsia and the Near East, while his chronology extendsback as far as the first recorded urban settlements ofMesopotamia 5,000 years before the birth of Christ.Significantly, however, Weber does not take hisnarrative past the Medieval period and the reader isleft to wonder if, as Jonas suggests, this reluctance to contemplate the city in the industrial era is anintellectual recoil in the face of an unfathomablecomplexity or an implicit acknowledgement that thecharacteristics of the urban have, through the devel-opment of capitalism, become those of society as awhole (Jonas, 1995: 27).

Weber makes use of a multi-dimensional, ideal-typical approach (Kaesler, 1988: 42) in order to high-light the essential characteristics of an urban formthat he believed was quite specific to Occidentalcivilisation. In this endeavour Weber adopts a rigor-ously descriptive method, and there is little in hisaccount, other than a quixotic chronology, that wouldobviously distinguish it from a scholarly work ofurban history.1 By linking together what he considersto be the defining characteristics of the city indifferent historical epochs, Weber is able to constructa sophisticated historical reconstruction that, despiterepeated attempts at generalising its characteristics,nevertheless, retains its contradictory specificities.

In one account, the city consists simply of a collec-tion of one or more separate dwellings but is a rela-tively closed settlement (Weber, 1958: 65), but helater extends this definition to add that the city is asettlement the inhabitants of which live primarily offtrade and commerce rather than agriculture (ibid.:66). However, he is equally quick to point out that not all localities based primarily on trade andcommerce can be called cities. Hence, Webers tech-nique is to first define the necessary conditions beforegoing on to highlight all the other elements of theurban system that must be in place in order to meetthe sufficient requirements of cityness. Implicit inWebers explanatory framework is the goal of thewestern capitalist city and, rather like Darwin in TheOrigin of Species, Weber sets himself the task of tracingthe evolutionary development of the modern cityback to its remote origins in antique society. Whatdistinguishes Webers narrative from a conventionalurban history, however, is the close inter-weaving ofevidence from ancient and medieval urban societiesthat provides a comparative model for analysingsubsequent urban formations.

In Webers account, what gives the city its specialcharacter is principally the existence of commerce and trade, together with all the activities associatedwith it such as the establishment of markets andexchanges. Hence, Weber writes, In the meaning of the word here, the city is a market settlement(Weber, 1958: 67). This does not necessarily meanthat early cities were based around open markets inthe more contemporary sense. Indeed, Weber is atpains to point out that long before the arrival of thebourgeoisie, princely courts would establish them-selves in a particular location where the domesticeconomy (Oikos) of the nobleman created by defaultan infrastructure of buildings, storage facilities, roads,etc. that operated as a colonial settlement. In somecases these settlements expanded beyond the mano-rial court as artisans, journeymen, entertainers andother unindentured labourers attached themselves tothese burgeoning centres of wealth and employment,forming increasingly autonomous nuclei.

Feudalism, with its relatively decentralised powerstructure, and its ability to generate money capital

T H E F O U N D AT I O N S O F U R B A N T H E O RY10

through the trade in agriculture and manufactures(such as cloth) and through the extraction of rents,allowed for a much more dynamic form of urbandevelopment than was the case in Islamic and Asiaticsocieties where patrimonial or prebendary2 social and political relations set tight limits on the growthand organisation of urban centres. As Turner notes,In Webers view, feudalism favoured the develop-ment of capitalist relations because, within feudalconditions, free cities, autonomous guilds, an inde-pendent legal profession, free labour and commer-cialisation were able to flourish. By contrast, pre-bendalism ruled out or limited such developments(Turner, 1996: 247).

Trade and commerce, although important do notcomplete the picture however, since for Weber, citiesmust also enjoy a degree of political and adminis-trative autonomy this would rule out most of the large trading centres set up by Peter the Great inRussia which were little more than income streamsfor the imperial exchequer. It was also possible,Weber believed, for a locale to exist in a political-economic sense, though it would not qualify as a city economically (Weber, 1958: 74). The attempt toregulate and tax trade, to manage security and fundarbitrational courts meant that a legal and bureau-cratic order would quickly develop in the wake of anypermanent economic settlement.

As settlements grew in size and affluence it alsobecame imperative to create a means of defence, andhistory is littered with examples of cities that failedto flourish because their wealth and population weretoo easily confiscated by marauding armies. Hence,the garrison city or fortress city became a commonfeature of urban settlements across Europe and farinto the Holy Lands in early medieval Europe. AsWeber makes clear, the city in the past in Antiquityand the Middle Ages, outside as well as withinEurope, was also a special fortress or garrison (Weber,1958: 75). Only in the latter half of the nineteenthcentury did the larger European metropolisesdismantle their city walls, despite the obstacle todevelopment and circulation that these physicalbarriers posed.

Here, again, Weber warns against the false syllo-

gism of fortress = city and city = fortress since manyfortified settlements existed in the ancient andmedieval world that would not qualify as cities in the other senses outlined above. Neither were wallsalways necessary to defend a citys inhabitants. In thecase of Sparta, which Weber describes as a perma-nent open military camp there was no need toprovide fortifications since the population was on anear constant war footing. As with the establishmentof urban markets, fortified constructions such ascastles or walled towns relied on the resources andinitiative of princely or noble elites and the motivesfor the creation of these defensive structures dependedon the threats posed by rival populations as well asthe need to protect expeditionary armies from attack as was the case with the crusader castles built bythe Knights of St John and the Knights Templaracross the Mediterranean and Holy Land, some ofwhich were to form the basis of important settle-ments (such as Rhodes) while others became desertruins.

The juxtaposition of coercive authority in the formof a castle or fortified palace or dwelling and theeconomic power of a chartered market meant that thecity could be, at the same time, a drill-field and aplace of exchange. In the case of the Attic pnyx thathad developed its function from the Greek agora,religious and political activities as well as those oftrade and commerce could take place in the samespace. In Ancient Rome, in Northern Africa, Med-ieval Europe and Southern Asia it was more usual toseparate martial and political activities from purelyeconomic undertakings, although commercial centreswere often found close to the sites of legitimateauthority (Weber, 1958: 78).

As trade and commerce grew in importance, themerchants who had been attracted to such lordlyfortified settlements by the prospect of trade with thenoble household and its entourage and by the protec-tion offered by its soldiery, accrued sufficient wealthand power in their own right to establish politicalauthorities of their own. Many, such as the medievalguilds, existed harmoniously within an urban sys-tem dominated by princely and Episcopal authority.Other associations of urbanised gentry were more

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combative and attempted to assert their rights againstthe dead hand of seigneurial power, as was the casewith the city republics of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. But, as Weber is quick to point out, inthe Medieval and Ancient Occident, local individualparticipation in self-administration was out of thequestion. Indeed, local individual participation in self-administration was often more strongly devel-oped in the country than in the relatively largecommercially organized city (Weber, 1958: 82).

However, the sapling growth of urban communityor civitas that was to be found in the guild-basedmercantile associations of late medieval Europe was not replicated elsewhere. As Weber writes, InChina, Japan, and India neither urban community nor citizenry can be found and only traces of them appear in the Near East (Weber, 1958: 83). In Mecca,in the same period, despite the existence of powerfulguild-like associations, power remained within atight network of noble koreischitic families and, thus,a government by guilds never arose. For Weber, civic participation, and especially democratic partic-ipation is, therefore, a key feature of urban develop-ment. But this did not mean that only townsmencould enter democratic life. As Weber argues, inAntiquity in Cleisthenes time the peasantry was thefoundation of democracy whereas, [f]rom the begin-ning in the Middle Ages commercial strata were thebearers of democracy (Weber, 1958: 206).

The existence of citizens who were neither rulersnor slaves, whether they be the proletarians ofAncient Athens or the plebs of Ancient Rome also hadimplications for the economic management of citiesin that urban elites were obliged to develop schemesfor occupying these popular classes in order toreduce the risk of riots and even revolt. Ensuring thatthe urban population was fed meant that draconianlaws forbidding grain exports or imposing tributes oncolonised provinces were widely used under the Greekand Roman empires. In Ancient Greece, the urbanproletariat were also employed in great public worksduring the rule of Pericles but, as Weber points outin an insightful historical comparison, existence of anextensive slave economy in Ancient Athens meantthat the consumption needs of the nobility and the

state were almost entirely met by slave labour, as inthe American Deep South, which led to the creationof a disgruntled and politically violent poor whitetrash with formal political and legal rights but littlein the way of economic opportunity (Weber, 1958:199). Thus, from its first inception, the city was a profoundly political and politicised system that could only function effectively when economic, mili-tary and administrative life was well integrated andcoordinated.

However, the cities of Antiquity were neverdominated by economic exigencies alone, as Weberwrites, ancient economic policy was not primarilyconcerned with industrial production nor was thepolis dominated by the concerns of producers.Whereas in North Continental Europe, [t]he estab-lishment of the city was an economic rather than a military affair (Weber, 1958: 209), and thisoccurred, Weber believed, because extra-urban powerholders lacked the administrative resources to meetthe economic needs of the cities (which supplied themwith lucrative tax and customs revenues) within theirown bureaucratic apparatus. The same could also besaid for the Church, and this is why all feudal powersbeginning with the king viewed the development ofcities with extreme distrust (Weber, 1958: 210).

Thus, the bourgeois society is born in the self-governing cities of medieval Europe and with thegrowth of mercantile capitalism, the citys pre-eminence and raison dtre as a commercial centre isassured. Increasingly, the city emerged as a sphere ofnon-legitimate domination that operated outsidethe authority of church and state and, hence, offereda provocative challenge to the states claim to themonopoly of legitimate authority (Magnusson, 1996:2823). The rising affluence of the commercial citystimulates armed struggles for control of its com-mercial traffic and territorial possessions which, in thecase of powerful city-states such as Venice and Genoa,were greater than many kingdoms. In nearly everyconflict, the city republics lose their independenceand are incorporated within a larger territorialauthority, highlighting Webers major observationthat the monopoly of violence is as important to thedevelopment of states as commerce and trade.


As a result of improvements in the organisation and extent of armed force by territorial states, itself aconsequence of a general economic improvement inthe late Middle Ages, the era of the independent city-states proves short-lived. By the fifteenth centurythe superior military capacity of the Church andPrincely Absolutism wins out against the limiteddemocracy of the city republics (with the notableexception of Venice) (Tilly, 1990). Yet the die hadbeen cast, and while the great cities of Europe con-tinued to change hands often with bewildering rapid-ity, even as late as the nineteenth century, the motiveforce of economic and political modernisation can besummed up in one word urbanisation.

Webers City essay helps us to understand how thisprocess of urbanisation leads to the bureaucraticeconomic complex of modern capitalism, which forms the subject of Economy and Society, but it alsoserves, as Martindale rightly points out in his introduction to The City (Martindale in Weber, 1958:50), to differentiate Webers conception of the city from the urban analysis of Georg Simmel.Whereas, Weber implies that all the essential featuresof the city are present in past societies, only more so, Simmel, as we are about to see, associates thearrival of modernity with the full articulation of the metropolis and with the birth of a new and elusivesubjectivity.

GEORG SIMMEL: THE CULTURE OFTHE METROPOLIS

Although Simmel did have a significant impact onthe new science of sociology in the US in the earlydecades of the twentieth century (Frisby, 1992b:15574), unlike Weber and Durkheim, Simmelsrather quixotic method meant that his ideas were lesseasily adapted for the purposes of empirical research.The Anglo-American concern with the positivistpotential of the social sciences diverged quite radi-cally from what could best be described as an appliedmoral philosophy in Simmels case. In this sense,Simmel has more in common with Comte, Marx andNietzsche than Weber and Durkheim, though his

rejection of the Kantian notion of an a priori morallaw made Simmel even more determined to provethat a moral order could be produced synthetically asan outcome of human civilisation (Simmel, 1986:xviiixix). It is this exultant belief in the transfor-mative powers of modernity (and especially art andaesthetics) that focuses so much of Simmels attentionon the modern metropolis and urban culture ingeneral.

Simmels celebrated essay The Metropolis andMental Life was not published in its entirety inEnglish until after the Second World War (Simmel,1950), and while Simmels influence on the ChicagoSchool is now well documented, in his 1915 essay TheCity, Robert Park makes no mention of the first soci-ologist of modernity (Frisby, 1985: 2). On the otherhand, Louis Wirth more readily acknowledgedSimmels importance, describing The Metropolis andMental Life as the most important single article onthe city from the sociological standpoint (Wirth,1925: 219 in Levine et al., 1976: 249) and, as we shallsee in the following chapter, he was to develop severalof its arguments in his seminal essay Urbanism as aWay of Life (Wirth in Le Gates and Stout, 1996:18997) which was to become a classic of Americansociology (see Chapter 3). The Chicago School werenot the only American sociologists to take Simmelswork seriously and, according to Donald Levine,Talcott Parsons highly influential The Structure ofSocial Action (1937) was to have contained an article onTnnies and Simmel. Thus, it would seem that theconnections between continental European sociologyand foundational American sociology were rathercloser than might appear at first sight (Kurtz, 1984:17; Frisby, 1994: 225).

What is not in question is the growing reputationSimmel enjoyed after the Second World War as a keyreference point for students of urban society. Writerssuch as Fischer have studied Simmels impact on theChicago School (and particularly the work of LouisWirth) while Milgram has used systems analysis toinvestigate the features of metropolitan mentalitythat, it was believed, modern urban life was bound toproduce (Levine et al., 1976: 250). Simmels influenceextends from Marxist cultural critics such as Fredric

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Jameson (Jameson, 1999), to film theorists (Mila,1998), contemporary urban sociologists (Korllos,1988; Joas, 1991; Ruggieri, 1993; Haussermann,1995; Kajaj, 1998), historians of sociology (Jonas,1991) writers on sexuality and the sex industry (Bech, 1998), social psychologists (Claes, 1994),social geographers (Werlen, 1993), sociologists ofphilosophy (Bevers, 1982; Gephart, 1992), writers ontown planning (Phillips, 1994), space and architec-tural analysts (Vidler, 1991), and to aesthetic theorists(Baruzi, 1988). This, far from exhaustive, list gives ahint of the range of Simmels interests, and of hisability to move from micro-level analysis to a meta-physical and metahistorical concern with the natureof human civilisation.

Simmels metropolis

Born into an affluent and cultured Berlin family in1856, Georg Simmel remained a resident of what was to become the capital of a united Germany andthe administrative and political centre of KaiserWilhelm IIs expanding empire until the outbreak ofwar in 1914 (Frisby, 1992b: 99). Thus, Simmel couldhardly have been better placed to observe the greatadvances in technology, communications, commerceand culture that were to signify the birth of themodern era in much of Europe. It was his home city of Berlin, however, that Simmel chose to analysein the essay The Metropolis and Mental Life, origin-ally published in 1903. The context for this ratherbrief account of the modern city was a series oflectures Simmel gave to accompany an exhibition on the modern metropolis held in Dresden in19023. In this analysis, the citys negative featuresare not ignored, but Simmel insists that the pressuresof metropolitan life are more than compensated bythe freedom from parochialism and surveillance thatGemeinschaft (small town) existence perpetuates.

Furthermore, the metropolis permits such anintense concentration of capital that the integrationof space, time and social actors reaches a hithertoundreamed of complexity. Simmel was one of the firstto elucidate the phenomenon that later writers havetermed time-space compression (Giddens, 1984;

Harvey, 1989) and to argue that the speed andintensity of social and economic interactions in thecity have led to the emergence of a new society(Frisby, 1992b: 113). An example of this necessarysynchronisation of activities in the city is provided bythe sudden emergence of pocket watches (whichbecame as ubiquitous and indispensable to citydwellers in the early twentieth century as mobilephones have become in the early twenty-first cen-tury). Individual time-keeping was vital, Simmelargued, because,

[t]he relationships and affairs of the typical metropol-itan are so varied and complex that without the strictestpunctuality in promises and services the whole struc-ture would break down into an inextricable chaos . . .If all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly gowrong . . . all economic life and communication of thecity would be disrupted for a long time.

(Simmel, 1950: 41213)

The key to all exchange in the modern metropolisis, of course, money the subject of Simmels majortheoretical work and through this abstraction ofpower, the integration of even the most complexfunctions becomes possible. Those who have moneywealth are able to secure goods and services withoutthe need for coercion or resort to ideologies of domination as with traditional societies, thus facili-tating, independence from the will of others.Simmel goes on to add:

The inhabitants of a modern metropolis are indepen-dent in the positive sense of the word, and even thoughthey require innumerable suppliers, workers and coop-erators and would be lost without them, their relation-ship to them is completely objective and is onlyembodied in money . . .

(Simmel, 1978: 300 in Harvey, 1985: 5)

This abstract integrative power also applies in thedomain of space where money

permits agreements over otherwise inaccessible dis-tances, an inclusion of the most diverse persons in thesame project, an interaction and therefore a unificationof people who, because of their spatial, social, personaland other discrepancies in interests, could not possiblybe integrated into any other group formation . . .

(Simmel, 1978: 347 in ibid.: 14)


Urban character

Like Weber, Simmel views the metropolis as a histor-ical development and his purpose is to identify thegeneral characteristics of urban life sui generis, and notonly those of relevance to his home city. UnlikeWeber, however, Simmel constructs his vision ofmetropolitan society by observing micro-level behav-iour, giving his analysis more of an anthropological or social psychological quality than the systemicanalysis preferred by Weber. Thus Simmel tends tofocus on the consciousness, personality, and charac-ter of the individual social actor (Brody, 1982 inFrisby, 1994: 83). Urbanisation is associated withemancipation from traditional forms of social dom-ination that Simmel argues persisted until theeighteenth century. In traditional societies, rigidstatus hierarchies made it almost impossible for indi-viduals to assert their own autonomy and identity.But with the advent of industrial capitalism in thenineteenth century, the ties that bound the subordin-ate classes to the land began to loosen and, indi-viduals now wish to distinguish themselves from one another. It was the function of the metropolis,Simmel believed, to provide the arena for this strug-gle, and its reconciliation (Simmel, 1950: 423).

With this new-found freedom came an indifferenceto ones fellow city dwellers resulting from the needto escape the tumult of the streets and the inhumannature of commerce in a cultivated privatism. At thesame time the sensory over-stimulation of urban lifeled to a blunting of discrimination and the devel-opment of a blas attitude in which Simmel suggestsurbanites could not draw on the emotional reservesrequired to empathise or even interest themselves inthe lives of other metropolitans (Simmel, 1950: 414).In the city, the individual is able to explore anddevelop the psychic core of his or her personality. Butas Smith reminds us, for Simmel:

The twin dangers that threaten to frustrate the urbanindividuals creative search for spiritual refinement arethe growing spirit of objectivity and rationalization onthe one hand; the growing overexposure of the senses toexternal stimuli on the other. Simmel traces both of thesedevelopments to an emergent metropolitan way of life.

(Smith, 1980: 91)

Although Berlin was a constant reference point for Simmels analyses of modern society forming thesubject of several self-contained essays on the city, he was a frequent visitor to other European cities such as St Petersburg, Paris, Prague, Vienna, Rome,Florence and Venice. These last three form the subjectof essays published between 1989 and 1907 in whichSimmel emphasises the haphazard or fortuitousnature of their layout that produces a unique aestheticquality. The classical Italian city, in Simmels view,attracts admiration because it can engender some ofthe wonder felt by encounters with the natural land-scape (Frisby, 1992b: 10910; Simmel, 1996). Thisis a theme that Benjamin also discusses in his essay(with Asja Lacis) on Naples that we discuss in thefollowing section.

WALTER BENJAMIN: THEEXEGETICAL CITY

Since his tragic suicide in 1940, Walter Benjaminsreputation and importance as a critic and theorist hasgrown to the extent that it is now possible to talk of a veritable Benjamin industry. Each year several new titles are added to an already substantialsecondary literature, while new translations of Ben-jamins writings previously unavailable in Englishcontinue to appear (although much of BenjaminsCollected Writings still remains untranslated). Despitethe esteem Benjamins writings enjoyed from estab-lished academic scholars such as Ernst Bloch, TheodorAdorno and Gershom Scholem, only a small percent-age of it was published in his own lifetime. Perhapsthe most ambitious and important of Benjaminsresearches, the Passagen-Werk or Arcades Project waspublished posthumously from the authors notes and,although the themed manuscripts (that Benjamincalled Konvoluts) are minor works of art in their ownright, we get no sense of how each component relatedto his general argument.

Indeed, the lack of a discernible thesis or rationalethat might explain why the Parisian arcades areworthy of such an exhaustive analysis makes it diffi-cult to categorise Benjamins method or prospectus.

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This is because Benjamins writings are quite con-sciously seeking to avoid the somewhat dry and sterileinvestigations of social life associated with the newdisciplines of sociology and social psychology. Alongwith his Frankfurt School colleagues, Benjamin owed his allegiance to the philosophical traditiondeveloped by Hegel and Marx, that of idealism, andalthough Benjamins dialectical critique differed in important ways from contemporary Marxists, itsets him apart from sociological empiricists whosework had no discernible impact on his city writings.Like Simmel, and even more so Lefebvre, Benjaminwas engaged in a philosophical dialogue on the natureof truth, morality and the human condition with thetwo great book ends of the Enlightenment Kantand Nietzsche.3

Throughout his writing, according to HowardCaygill, it is possible to discern in Benjamin thedevelopment of a Kantian concept of experiencethrough an extension of a Nietzschean method ofactive nihilism (Caygill, 1998: xiii). In Benjaminsown researches this ultimately unsuccessful attemptto recast Kantian experience, nevertheless helped himto refine the dialectical method known as immanentcritique, and by applying this technique to the study of cultural formations, Benjamin hoped funda-mentally to change the way in which literary andcultural criticism had hitherto been undertaken.Benjamin found the metropolitan city to be a par-ticularly important stimulus to his reflections on the nature of human experience and, along with his important literary and philosophical work, hebequeathed a corpus of writings ranging from jour-nalistic travel essays and autobiography to the monu-mental Arcades study that continues to inspire thestudy of the city in all its dimensions.

The City Sketches

Several writers trace the development of Benjaminsinterest in the city from the essay on Naples that hewrote with the help of Asja Lacis, and published inthe Frankfurter Zeitung in 1925 (Buck-Morss, 1989:8; Gilloch, 1996: 223; Leslie, 1999.4 Though it doeshave the feel of a travel piece written for an educated

middle-class audience, several themes of Benjaminslater writings emerge here. For example, his interestin the visitors difficult insertion into the closed worldof the citys popular districts that Naples so richlyevokes. The travelling citizen who gropes his way asfar as Rome from one work of art to the next, as alonga stockade, loses his nerve in Naples (Benjamin,1997: 168). In the Naples sketch, Benjamin discussesthe porosity of the buildings and the privatepublicthresholds of courtyards, arcades and stairwells. He isfascinated by the constant change of the urban milieuwhere [t]he stamp of the definitive is avoided. Nosituation appears intended forever, no figure assertsits thus and not otherwise (ibid.: 169). Porosityresults not only from the indolence of the Southernartisan, but also, above all, from the passion forimprovisation, which demands that space and oppor-tunity be at any price preserved. Against this ratherhackneyed view of Neapolitan society must be set themore interesting observation that in Naples, Build-ings are used as a popular stage. They are all dividedinto innumerable, simultaneously animated theatres.Balcony, courtyard, window, gateway, staircase, roofare at the same time stage and boxes (ibid.: 170).5

Porosity is the inexhaustible law of the life of thiscity, reappearing everywhere. A grain of Sunday ishidden in each weekday, and how much weekday inthis Sunday! (ibid.: 1712).

In this respect, Benjamin sees Naples as more of adeveloping city than a European city where theprivate realm, at least for the popular classes, is hardlyin evidence. Like the African kraal where each privateattitude or act is permeated by streams of communallife . . . the house is far less the refuge into whichpeople retreat than the inexhaustible reservoir fromwhich they flood out (ibid.: 174). Economic neces-sity makes a virtue out of this enforced socialisation Poverty has brought about a stretching of frontiersthat mirrors the most radiant freedom of thought.There is no hour, often no place, for sleeping andeating (ibid.: 175). The arrhythmia of the SouthernMediterranean city is a theme that Lefebvre also findsinteresting, as we shall later discover but, unlikeLefebvre, Benjamin does not appear to set any specialstore by climate, topography or geology. Thus, for


Benjamin, Moscow more closely resembles Naplesthan it does Berlin because its street culture andcollective behaviour are closer to peasant societiesthan the princely solitude, princely desolation [that]hang over the streets of Berlin. Whereas in Moscow,goods burst everywhere from the houses, they hangon fences, lean against railings, lie on pavements justas they do in Naples in contrast to Benjamins homecity where the streets are like a freshly swept, emptyracecourse (ibid.: 180). Later in his essay, Benjaminmakes the connection between Moscow and Naplesexplicit when he writes:

Shoe polish and writing materials, handkerchiefs, dollssleighs, swings for children, ladies underwear, stuffedbirds, clothes-hangers all this sprawls on the openstreet, as if it were not twenty-five degrees below zerobut high Neapolitan summer.

(ibid.: 1801).

Again, the motifs of the inside on the outside arerepeated and put us in mind of the reclaimedurbanism of Aragons Le paysan de Paris (ParisPeasant). Only in wholly bourgeois cities are the sep-arations between private and public space so neat anddistinct. In the proletarian city the personal and thepublic are intertwined with invention and bravado,so that the streets and the pavements becomeinscribed with the folk routines of their habitus. The culture of the city and its antagonistic relation-ship with the rural is perfectly captured in theoutskirts of Marseilles the terrain on which inces-santly rages the great decisive battle between townand country (ibid.: 213) where there is the hand-to-hand fight of telegraph poles against Agaves,barbed wire against thorny palms . . . short-windedoutside staircases against the mighty hills. Here,Benjamin is describing the commercial extension ofthe city into the rural hinterland using languagereplete with explosions and shell splinters, as if thecity cannot tolerate the inanimate passivity of thecountry and must subordinate it using almost mili-tary force and violence. In other parts of the Marseillesessay, Benjamin draws our attention to how urbantopography is overwritten with languages of classdomination and resistance (gaudy advertising hoard-ings along the walls of the central city, red lettered

socialist graffiti in front of dockyards and arsenals).Although these observations are tantalisingly brief,they recur in all the city sketches, combining whatwould now be called urban semiotics or the analysisof signs with a materialist spatial analysis thatanticipates many of the formulations of Marxist urban ecology (see Chapter 6). However, it is in theArcades Project that Benjamins urban critique reachesits apogee.

The Arcades Project

Were we only to have the City Sketches asBenjamins contribution to critical urban studies, itis doubtful that his readership among strict readersof the genre would have extended beyond its orig-inal circulation in the German literary press.However, these journalistic and essayistic forays intothe heart of the city prefigured a far more exten-sive and philosophically ambitious project that wasto occupy him for most of his later writing career. In the Arcades Project, Benjamins preparatory notesappear initially to be a random collage (or literarymontage as Benjamin himself described it) of themes under which are grouped long quotationsculled from a vast library of historical, literary, scien-tific and journalistic accounts of different urbanphenomena. Benjamin assigned upper case and lowercase letters to each individual subject (although not all possible letters were used in the collectedmanuscripts).6

It is clear that in the original sketch for the project(which was to have been undertaken with FranzHessel) every imaginable type of urban phenomenawas to be included in the purview of the research.Suggested themes included everything from Conven-iences and inconveniences (tobacco, mailboxes, tick-ets, poster pillars, and so forth) to Types of cocottes:streetwalkers, mmes, call girls (deluxe), social rela-tions, tarts, lionesses, girlfriend, sweetheart, artiste toRidiculous souvenirs and bibelots-quite hideous,The Sunday of the poorer classes, Tea in the Bois,and Great and small labyrinths of Paris (Benjamin,1999b: 91921). Arcades was merely listed as one of these themes, but as Benjamins solitary project

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continued, these commercial passageways became theleitmotif for his critical engagement with the problemof modernity in all of its aspects. The inside-outsideworld of the dimly lit labyrinth conjured up, forBenjamin, a universe of possibilities and trans-gressions that only the modern metropolis could offer.As Benjamin writes:

The city is the realization of that ancient dream ofhumanity, the labyrinth. It is this reality to which theflneur, without knowing it devotes himself.

(Benjamin, 1999b: 42930)

In Konvolut M, dedicated to the figure of theflneur, much of the rich seam of Benjamins contri-bution to urban critique is to be found. In Benjaminsunderstanding, the flneur is not a mere boulevardier a man (the male form of the noun in French issignificant as we shall see in Chapter 8) with themeans to indulge in the voyeuristic spectacle of cafsociety but something closer to a secular pilgrim,a seeker after the profane truths of a temporal-spatialuniverse that has been trampled into the dust by ahumanity made dull and inattentive to the hiddenwonders of the metropolis.

The flneur goes in search of vanished time like awerewolf restlessly roaming a social wilderness(Benjamin, 1999b: 416, 418). He is in, but not of,the crowd where every face is masked in anonymity,as in a masquerade of space. Like the Neapolitansand the Muscovites, Parisians also have this tech-nique of inhabiting their streets, and Benjaminrecalls an experience similar to that of Adolf Stahrwriting in the 1850s of the spontaneous creation of a small outdoor market beside some roadworks that had formed a sudden human bottleneck. Seventyyears later, I had the same experience at the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the BoulevardRaspail. Parisians make the street an interior . . . Forif flnerie can transform Paris into one great interior a house whose rooms are the quartiers, no less clearly demarcated by thresholds than are real rooms then on the other hand, the city can appear tosomeone walking through it to be without thresh-olds: a landscape in the round (Benjamin, 1999b:4212). The point here is that the citys boundaries

are mostly invisible, and it is only the uninitiatedwho sees the metropolis as a shapeless, undifferenti-ated totality.

Flnerie is also a function of nostalgia, or ratherof the ecstatic remembrance of lost times, sensations,landscapes. Proust represents this notion of landscapeas epiphany in Swanns Way where he tells of how

suddenly a roof, a gleam of sunlight reflected from astone, the smell of a road would make me stop still, toenjoy the special pleasure that each of them gave me, andalso because they appeared to be concealing, beneathwhat my eyes could see, something which they invitedme to approach and take from them, but which, despiteall my efforts, I never managed to discover . . .7

For Benjamin this sudden remembrance of a onceforgotten experience can lead to intoxication in muchthe same way as does the taking of hashish but, aswith narcotics, it is a transient impermanent sensa-tion that the flneur or user always seeks to repeat.We come back to the city time and time again inpursuit of that true experience that constantly eludesus, and so, unable to embrace the metropolis in itsprofound totality, we take refuge in the landscape ofmemory.

The history of the present

Benjamins engagement with the city owed much tohis childhood and adolescent experiences that hemade the subject of an essay written in the 1930s, A Berlin Childhood Around 1900 (Lindner, 1986). In this essay and its complement, BerlinChronicle, as Susan Sontag observes, Benjamin is not trying to uncover his past, but to understand it:to condense it into its spatial forms, its premonitorystructures (Sontag in Benjamin, 1997: 13). Benjaminshared with Proust a fascination for the redemp-tive and emancipatory qualities of memory that allow us to reclaim from our past a comprehension of those emotions and perceptions that eluded us at the time. For Benjamin, recollection meansprecisely the re collection of impressions of a frag-mented and scattered experience and their reconsti-tution as a meaningful narrative that seeks in its ownimperfect way to assume the dimensions of a social


and psychological totality. This work of exegesis, orrevelation, often called on unconscious elements(Benjamins debt to the surrealist artists and poets in this respect is acknowledged throughout his work) and an engagement with the mythical aspectsof human development. But, at the same time,Benjamin felt the need to engage with the morerigorous or scientific claims of Critical Theory andhistorical materialism.8 In this sense, it could beargued that Benjamin was something of a seculartheologian who saw his task as one of divining andexplaining the transcendental and contradictoryessences of the total city.

Benjamins historical materialism is often des-cribed as anti-historicist that is to say he rejectsthe idea that the past can be explained only in termsof the past because history is always seen through theeyes of the present. He writes that every image of thepast that is not recognized by the present as one ofits own concerns threatens to disappear irretriev-ably. This is not so much a plea to make the pastrelevant to the present as a caution against the ideathat historians, as Ranke believed, could and shouldrecount the past the way it really was (Benjamin,1999a: 247). In a much quoted and deeply lyricalpassage, Benjamin compares the work of historicalmaterialism to the Angelus Novus in Paul Kleespainting that

shows an angel looking as though he is about to moveaway from something he is fixedly contemplating. Hiseyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.This is how one pictures the angel of history. His faceis turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chainof events, he sees one single catastrophe which keepspiling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front ofhis feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead,and make whole what has been smashed. But a stormis blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wingswith such violence that the angel can no longer closethem. This storm irresistibly propels him into thefuture to which his back is turned, while the pile ofdebris before him grows skyward. This storm is whatwe call progress . . .

(Benjamin, 1999a: 249)

Cities as vast, living repositories of the past provideus with the archaeological debris of this progress on

a daily basis, but Benjamin urges us to confronthistory not as a site of homogeneous, empty time,but time filled by the presence of the now [ Jetszeit].Ancient civilisations are redeemed and reclaimed byemergent political states in the way that Jacobin Parisviewed itself as Rome re incarnate, evoking ancientRome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past(ibid.: 253). Benjamins urban imaginary thus offersa strong rebuttal of history as progress accounts ofurban development, while at the same time makinga strong claim for the place of the subjective imagin-ation and memory in the social construction of urbanlife. As we shall see in the next section, the criticalexploration of the imagined city through the lens of historical materialism is also a central feature ofthe work of Henri Lefebvre. But more generally, as we shall see in Chapter 8, Benjamins rich aes-thetic and philosophical engagement with the urbanexperience has inspired a new generation of urban writers who have used Benjamins insights to attempt new readings of the city as the laboratoryof a dynamic and stormy modernity.

HENRI LEFEBVRE: THEPRODUCTION OF THE CITY

It is at this moment that the mode of production domin-ates the results of history, takes them over and integrateswithin itself the sub-systems which had been estab-lished before capitalism (i.e. exchange networks ofcommerce and ideas, agriculture, town and countryside,knowledge, science and scientific institutions, law, thefiscal system, justice, etc.), without, however, managingto constitute itself as a coherent system, purged ofcontradictions. Those who believe in the system aremaking a mistake, for in fact no complete, achievedtotality exists. However, there is certainly a whole,which has absorbed its historical conditions, reabsorbedits elements and succeeded in mastering some of thecontradictions, though without arriving at the desiredcohesion and homogeneity.

(Henri Lefebvre, 1976: 10)

Henri Lefebvre was a genuinely interdisciplinarywriter whose intellectual interests included litera-ture, language, history, philosophy, planning and, inlater life, even policy-making (Kofman and Lebas,

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1996: 6). In all of his reflections on the urban ques-tion, Lefebvre also remained a committed Marxist,and his now classic ma

urban theory and the urban experience (1)

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