Urban Space and Late Twentieth-Century New York Literature

Reformed Geographies

C. Neculai

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137340207
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Interdisciplinary in nature, this project draws on fiction, non-fiction and archival material to theorize urban space and literary/cultural production in the context of the United States and New York City. Spanning from the mid-1970s fiscal crisis to the 1987 Market Crash, New York writing becomes akin to geographical fieldwork in this rich study.

P A R T I

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Mappings

C H A P T E R 1

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The Paradigmatic Exceptionality of New York: Scaffolding a Radical Literary Urbanism

We owe the clearest cultural map of structural change not to novelists or literary critics but to architects and designers. Their products, their social roles as cultural producers, and the organization of consumption in which they intervene, create shifting landscapes in the most material sense.

—Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power, 1991

Amongst the great American urban centers, Chicago is the city that hosted the emergence and development of the first school of urban sociology in the 1920s. The strongly influential body of work of the so-called ecological urbanism by Ernest Burgess, Robert E. Park, Roderick D. McKenzie, and Louis Wirth is noteworthy for its structural interpretation of the city and the preoccupation with “patterns of regularity” in community formation.¹ Chicago was a blueprint urban formation made up of concentric circles, and a “product of nature, particularly of human nature.”² The city developed akin to a biological organism through adaptation, self-selection, and competition.³ For this reason, the Chicago School came to be known as the proponent of the human ecology approach to urban space, a positivist perspective, which was to dominate urban geography until about the 1970s. If Chicago was the first laboratory for the production of urban theory and critique, then it is suitable to claim that New York City was such a prime laboratory for the radicalization and reformation of geographical thought, in keeping with the “social production of space” and its roots in late capitalism. New York, the borough of Manhattan in particular, is both a paradigmatic metropolis—template for the late twentieth-century, American, and global city—and an exceptional urban space that cannot be restricted to a fixed model of urban development. For this reason, New York is the most suitable location for vital spatial demystifications: a geo-historical account of the city’s “creative destruction” in its transition from a Fordist to a post-Fordist mode of production is also an account of the figurations—as urban myths—which the city has maintained and subverted.

New York also appears to constitute the ideal metropolitan scaffolding for acts of geo-literary reformation. It has been more than a decade since the rise to prominence of spatial studies in the mid-1990s on a note of disheartening certainty that “we inhabit a post-historical era,” and a geo-literary disciplinary crossbreed is still a project in the making. Two complementary critical gestures appear to be necessary: developing suitable ways in which the findings of human and urban geography can be brought to bear effectively upon the (re)production of space in fictional writing; and demonstrating that the literary imaginary may contribute to the knowledge of space and place, and to the reform and adjustment of socio-spatial practices themselves.⁴ Alas, literature has had little purchase on geographers despite their overt acknowledgment that literary documentation may provide an alternative, and equally viable, mode of experiencing and understanding spatialized material practices. This reduced import of literature in geographical research, also prefaced by Sharon Zukin’s remarks, could reside in the conception that fiction does not possess enough referential, spatial, and social credibility, which is to say enough verisimilitude.⁵ In its turn, geography has exerted diminished genuine influence on literary analysts so far on account of the latter’s adamant habits of critique.⁶ The different concepts, arguments, and positions in geography have been somehow homogenized, well “stretched,” or adapted in order to accommodate the critical apparatus of literary and cultural inquiry, which has led to the loss of their indigenous geographical force.⁷ These intrinsic contradictions in the current geo-literary scholarship tend to underlie the relation between material and figural (urban) space, which means that a reformed geography of literary urbanism needs to explore and then provide a resolution to these contradictions. One such resolution is a combined analysis of spatial scale, socio-spatial unevenness, and local regime formations in New York literature, which can show that literary representations of the urban can help build geographical insights and promote alternative spatial practices that would not leave the reader’s experience and knowledge of place, and of place-making, unaffected.

URBAN MYTHS AND THE CREATIVE DESTRUCTION OF NEW YORK

When the first school of urban sociology came into existence on American soil at the beginning of the twentieth century, one might speculate that American urbanism needed some scientific liberation from its most popular mythologies deeply entrenched in its socioeconomic, political, and cultural history: the cyclical, repetitive patterns of degeneration and redemption complemented by the myth of the frontier. Whereas benchmark cities for experiments in scientific urbanism have counted Chicago (the urban ecology model of Burgess, Park, McKenzie, and Wirth) or Atlanta (the urban regime model of Clarence Stone), a significant portion of American urban scholarly research has been conducted in New York City. The areas of investigation have been numerous: from real estate, gentrification, and housing questions to (de)industrialization and the rise of finance capital; from the privatization of public spaces to the dissolution and constitution of urban and local political coalitions in regime change; from the resistance of culture to urban restructuring to its collusive relationship with the FIRE industry; from social justice and equality to patterns of commodification and consumer preference; from cosmopolitan diversity to the reconfiguration of social classes. Urban affairs in New York have captured a great deal of scholarly attention because of the double characteristic of the city as both paradigmatic and exceptional, at once a template for American and transnational urbanism, and singular, particularly in its role as a nodal point between spatial scales, blending in the local, the urban, the national, and the global.

These ambivalent features of New York have become axiomatic, and therefore unquestionable, amongst urban geographers and historians. As a methodological illustration, Re-presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the Twenty-First Century Metropolis (1996), edited by Anthony D. King, may easily bear witness to the prominence the city has taken amongst geographers. The collection brings together a complex spectrum of perspectives on the representation of urban space, and the organization of the volume is very compelling in that it dedicates its first four essays to New York City. The articles about New York tackle urban ethnicity in relation to the spatialization of the global economy, “space and symbols,” and the interlocking effects of the political and symbolic economies, the vernacular of Puerto Rican architecture, and last but not least the post-Tompkins Square Park urban movements of opposition to gentrification.⁸ Studies of the postcolonial city in Africa and South Asia closely follow the research on New York with a number of speculative reflections on modes of reading and writing the city. King himself reflects on the framing of the book and testifies to an inherently uneven “tripartite tidiness,” which suggests a certain structured fluidity of the writing that may stimulate a similar flexibility of reading.⁹ The unevenness of the book is not only formal but also socio-spatial and theoretical. He thus draws attention to the diverse ethnic composition of the contributing authors and to the multiple perspectives they embrace.

What attracts attention, though, is that the editor places (the representation of) New York City at the helm of the debate where it looms large in more than half of the essays. The mission of the book is to carry out the mandate of overcoming the customary “parochialisms” that characterize the “media self-representations of New York,” as Neil Smith has it, by way of an exogenous approach to the city, its inner and outer colonialisms.¹⁰ Whether one writes and reads about Nigeria’s Lagos or Sri Lanka’s Colombo, one also writes and reads about New York as yardstick city in the story of urban globalization. Beyond the objective necessity to tell the story of the American city from outside in, the material, symbolic, representational, and theoretical persistence of New York suggests a deep-seated colonization of a more subtle kind: the constant and unavoidable penetration of urban(ized) consciousness and knowledge by the paradigmatic exceptionality of New York as point of reference and case study. Furthermore, John Tagg, in the essay “This City Which is Not One,” commences precisely by questioning the overweening urbanism that New York has come to epitomize and addresses its metonymical and exceptional position within the geography of the American city as well as with respect to the development of a generic global(ized) metropolis. “In what sense does the New York City that has been constructed for us constitute a new formation and a paradigm for the rest of the urbanized world?”¹¹ Tagg chooses not to answer the question and deliberately leaves it open for the other contributors, allegedly “better equipped to ask” (and answer) it. However, the question places a tacitly subversive emphasis on a New York whose production or representation—the ambiguity of a constructed New York seems deliberate and compelling—suggests both the fabrication and mediation of the experience, comprehension, and knowledge of the city.

Colonizing in this manner both geographical theories and urban practices elsewhere, New York remains exceptional for its spatial and historical tale of “creative destruction,” to use the consecrated Schumpeterian term, on a national and global level. Originally deployed in the 1942 publication of Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Joseph Schumpeter’s acceptation of creative destruction refers to revolutions within capitalism and the ways in which innovation and the creation of the new always accompanies the destruction of the old and the obsolete. To put it differently, the in-built obsolescence of the capitalist system of production, reproduction, and consumption is permanently resolved and overcome through an internal process of reformation and the subsequent emergence of novel economic, technological, and social structures.

The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.¹²

In urban terms, creative destruction can explain New York’s history of socio-spatial restructuring as directly determined by the changes in capitalism’s regime of accumulation and modes of regulation. As a paradigm of urbanization, these endemic transformations in New York’s social and spatial landscape from the accelerated industrialization, social diversification, and modernization at the turn of the century to the progressive deindustrialization and uneven expansion after the Second World War can be mapped quite rigorously onto the process of urbanization at national scale. Notwithstanding, urban creative destruction was packaged in a set of myths and ideologies that translated urban changes, historically, in terms of imminent cycles of degeneration and regeneration, and spatially, in terms of unstoppable advancing frontiers of socio-spatial reform.

Starting in the nineteenth century, with the “incorporation” and industrialization of America, the signposts of the “westward route” of capital and labor were the growing metropolises. The mixed anti- and pro-urban sentiments that accompanied urbanization came to be symbolized by two metaphors dug out of the “Pilgrim’s Progress” tradition.¹³ To the utopian version of “the city upon a mighty hill”—naturalized on the American soil as the “the celestial, White City”—corresponded the dystopian city of evils and destruction. The accelerated urban changes during the first half of twentieth century, especially through unprecedented demographic mobility as well as social and labor reconfigurations, accentuated the patterns of growth and decline spatially rather than historically. Degeneration and regeneration were no longer a matter of temporal succession but co-terminus socio-spatial and economic realities. The progressive urbanism of the boom years during the 1920s in particular, culminating with the New Deal of the Great Depression, could not obscure its uneven consequences in spite of concerted efforts to level out living conditions in cities and weed out the roots of poverty and social inequality.

The utopian and the dystopian were thus carried into post-Second World War twentieth-century urban America along two main channels. The former fuelled a “pro-quality of life” urbanism bolstered by ideologies of economic growth and spatial reconfiguration, at first in the form of centrifugal suburban sprawl and economic boom away from the center. This resulted in the construction of highways and urban-suburban infrastructure, and toward the late 1960s through to the end of the 1980s, strategies of spatial restructuring were funneled back to the city via the sustained maintenance of upscale urban neighborhoods and the revamping of former industrial or inner city zones. The new, hegemonic middle class of service professionals, with interests in urban redevelopment, engineered these changes with a view to creating a sustainable, safe, high quality, legitimate urbanism. The gritty dystopian, on the other hand, could tag the less visible consequences of utopian urbanism while more radical discourses of urban decline associated it with the imminent demise of the city. Thus, urban degeneration, just like regeneration, was as much a discursive reality as a material crisis pertaining to the “natural” logic of spatial and social unevenness. Primarily, postwar deindustrialization—progressive or “cataclysmic”—generated the decay of core cities through the flight of capital and labor forces away from the center, and a resulting increased rate of urban unemployment.¹⁴

The antinomy of suburban boom and urban doom characterized most of America’s cities during the late 1960s and the 1970s. The socio-spatial migration brought about by the displacements of the manufacturing industry was accompanied by urban ethnic diversification and the growing of a “residual,” bottom-level city.¹⁵ High crime rates, diminished street safety, a great population influx across and below the poverty line, the increase of an ethnic “reserve army” of labor, the growth of the informal and underground economy, the spread of the abandoned, blighted inner city, and not least, the wide spreading shelterless populace, were all key features of the late twentieth-century urban dystopia.¹⁶ Some postmodern interpretations assign these transformations to a global, critically terminal phase.¹⁷ Other Marxist views a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Prologue: Urban Hermeneutics and the Problem of the Fetish Space
• Part I   Mappings
• Part II   A New York Trilogy Inc.
• Epilogue: The Politics of Urban Writing and the Hegemony of FIRE
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index