In the twentieth century, the city was theorized as never before. Thinking about cities became professionalized. This happened at the intersection of theoretical and applied thinking, between sociological research and architectural practice, which was known as planning. This was when, in many parts of the world, the growth of cities seemed an uncontrollable and even a dangerous phenomenon. While multiple urban traditions, for example that of the Arab world, continued (qualified by imperialism and colonialism), the changes that were visualized and written about in cities such as Paris and New York had enormous impacts on large and small cities in many countries.
This chapter considers what literary scholars in the twenty-first century could do with the models and theories which emerged under the general headings of planning and urban studies between the mid-nineteenth and the later twentieth centuries. Accounts of the city which were produced to describe and shape actual practice and policy in the new, sprawling urban zones could become fresh approaches to the reading of literature. Conversely, as works produced from the 1970s onwards in sociology, architecture and design, and human geography taking a cultural turn recognize (Lefebvre [1974] 1991; Sennett 1977, 1994; Pinder 2005; Campkin 2013), literature and other forms of cultural production contribute to the discussion. The texts at the centre of this chapter were shaped with different purposes in mind from those of literary scholars. The outcome of such purposes in the actual building and planning decisions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century cities in Europe, North America and elsewhere is neither utopia nor dystopia but the messiness of life. Such messiness is rendered best not by plans but by certain literary forms, notably the realist novel and creative non-fiction.
Until the ‘spatial turn’ of the 2000s and 2010s, literary scholarship paid little attention to urban theory. Even now, the reception of contemporary spatial theory by Andrew Thacker (2003), Anna Snaith and Michael Whitworth (2007) and others, like the mapping-based approach of Franco Moretti (1998, 2005), the ‘geocriticism’ proposed by Bertrand Westphal ([2007] 2011) and his disciple Robert T. Tally Jr. (2013) and even the postmodern geographies of Edward Soja (1989) rather emphasized narratives of the modern, within which the urban dominates, proposed in France between the 1960s and the 1990s by Pierre Bourdieu et al. 1999, Michel Foucault ([1967] 1998), Guy Debord ([1967] 1994), Gilles Deleuze, Henri Lefebvre ([1974] 1991), George Perec ([1974] 1997), Michel de Certeau ([1974] 2000) and Marc Augé ([1992] 1995). Such narratives see the modern and postmodern urban as essentially the site of contests of power between varied ideological forces with individual ‘users’ occasionally developing the ability to subvert the system via creative and irrational practices of walking and art production. But a much broader range of theorizations of and responses to the urban, produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have still largely been overlooked by literary scholars. Work from specifically German and Anglo-American traditions which coalesced as urban studies is at the centre of this chapter.
Specifically, this chapter moves from fairly fresh responses to the rapidly urbanizing city in the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth by the likes of Friedrich Engels ([1845] 1987), John Ruskin ([1884] 2006), Charles Booth ([1886–1903] 2002), Ferdinand Tönnies ([1887] 2001), Frederick Law Olmsted ([1870] 2003) and William Morris ([1890] 2007) to the wholesale rejection of the urban embodied most clearly in the work of Ebenezer Howard ([1898] 2003) and Patrick Geddes (1915) and developed into a massive orthodoxy in the USA by Lewis Mumford ([1938] 1940, 1961) and in the UK by Patrick Abercrombie (1945) in the mid-twentieth century. This is followed by efforts to reshape the urban via revolutionary transformations, again focused on the era between the two world wars and emerging most clearly in the work of Le Corbusier ([1929] 2003) and Albert Speer (1970; see Hall 1988, pp. 198–200).
Running alongside such efforts was a slow and penetrating effort to get to grips with the details and landscape of the modern urban beginning, with the refocusing on the individual in Georg Simmel ([1903] 2010), progressing through the Chicago School sociological studies produced between the 1920s and the 1960s and taking a vital turn with the neo-urbanism of Jane Jacobs (1961) and the work on gentrification and urban revival of Ruth Glass (1964), Marshall Berman ([1982] 1983) and Neil Smith (1996) between the 1960s and the 1990s. This work tested the hypotheses about the unique nature of the modern urban social experience proposed by Tönnies and others, becoming itself the foundation for twenty-first century work in cultural geography (Pinder 2005) and sociological ethnography (Hall 2015).
Nineteenth-Century Fear of the City
The historian of urban planning, Peter Hall (1988, p. 14) entitles his chapter on late nineteenth-century ‘[r]eactions to […] the Slum City’, ‘City of Dreadful Night’. In doing so, he borrows the title of a literary text, the Victorian poem of the same name by James ‘B.V.’ Thomson, which describes a city as dark and bleak, its inhabitants isolated. Characteristic nineteenth-century accounts of the new, sprawling metropolis were acts of demonization. For Engels (1820–95), the meaning of the city was found in many individuals living in close physical proximity to one another, which he held to be necessarily a dehumanizing experience:
The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest, be...