Cities and Cultures

Malcolm Miles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134257706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Cities and Cultures is a critical account of the relations between contemporary cities and the cultures they produce and which in turn shape them. The book questions received ideas of what constitutes a city's culture through case studies in which different kinds of culture - the arts, cultural institutions and heritage, distinctive ways of life - are seen to be differently used in or affected by the development of particular cities. The book does not mask the complexity of this, but explains it in ways accessible for undergraduates.

The book begins with introductory chapters on the concepts of a city and a culture (the latter in the anthropological sense as well as denoting the arts), citing cases from modern literature. The book then moves from a critical account of cultural production in a metropolitan setting to the idea that a city, too, is produced through the characteristic ways of life of its inhabitants. The cultural industries are scrutinised for their relation to such cultures as well as to city marketing, and attention is given to the European Cities of Culture initiative, and to the hybridity of contemporary urban cultures in a period of globalisation and migration. In its penultimate chapter the book looks at incidental cultural forms and cultural means to identify formation; and in its final chapter, examines the permeability of urban cultures and cultural forms. Sources are introduced, positions clarified and contrasted, and notes given for selective further reading.

Playing on the two meanings of culture, Miles takes an unique approach by relating arguments around these meanings to specific cases of urban development today. The book includes both critical comment on a range of literatures - being a truly inter-disciplinary study - and the outcome of the author's field research into urban cultures.

Part One
Definitions

1 Cities

Learning objectives

• To understand what is distinctive about living in a city
• To outline some theories and histories which draw out particular qualities in urban living
• To refine the above by looking at a specific case, in which the quality of proximity appears a defining condition

Introduction

In this chapter I ask what is distinctive about living in cities. My concern is for qualitative rather than quantitative issues, and I dispense quickly with issues of data such as a city’s size or the density of its population. But density leads me to the idea of proximity as the condition of a large mass of people from different backgrounds inhabiting a single site, which I develop through Edward Soja’s account from archaeological evidence of Çatal Hüyük, one of the first cities, in Sumeria. Soja argues that at Çatal Hüyük the city was a primary form of settlement established before villages in its environs. Before looking at this I note the differentiation of urban from rural patterns of sociation in the work of early sociologists Emile Durkheim and Fernand Tönnies, and in Georg Simmel’s view of metropolitan life; and contrast the work of Ernest W. Burgess and Louis Wirth in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s with that of feminist writers such as Elizabeth Wilson (1991). Finally I ask if there is any substance in the idea that city air is liberating, looking to the writing of Henri Lefebvre. In case studies I cite Iain Sinclair’s story of London’s orbital motorway (2003); Jennifer Robinson’s case for ordinary cities (2006); and an image of Hassan Fathy’s experimental settlement at New Bariz, Egypt (constructed 1967, photographed 2005).

Concepts

Urban distinctions

Cities are large, densely populated human settlements, often with a degree of governmental autonomy from the national state. They have been hubs of trade and transport, defensive outposts and centres of manufacturing and cultural production. In the nineteenth century cities such as London, Paris, Madrid and Berlin were centres of political power reflecting the rise of nation-states in Europe, while Delhi, Algiers and Buenos Aires among others were nodes of colonial power and contestation – all centres of commercial expansion – and in the United States and Australia the function of political power was separated from that of commerce by the building of national capitals in Washington and Canberra. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, new movements in art, music and literature emerged in metropolitan cities such as Paris, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Barcelona and St Petersburg when artists, writers and composers were attracted to milieux which also included critics and patrons. There are also university cities and cathedral cities, or cities which arose as major crossing points of a river or as ports, ancient cities such as Troy and Knossos known from their archaeological sites, and cities outside the dominant classifications of Western imperialism such as Djenne or Zimbabwe which were nonetheless nodes of trade and power. The difficulty is that as I adopt a range of variables I am presented with no more than a cumulative definition, while to fall back on legal and administrative arrangements or the granting of charters in medieval times is no more informative of what makes a city feel like a city today. I am drawn to ask instead if it is the availability of multiple dimensions of experience – the city as event, or cosmopolitan street life – that draws people to live in a city. But it is agricultural decline, rural poverty and the prospect of work that drives people to cities such as Lagos, Mexico City and São Paulo in less exalted ways today, as it did to London, Birmingham and Manchester in the English Industrial Revolution. Yet despite high costs people continue to live in a city such as New York because, I assume, they like it. Big cities are sites of anonymity in a crowd – a kind of freedom.

But what makes a city? Conventionally, villages have populations counted in hundreds, towns in thousands, cities in hundreds of thousands and metropolitan cities in millions (Angotti, 1993: 6). Today mega-cities have populations above twenty million (Soja, 2000: 236). But Thomas Angotti points out that a dense agricultural area can have a population equivalent to that of a small city (1993: 6); and Joel Garreau (1991) uses the term edge city for a spatially extended settlement with a large population but no centre which resembles a traditional city in name only. As planning increasingly looks to city-regions, and the idea of a city is so variable, size says little of what makes city life attractive. The factor of density is only slightly less equivocal. A received image of the European city is a knot of streets in which people live closely, a romanticised notion which ignores social distinctions and the hierarchies of streets. The term city has resonance, still, in contrast to suburb (not least in the marketing material of innercity property developers). Perhaps the idea of a city links to that of a settlement protected against wild nature or invading armies, a safe place; or its resonance may derive from romanticised pictures of a medieval city with its towers, or the religious image of a city on a hill. The words city and urban both derive from Latin: city from civis (citizen), and urban from urbs (city). One implies an act of dwelling, the other a site. In French cité means a walled site and bourg an unwalled but protected area of land; both are separated from commune, a peripheric settlement for the poor (Sennett, 1995: 189–190) at least as densely populated as a cité but lacking its privilege and mystique. At the simplest level, a city is where things happen to influence history. For the privileged, a city reflects and allows expression of their status in a degree of governmental autonomy, as site of freedom from ties to the land, or site of commercial expansion and intellectual development. For the poor the city may be a site of oppression, as the land was before it.

Freedom was nonetheless material to the early modern idea of a city, housing trade which crossed the boundaries of principalities, free from the bonds of feudalism. It is not difficult to see how in eighteenth-century Europe a new commercial life and philosophy of reason were articulated in new city forms such as the grid plan (though I say more of this in Chapter 9). Cities were subject to rulers who had traditionally granted charters, collected tolls on movement and tariffs on goods and relied on a class of literate officials to administer their powers as well as artists and composers to establish the profiles of their courts. By the eighteenth century rulers had the power and technical resources to plan cities and then build them according to a plan. Yet the inscription over the gates to cities of the medieval Hanseatic League – city air makes people free (Stadt Luft macht frei) (Sennett, 1995: 155; Soja, 2000: 248) – retained currency for the bourgeois class. The Baixa district of Lisbon, the commercial centre rebuilt after 1755, with its marble pavements in designs of black and white and its arcades, expresses this commercially based freedom which challenged the power of religious and land-based elites. As Kenneth Maxwell writes, the new city was socially progressive:

Pombal not only gave attention to the central squares and principal streets; more modest houses were designed and built as well, creating one of the first industrial development zones in a European city. Where the great aqueduct terminated, Pombal placed his industrial suburb with silk manufactures, ceramic works, and cotton mills.

(Maxwell, 2002: 37)

The extension of Barcelona outside its walls is another such case, which I take up in Chapter 4.

Urban sociation

Commerce requires free contracts between individuals. In early sociology the kinds of association people make in cities are perceived as voluntary, distinct from the restrictive patterns available in village life. For Fernand Tönnies, the move to cities ends the obligations of a rural society when ties to kin and land are replaced by contractual associations between migrants (Tönnies, 1895; 1940; 1955). Emile Durkheim (1947 [1893]) sees the division of labour as key to the development of urban sociation, resting on a moral consensus enabling security of contracts between individuals of different status. This can be compared to Richard Sennett’s account of the coffee houses of eighteenth-century Paris and London (1992 [1974]: 80–87; see also Rendell, 2002) where a specific mode of telling news bridged class backgrounds so that information was gathered as widely as possible. Commenting on Durkheim’s The Division of Labour in Society (1947 [1893]), Peter Marris remarks that while his ‘social prescriptions now seem quaint and dated’ Durkheim’s insistence on moral consensus is ‘at the heart of all social democratic movements: the belief that economic relationships . . . must be governed by principles of justice and humanity’ (Marris, 1998: 15). Tönnies and Durkheim are worth rereading, but I suggest that their division of urban from rural reflects a temporal rather than a spatial trajectory – a development from feudal to modern society rather than a comparison of different experiences within modern societies in which the countryside tends to be a source of food and recreation for city dwellers, a historical shift based on an assumption that cities offer more advanced social development than villages. The progressive trajectory echoes a utopianism in late nineteenth-century planning which follows a pronounced gendering – city as advancing masculine, countryside as retreating feminine – to become a patriarchal urbanism.

Utopianism, however, is a key factor in modern city development, in different ways as the following examples indicate. Ebenezer Howard’s garden city is a synthesis of rural health and urban opportunity (Hall and Ward, 1998), and retains a central hub of cultural activity. Its philanthropic model is that of model villages for working-class housing at Bourneville and Port Sunlight, and translates with difficulty into fully urban terms. Camillo Sitte’s plan for Munich, in contrast, sets out new city districts which reproduce the city as a whole with multi-use zoning, so that a city becomes a network of what might now be called urban villages (Meller, 2001: 43–44). In Idelfons Cerdá’s plan for the extension of Barcelona (Soria y Puig, 1999) all classes are provided with decent housing, transport and green spaces, and half the space of a street is pedestrianised. It is remarkably progressive today. This utopianism transmutes in the 1950s into the work of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) and the efforts of some of its (mainly better established) members to design a better world for urban-industrial societies (Curtis, 2000). Underpinning CIAM’s work is an idea of a city as the most advanced form of settlement, the most modern in a circular definition in which the most modern is the most urban and technologically driven. This privileges expertise, as in the rational comprehensive planning model adopted in North America in the postwar period (Sandercock, 1998: 87–91). But cities are also where new alliances of workers were made. The first trades unions arose in the agricultural not the industrial revolution but the strength of unions in the twentieth century echo the scope for organisation available in industrial workplaces in cities. The growth of mass political movements similarly follows the existence of a critical mass of people. But if the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 began in factories (Smith, 2002: 29–30), this does not mean that cities are the only places where a new society could be forged. Charles Fourier proposed to restructure French society through phalansteries – communities of equal size, spaced equidistantly – in which artisan and intellectual were to co-operate to produce a society based on the libidinisation of work (Beecher and Bienvenu, 1983). And today the conditions of village life include access to global communication technologies, blurring the distinction between rural retreat and inner-city loft. Farha Ghannam notes that immigrants from rural Egypt retain their former social ties and culture after relocation to Cairo in a search for stability (Ghannam, 1997), but in the affluent world a picture of rural life as stable and urban life as disruptive is fanciful. R. E. Pahl sees the idea of village as site of community as ‘nearer to the middle-class image of a village’ than to reality (Pahl, 1975: 41), while the notion of a place-based community is questionable in a period of global migration (Albrow, 1997; Fennel, 1997; Albrow, 1996: 155–159). This seems not to inhibit developers keen to promote a concept of the urban village as site of a place-based community, usually in post-industrial cities.

The rhetoric of urban development which extols the urban village as a way to describe gated apartment blocks extends a logic of improvement beginning in the seventeenth century, which gained prominence in the nineteenth. Victorian reformers saw the provision of public health as part of a new moralism, just as modern planners saw the provision of decent public housing as social restructuring designed for stability. Citing Michel Foucault (1988: 67), James Donald argues that the modern state uses two rationalities in maintaining its power: that of reason of state, or governance; and that of policing, which classifies and identifies a population. Donald writes: ‘The population became the target of both surveillance and welfare’ (Donald, 1999: 32). I would take map-making, of which there was an expansion in Europe in the seventeenth century (Pickles, 2004), like the statistical work to which Donald refers, as an example of technologies of policing. Donald continues, citing Paul Rabinow (1989), that ‘this statistical grid of investigation produced a new social scientific conception of society that in turn informed the physical structure of the city’ (Donald, 1999: 32). These references form a context for Chicago urbanism, discussed below, but the idea of a city as zone of increasing control is countered in Georg Simmel’s writing, by which the Chicago sociologists were also influenced.

Urban stimulations

For Simmel the city is a site of over-stimulation and anonymity. Metropolitan Berlin becomes a state of mind. David Frisby links Simmel’s work to Tönnies’s idea that social evolution is spontaneous disagregation (désagrégation spontanée): ‘the social theorist is presented with the distinctive problem of locating and capturing the fleeting and the transitory’ (Frisby, 1985: 46). In his essay ‘Metropoles and Mental Life’ Simmel writes of an intensification of perceptions, a ‘sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance’ (Simmel, 1997: 175):

Precisely in this connection the sophisticated character of metropolitan psychic life becomes understandable – as over against small town life which rests more upon deeply felt and emotional relationships. These latter are rooted in the more unconscious layers of the psyche and grow most readily in the steady rhythm of uninterrupted habitations.

(Simmel, 1997: 175)

This reiterates Tönnies’s distinction between village and city; but Simmel constructs a metropolitan psyche which co-exists with a rural psyche but is more imbued with the abstractions of intellectual life. He links this to the money economy, characterised as individualist while breeding a withdrawal from close ties. He links introjection of money with a flatness of metropolitan experience amid over-stimulation of the senses (nerves, as he puts it) resulting in ‘an incapacity . . . to react to new sensations with the appropriate energy’ – a blasé attitude – a ‘colourlessness and indifference’ which ‘hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability’ (Simmel, 1997: 178). The individual is less guarded than in a small group, and Simmel identifies ‘the individual’s full freedom of movement in all social and intellectual relationships’ (Simmel, 1997: 184) as a key dimension of metropolitan life as crowds liberate people from inherited identities. This may link in ways which may not be compatible to Iris Marion Young’s affirmation of group difference (1990), Louis Wirth’s view of the city as a competitive jungle, and the idea of flâneurie in Charles Baudelaire’s writing (see Chapter 3). Simmel continues that metropolitan conditions produce a reserved attitude: ‘we frequently do not even know by sight those who have been our neighbours for years’ – while ‘This reserve . . . grants to the individual a kind and an amount of personal freedom which has no analogy whatsoever under other conditions’ (Simmel, 1997: 179–180). This restructures a tendency to form small and close-knit groups, but in place of family the new ties depend on engagement in a society which Simmel, like Durkheim, sees as based on the division of labour.

Urban transitions

The idea of a city as site of freedom is problematic and gendered but it gives a hint as to why cities are regarded as vibrant when undercurrents of freedom threaten the agencies of policing. But Louis Wirth sees incoherence in a city left to its own devices:

Cities generally, and American [sic] cities in particular, comprise a motley of peoples and cultures, of highly differentiated modes of life between which there often is only the faintest communication, the greatest indifference and the broadest tolerance, occasionally bitter strife, but always the sharpest contrast.

(Wirth, 2003: 102)

He echoes early sociology in noting ‘the weakening of the bonds of kinship, and the declining social significance of the family’ in cities and goes on to say that urban dwellers are drawn to spectacle as ‘escape from drudgery’ (Wirth, 2003: 103). He then writes:

Being reduced to a stage of virtual impotence as an individual, the urbanite is bound to exert himself [sic] by joining with others of similar interest into organized groups to obtain his ends. This results in the enormous multiplication of voluntary organization...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Case studies
• Acknowledgements
• General introduction
• Part One: Definitions
• Part Two: Interactions
• Part Three: Culture industries and cultural policies
• Part Four: Interventions
• Bibliography