City and Nation

Rethinking Place and Identity

Michael Peter Smith, Thomas Bender

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351320221
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This compendium offers a textured historical and comparative examination of the significance of locality or "place, " and the role of urban representations and spatial practices in defining national identities. Drawing upon a wide range of disciplines - from literature to architecture and planning, sociology, and history - these essays problematize the dynamic between the local and the national, the cultural and the material, revealing the complex interplay of social forces by which place is constituted and contributes to the social construction of national identity in Asia, Latin America, and the United States. These essays explore the dialogue between past and present, local and national identities in the making of "modern" places. Contributions range from an assessment of historical discourses on the relationship between modernity and heritage in turn-of-the-century Suzhou to the social construction of San Antonio's Market Square as a contested presencing of the city's Mexican past. Case studies of the socio-spatial restructuring of Penang and Jakarta show how place-making from above by modernizing states is articulated with a claims-making politics of class and ethnic difference from below. An examination of nineteenth-century Central America reveals a case of local grassroots formation not only of national identity but national institutions. Finally, a close examination of Latin American literature at the end of the nineteenth century reveals the importance of a fantastic reversal of Balzac's dystopian vision of Parisian cosmo-politanism in defining the place of Latin America and the possibilities of importing urban modernity.

1
The Localization of Modernity

Michael Peter Smith
Thomas Bender

City and Nation : Rethinking Place and Identity explores the dialogue between past and present, local and national identities in the social construction of “modem” urban places. The contributions to this volume in the Comparative Urban and Community Research series stretch widely across time and space. They range from an assessment of historical discourses on the relationship between modernity and heritage in turn of the century Suzhou, China to an analysis of the social construction of San Antonio’s Market Square as a contested presencing of the city’s Mexican past. Case studies of Pacific Rim urbanization detail the socio-spatial restructuring of cities in the Penang region of Malaysia and the politics of authoritarian urban design in Jakarta and other cities in Indonesia. These vividly show how place-making from above by top-down modernizing regimes is articulated with a claims-making politics of class and ethnic difference from the middle and from below. An examination of nineteenth century Central American urban history and political life reveals a case of local, grassroots construction not only of national identity but of the very institutions whereby a modem nation-state is formed. Finally, a close literary criticism of Latin American writing at the end of the nineteenth century reveals the importance of a fantastic reversal of Balzac’s dystopian vision of Parisian cosmopolitanism in defining the possibilities of importing one type of imagined urban modernity into Latin America.

What do these seemingly disparate urban studies have in common? In this chapter we will address this question by considering the similar ways in which the contributors to this volume imagine the politics of modernity, understand the historicity of urban social and spatial change, narrate human agency, and underline the state-civil society interplay in the social construction of urban space. These similarities stand out despite the contributors’ different disciplinary starting points in history, sociology, architecture, literary criticism, and cultural studies. This common ground for understanding the relationship between city, nation, place, and identity will be considered in the sections which follow.

Imagining Modernity

At the heart of the essays and case studies comprising this volume is the relation between some real or imagined center of “modernity” and a marginal place or people. To some extent, the question of modernity is a temporal relation. This temporal relation is often converged into a normative notion of “progressiveness.” The politics of modernity is about the terms by which one moves temporally and becomes modem and the extent to which local culture, including spatial, racial, gender, and class relations, is compromised or enhanced by the process of becoming modem. For each of these essays, the question is specifically urban-focused: To what degree and in what ways does the modem find symbolic and concrete articulation in the social spaces and physical forms of the city.

Modernity is various in its elements and manifestations. Different aspects are employed in the different studies included here. For the Latin American colonial in Paris, discussed by Camilla Fojas, urban cosmopolitanism is the focus; for others, as in Beng Lan Goh’s study of urban modernity in Malaysia and Abidin Kusno’s study of the interplay of urban space and Indonesian modernity, modernity tends to be collapsed into modernization and a national project of modernization is best represented by the city as a space of urban design. In Peter Carroll’s study of Suzhou and Karl Miller’s assessment of Market Square in San Antonio, modernity is imagined in the context of a complex interplay between commerce and tradition, and both modernity and tradition are as much invented as inherited. In Jordana Dym’s study of the role of cities in state formation in Central America, modernity is participatory politics, an escape from old hierarchies. And, surprisingly, in various localities not only the national political elites but the Catholic Church as well, agrees to this modem political practice, partly for practical reasons and partly out of Enlightenment commitments.

Typically modernity is counterposed to tradition. Yet modernity is less an ideal-typical contrast than a temporal relation, always defined by a structured relation to the past. That relationship contains different possibilities. Peter Carroll’s study of Suzhou is to the point. His essay could be described either as a study of the Chinese quest for modernity or as an account of the reverence of antiquity in modem or modernizing China. Both versions are correct. Logics of both rejection of the past and the incorporation of its relics into the present and modernizing future are at work in the controversies he studies. In San Antonio, in an analogous but different way Karl Miller explains a past recovered and re-constructed in a selected way that points the city and even marginalized people in the city in the direction of modernity, new identities, and limited but real increases in access to the dominant society by the socially marginal.

Tradition, in varying degrees inherited and invented, plays a crucial role in the path to modernity outside of the zone of the metropole. Modernity may be global in scope, in the sense of touching all societies, but it is also intensely local, with local histories and institutions producing substantial local variation in the appropriation of the various elements or manifestations of modernity mentioned above. One sees, for example, how Gómez Carrillo, selectively appropriates the cosmopolitan modernity of Paris. In its relation to the colonial world, Balzac’s representation of Paris has an exclusionary agenda and, as Fojas shows, constructs the colonial as a racialized other, as exotic, primitive and unruly—a source of urban disruption, perversion, and unsettlement. But that very exotic comes to the metropolis with other intentions, and in the case of Gómez Carrillo selectivity results in a kind of empowerment pointing to reform at home and a bit more space in the metropolis by celebrating the very disruptive differences of the metropole as a sign of cosmopolitanism, racial difference, and what Simmel has called the blase atitude.

It would not be too far off to suggest that what happens in the appropriation/re-invention of modernity on the periphery is somewhat like the “misreading” that the literary critic Harold Bloom proposed in his theory of “the anxiety of influence.”¹ He argued that strong poets are compelled to misread and revise their models to achieve their own standing. That is what Gómez Carrillo does in Fojas’s account. To greater or lesser degrees this process is evident in each of the other essays.

Historicity, Contingency, and Agency

Taken together, as we have seen, the authors included in this volume share a fluid, social constructionist sense of “modernity” and “tradition.” They thus also share a common concern for historicizing and contextualizing urban social and spatial change. Their studies reveal the multiple meanings and uses of history. History has been conceptualized variously as ideology, context, process, and contingency. History is also understood in terms of material facticity, the precipitate of past social life. “Place,” in fact, might also be envisioned as the precipitate of social life over time.

Written history is, at its most elemental and most sophisticated, a thick description. That description is symbolic in a particular way; it offers a narrative representation of both pastness and the nature of temporal transformation. History in this sense has important ideological functions. As ideology history is at once a resource and a constraint. It can be liberating, a basis for resistance against various forms of power that threaten “tradition,” but in this ideological form it can also be an important form of state power, as these essays demonstrate.

Yet these studies show as well that history as ideology, even when institutionalized by the state, is not without inconsistencies, contradictions, and spaces that allow for contingency. Again and again, we see in these contributions the contingencies inherent in time and space, in the specificity of actors and logics of action. History is deeply involved in the issues of this volume, but its role is somewhat unpredictable. History may be found on either or both “sides” of a given controversy. There is seldom a one-to-one relation between a historical narrative, whether official or oppositional, and a particular politics or result.

In any given cultural circumstance, history may suggest a logic of determinism or not. In contemporary social theory reference to history or historicism tends to suggest agency and contingency. This has not always been the case, either in the past or the present. For example, Marxism and other foundational theories of historical development have projected a substantial degree of determinism in history, grounded, usually, in a belief that there is an underlying logic and direction to history. If the older materialist Marxist history had this structuralist implication, one finds, perhaps surprisingly, in various post-structuralist social theories associated with the linguistic turn, a similar implication. For some post structuralist theorists “culture” has displaced economic logic or biological determinism as the master narrative of urban development.

But we do not see either historical or cultural determinism in the essays and case studies comprising City and Nation. While each is informed by recent social and cultural theories, the resulting interpretations are quite different. Rather than inscribing any fixed theory of determination, they reveal spaces of innovation in the contemporary and historical city that emphasize contingency and, by implication, agency. While “context” is taken very seriously in the explanation of social action in these studies, the author’s understanding of the wider context informing local circumstances falls considerably short of historical determination. Context is understood to be complex enough, thick enough, contradictory enough, to allow or permit, even to prompt, more than one path of social action. Hence the importance of narrative explanation in these essays.

Historical analysis as understood in these essays clearly refuses reductionism. Relatedly, it is at once open to concepts and theory, but rightly nervous about reification of categories. Theory-derived categories are central to these analyses, yet the strong empiricist commitments of the authors partially subvert the very organizing categories, grounding each analysis in the particularities of time and place. The result is not a rejection of theory, but rather a sharpening of concepts and enrichment of theory. “Modernity” in this volume is thus best understood not as an inexorable driving force of historical development, but as a socially constructed and highly localized and contingent enactment of particular spatial and social practices that vary from place to place and time to time. As expressed in the politics of urban space, modernity is a socially produced and highly contested articulation of discourses and practices deployed by a wide variety of social actors and agents acting in the name of the state, the city, elements of civil society, and various class, ethnic, and gender based claims-making groups—all colluding and colliding in contests over place, space, and power.

Urbanism, Nationalism, and Modernity

The contributions to this volume reveal the city as linked to both modernity and the nation in two complex ways, both associated with the social construction of place. First, they concretize the nation and the modem, and, second, in doing so, they give both a local referent or articulation. This work is done in the representations and practices of the city whether one focuses on the modem in the domain of the symbolic as in the literary articulations of Paris discussed by Camilla Fojas or in the conflation of the urban, the modem, and the nation embodied in the postcolonial architectural and urban design projects of contemporary Jakarta detailed by Abidin Kusno. The connection between the city, modernity and nationalism may also be viewed in more instrumental ways, as in the discussion of state formation in Jordana Dym’s essay, where together the provincial cities and Guatemala City, the capital of United Provinces of Central America, give functional existence to an emergent national state. What was called the “National Essence” in Republican China was, as Peter Carroll demonstrates, literally fought over and concretized in the spatial forms of the city. Likewise, Karl Miller’s case study of the social construction and reconstruction of San Antonio’s Market Square shows how place as imagined space, can be transformed by specific actors over time (e.g., city planners, tourist-based capitalists, Mexican artists and street vendors) from an imagined site of national economic prominence requiring the exclusion of its past Mexican presence into a site of performed Mexican traditionalism, which require its reinscription as a space of undiluted “Mexicanness,” a double move, which in both instances erases the Market Square’s actual historical origin as an interethnic social center. Finally, Beng Lan Goh’s case studies of urban development in Malaysia lucidly show how contested representations of “Malayness,” “Malaysianness,” and national identity as well as the politics of class and ethnic inclusion in state-centered national and urban development policies are played out in the constitution and reconstruction of Malaysia’s urban built environment.

We tend to think of the state as having its own interest in this work of making modem nations. Often that is true. But the historical and comparative range of these essays suggests alternatives. The state can become, in spite of itself, the vehicle of other projects, whether in the domain of formal politics or in civil society. In Central America, as Jordana Dym tellingly illustrates, local needs brought together a political body that invited the state to take action, to enter the local community. The result was a strengthening of both the local civil society and the state. Far from a top-down model of state action, what occurred was a dialogue between the central state apparatus and local communities. In contemporary Malaysia, Beng Lan Goh pointedly shows how different types of societal pressures from the emergent Malay middle class, the transnational Islamic movement, and various non-Malay ethnic groupings, have forced a reconfiguration of the ruling public philosophy of the Malaysian state. The state has shifted from a politics of state-directed modernization and redistribution favoring the Malay majority to a politics of growth and a cultural reinvention in which the urban built environment has become an important signifier of “heritage protection” and urban development projects are used to construct an incipient panethnic Malaysian cultural identity.

One might easily argue that nineteenth century Paris was a prime example of the state representing itself as modernity through a capital city. Yet Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century, could be interpreted differently. Fojas’s reading of the fiction of Enrique Gómez Carrillo reveals the way in which the colonial in the metropolis may, for his own local reasons, rewrite the meaning of the capital city. Thus, while it might be argued that Paris both concretizes and symbolizes the French state as well as modernity, Gómez Carrillo ignores that aspect of Paris, looking instead to its cosmopolitan values and social experiences as the essence of modernity. The state in his representation of the city is invisible, but not irrelevant. The “stage” the state created for its own purposes, especially with the interventions of Haussmann and Napoleon III, were available to be appropriated by Parisians and foreigners alike to make an everyday life marked by the cosmopolitanism that Gómez Carrillo identifies with modernity and that supplies him with a distinctive identity, as a cosmopolitan colonial—at once seeking to be included in the cosmopolitan world of Paris and to find a legitimate identity he can carry from the metropole as a colonial aware of his difference both in the metropole and in his colonial home.

Fojas shows us a figure in Paris whose interest is cultural rather than political. Writing from the margins, he seeks to rewrite urban culture in a way that makes it more open and more hospitable to the colonial “other” and other deviants in the cities on both sides of the Atlantic. Paris, whatever the interests of the state planners, provided space for that rewriting. A city allegedly re-designed by Haussmann in the interest of control is re-read and re-written by Gómez Carrillo in terms which reinscribe its perversity, deviance, and decadence as signs of cosmopolitanism, secular freedom, and modernity. In related fashion, in Karl Miller’s narration, the Mexican traditionalism of San Antonio’s Market Square created by the “staging” of local state planners in alliance with tourist-based capitalists provided the social space for a politics of performed ethnicity, a kind of strategic ethnic essentialism from below, enacted by Mexican-American artists and street musicians, whose performances smuggled different meanings of Mexican traditionalism into the everyday landscape of the Market Square.

Much writing on nationalism, particularly in the wake of Benedict Anderson’s important book, has emphasized the imagination of sameness or national affinity, and the emphasis has been on various forms of representation, particularly the media, beginning with print, which has been as much a product of civil society as of the state.² While these essays fully acknowledge the importance of this perspective, and that by Fojas operates entirely in the realm of representation, as a whole the essays reveal both more explicit state activity (especially in the cases of Malaysia and Indonesia) and the importance of material conditions and instrumental activity. State-making and the sustenance of nationalism is dependent upon both the symbolic (or ideological) and the instrumental. This is perhaps no more clear than in Kusno’s case study of state-making and urban spatial transformation in modem Indonesia, where, under Suharto’s regime, the political culture and practices of govemmentality generated by his “New Order,” combined a symbolic assault on the “backward” underclasses who occupied “the street,” with a symbolic conflation of urban social movements and urban danger. These forms of stigmatizing symbolic representation, in turn, were used to legitimate the periodic instrumental use of state violence directed at the suppression and even forced removal of the lower strata segments of the urban population from Jakarta and other Indonesian cities.

With urban space thus sanitized, the practices of architecture and urban design were given over to state supported projects of crony capitalist modernization—flyover superhighways, office towers, shopping malls, and middle class housing developments segregated from “the street”—which reconfigured modernity entirely in terms of national upward social mobility and the middle classification of Indonesian society. Perhaps not surprisingly, the violence of the very categories of difference used to represent and enact the “New Order” produced the social divisions that contributed to its downfall. Repressive state policies truncated Indonesian civil society and excluded but failed to entirely eliminate the lower classes from the city. This ultimately played out in the street violence accompanying the 1998 urban uprisings that led to the fall of Suharto from power as the economic growth necessary to give credibility to the grand narrative of upward mobility was disrupted by the Asian financial crisis and the austerity measures demanded by the International Monetary Fund to cope with the crisis.

In a quite different instance, the case of turn of the 20th century Suzhou, as Peter Carroll reveals, the work of defining the “National Essence” in a way that enabled the pursuit of modernity Chinese-style was the result of tension and cooperation between the state and civil society in resolving very concrete spatial (or land-use) conflicts. Instrumental and symbolic issues were in conflict and at the center of the controversy. But the important point, in this instance, is that both sides associated nationalism (“National Essence”) with modernity, and both assumed that any resolution of urban spatial conflict would repr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Comparative Urban and Community Research
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• 1 The Localization of Modernity
• 2 Violence of Categories: Urban Design and the Making of Indonesian Modernity
• 3 Stability in Flux: The Ambivalence of State, Ethnicity and Class in the Forging of Modern Urban Malaysia
• 4 The Local Articulation of Nationality: The Value of Historicity and “National Essence” in Republican China’s Urban Modernity
• 5 The State, The Gty and The Priest: Political Participation and Conflict Resolution in Independence-Era Central America
• 6 Cosmopolitan Topographies of Paris: Citing Balzac
• 7 Mexican Past and Mexican Presence in San Antonio’s Market Square: Capital, Tourism and die Creation of the Local
• Contributors