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![a more fully democratic public realm.” The case study reveals that “how to
live difference in the city, especially when it is awkward to address rather than
easy to celebrate the exotic, has to be a central focus of urban research and
action over the following decades.” Moreover, the power of symbolic space is
revealed through a clash between the rational city of planning discourse and
a symbolic city constructed through an ancient Jewish text. The cultural
turn produces new understandings of the material inequalities and divisions
highlighted by earlier political economy approaches. A more just city can
be created through the new ways of thinking about the public city and public
space.
The issues involved in creating a more just city are also investigated by
David M. Smith. Focusing on the city and urbanization in apartheid and
post-apartheid South Africa, he reviews the debate about social justice and
the city during the last thirty years. He draws on such influential figures as
Harvey, Rawls, Walzer, and Young, as well as making vivid use of his own
experience and fieldnotes, to argue that “the challenge ahead is . . . not so
much social scientific as ethical: to help devise a new theory of the good,
incorporating inclusive material standards combined with an ethic of respon-
sibility to the weak and vulnerable, persuasive enough to be a source of moral
motivation as well as of social understanding. This would be progress in
‘urban studies.’”
The theme of social justice is continued in chapter 5. Sophie Body-
Gendrot considers changing views concerning urban violence from the per-
spective of the criminal justice system. She outlines the development of urban
violence and its causes during the 1980s and 1990s through a comparison
between French and American cities. She tracks the movement toward the
contemporary “politicization of the crime issue” and the role played by
“politicians, the media, and public opinion spokespersons [in taking] advan-
tage of a global feeling of insecurity to pursue their own strategies.” A new
situation has emerged where elites are more willing to legitimate repressive
policies than support preventive measures. This process is not globally
uniform since it is shaped by local conditions across the United States and
Europe. France and many other European countries subscribe to “social pre-
vention” and reject policies articulated initially in America. Moreover, across
Europe the symbolic unity of civic life is “often more valued than the expres-
sion of differences,” and urban violence is seen as avoidable. She ends on a
more upbeat note than David M. Smith, calling for a “new urban literature”
which can tell us “the good news” – presumably, where our understanding of
urban violence in America can draw on European traditions rather than the
other way round.
In Part III we bring together three American urbanists who advance a
critique of highly influential contemporary perspectives in order to propose
future directions for research. Michael Peter Smith sets out an urban research
Understanding the City 13](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2156822-250609124904-28483de9/75/Understanding-The-City-Contemporary-And-Future-Perspectives-John-Eade-33-2048.jpg)
![a radical political economy. Yet this cacophony of difference-directed rescript-
ings has also opened out important new questions that enhance our under-
standings of cities, implore us to pursue new trajectories of inquiry, and
offer invigorated scope for constructing more just cities. The ways in which
theories of difference have contributed to bringing these other city scripts into
view is the specific focus of this chapter.
Situated Scripts
All explanatory representations of cities, despite claims about their universal
applicability, are in fact always situated knowledges. This contradiction is
nowhere more clearly expressed than in the case of the Chicago School of
urban sociologists. Often treated as a universal spatial typology of the city,
their famous concentric circle model was constructed from very specific field
studies of a particular place and time. Specifically, their models of racialized
“ghetto” formation and stages of “invasion” and “succession” drew upon
Chicago in the 1920s. This was a time when African Americans and others
were migrating in great numbers to the northern and eastern cities of the
United States, a migration understood to be causing “disturbances” to the
healthy “metabolism” of the city (Duncan 1996: 257). On the one hand, the
model was an attempt to account objectively and scientifically for the logic of
change in cities. But, on the other, it was produced from anxieties about urban
disorder and dysfunction, those anxieties resulting from specific new experi-
ences of cohabiting with racialized difference. In this sense, the model had
embedded in it a set of normative ideas about proper urban living and appro-
priate (i.e., manageable) urban subjectivities (Jacobs and Fincher 1998: 6). So
a historically and geographically specific moral stance in relation to urban life
– and one “generated inductively” from detailed observations of the “labo-
ratory” called Chicago – was presumed to apply to “any town or city” (Burgess
[1925] 1967: 50, quoted in Duncan 1996: 257). This is a classic example of
what Rob Shields (1996: 229) described as the way such representations (and
especially those valorized by the authority of science) come to “replace or
stand in for the city.” As he (and the Chicago model) so graphically reminds
us, such representations can become “treacherous metaphors, summarizing
the complexity of the city in an elegant model.”
The universal claims of the Chicago model are an easy target for chal-
lengers. Not least, the “truth claims” of such abstracted models challenge our
commonsense notion of how applicable they really might be to other cities.
There is a more recent example of this type of synecdoche, whereby the expe-
riences of one place are expected to stand for the experiences of all cities.
Nowhere is such a bold claim more apparent than in the emergence of the
“Los Angeles School” (Dear 2000: 10). It is certain that there is a large body
28 Ruth Fincher, Jane M. Jacobs, and Kay Anderson](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2156822-250609124904-28483de9/75/Understanding-The-City-Contemporary-And-Future-Perspectives-John-Eade-46-2048.jpg)
![To illustrate the need to abandon highly differentiated, area-specific scripts
for Southeast Asian cities, Rimmer and Dick refer to the appearance of gated
residential communities in Jakarta. In following this strategy they build on a
wide body of scholarship charting the appearance of the gated community
throughout cities of varying sizes and locations. The role of the gated com-
munity in recent scripts of globalization and urbanization may well be an
example of what Amin and Graham (1997: 416) refer to as the “problem of
synecdoche” – the “methodological dangers of overgeneralizing from one or
a few examples or overemphasizing particular spaces, senses of time and
partial representations within the city.”
There is now a vast scholarship on gated communities in cities of the First
and Third World, cities of the North and of the South, and cities in the West
and the East. As McLaughlin and Muncie (1999: 117) note: “[i]n an ever-
increasing number of global contexts, the middle and upper classes in cities
are opting . . . to live, shop, and work in privately guarded, security conscious,
fortified enclaves.” The gated community, no matter its location and no matter
its circumstance, acts as artifactual evidence not simply of globalization, but
of globalization’s peculiar urbanistic outcomes. In the case of the gated com-
munities of Jakarta, Rimmer and Dick (1998: 2309) suggest that although the
“debates and literatures” on US and Southeast Asian gated communities are
separate, “in reality many issues are the same.”
The way in which gated communities are scripted in current urban liter-
ature is a useful example of the complex and uneven ways in which theories
of difference have percolated through to our understandings of urban
processes. On the one hand, much of the analysis of gated communities is
premised on recognizing and theorizing the kinds of fears and antagonisms
that a lived experience of radical difference in urban settings can produce.
Yet the gated community that is the outcome of this condition of hyperdif-
ferentiation lends itself well to globally broad explanations that reduce every-
thing to the same. As Teresa Caldeira (1999: 83) argues, in the context of São
Paulo, “the proliferation of fortified enclaves has created a new model of
spatial segregation . . . in many cities around the world.” Indeed, for Caldeira
(1999: 83, 84), the story of gated communities in São Paulo offers a “carica-
ture” of “a pattern of segregation that is widespread in cities throughout the
world.” Here we glimpse a mirror image of the claims made for Los Angeles:
São Paulo as the “paradigmatic” city.
If we are alert to the very peculiar ways in which specific cities come to be
connected to aspects of the global economy, then the apparent evidence of
sameness can be approached differently, in a way that sees difference in that
sameness. For example, detailed ethnographic accounts of gated communi-
ties, like that offered by Caldeira, also suggest certain processes that are not
so readily encompassed into a globally scripted model of hyperdifferentiation.
Rescripting Cities with Difference 35](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2156822-250609124904-28483de9/75/Understanding-The-City-Contemporary-And-Future-Perspectives-John-Eade-53-2048.jpg)
![from having no knowledge, and being therefore incapable of an
opinion, there is the large company of the superficial and light-
minded, who are always injuring the honor and beauty of truth by
the levity, the impertinence, the absurdity of the enthusiasm they
pretend, and the nonsense they talk about “some new thing.” No
period of society has been more familiar with that class and its
mischief-making than our own. There is the other large class of the
cotemporaries of any discovery or special advance, who, when they
can absent themselves from the scene no longer, look and listen,
and bend all their efforts to hold their ground of life-long opinion,
usually succeeding so far as to escape any direct admission that
more is known than when they were born. These are no ultimate
hindrance. When Harvey died, no physician in Europe above the age
of forty believed in the circulation of the blood; but the truth was
perfectly safe; and so it will be with the case of the psychological
relations of the nervous system when the present course of
investigation has sustained a clearer verification and further
advance. On this point we have the sayings of two truth-seekers,
wise in quality of intellect, impartial and dispassionate in temper, and
fearless in the pursuit of their aims. The late Prince Consort is vividly
remembered for the characteristic saying which spread rapidly over
the country, that he could not understand the conduct of the medical
profession in England in leaving the phenomena of mesmerism to
the observation of unqualified persons, instead of undertaking an
inquiry which was certainly their proper business, in proportion as
they professed to pursue science. The other authority we refer to is
the late Mr. Hallam. A letter of his lies before us from which we
quote a passage, familiar in its substance, doubtless, to his personal
friends, to whom he always avowed the view which it presents, and
well worthy of note to such readers as may not be aware of the
observation and thought he devoted to the phenomena of
mesmerism during the last quarter-century of his long life. “It
appears to me probable that the various phenomena of mesmerism,
together with others, independent of mesmerism properly so called,
which have lately [the date is 1844] been brought to light, are
fragments of some general law of nature which we are not yet able](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2156822-250609124904-28483de9/75/Understanding-The-City-Contemporary-And-Future-Perspectives-John-Eade-63-2048.jpg)
![to deduce from them, merely because they are destitute of visible
connection—the links being hitherto wanting which are to display the
entire harmony of effects proceeding from a single cause.”
[Persons curious to know what has been developed in this class of
studies may find the same in a work published at this office, entitled
The Library of Mesmerism and Psychology—comprising the Philosophy of
Mesmerism, Clairvoyance, and Mental Electricity; Fascination, or the
Power of Charming; The Macrocosm, or the World of Sense;
Electrical Psychology, or the Doctrine of Impressions; The Science of
the Soul, treated Physiologically and Philosophically. Complete in one
illustrated volume. Price, $4.]
What room is there not for hopefulness when we compare such an
observation as this with Mr. Parris’ dogmatical exposition of Satan’s
dealings with men! or when we contrast the calm and cheerful tone
of the philosopher with the stubborn wrath of Chief Justice
Stoughton, and with the penitential laments of Judge Sewall! We
might contrast it also with the wild exultation of those of the
Spiritualists of our own day who can form no conception of the
modesty and patience requisite for the sincere search for truth, and
who, once finding themselves surrounded by facts and appearances
new and strange, assume that they have discovered a bridge over
the bottomless “gulf beyond which lies the spirit-land,” and wander
henceforth in a fools’ paradise, despising and pitying all who are less
rash, ignorant, and presumptuous than themselves. It is this
company of fanatics—the first of the three classes we spoke of—
which is partly answerable for the backwardness of the second; but
the blame does not rest exclusively in one quarter. There is an
indolence in the medical class which is the commonest reproach
against them in every age of scientific activity, and which has
recently been heroically avowed and denounced in a public address
by no less a member of the profession than Sir Thomas Watson.[1]
There is a conservative reluctance to change of view or of
procedure. There is also a lack of moral courage, by no means
surprising in an order of men whose lives are spent in charming
away troubles, and easing pains and cares, and “making things](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2156822-250609124904-28483de9/75/Understanding-The-City-Contemporary-And-Future-Perspectives-John-Eade-64-2048.jpg)
![the gravest curses of the human lot. We have parted with one after
another of the fetish or conjectural persuasions about our relations
with the world of spirit or mind, regarded as in direct opposition to
the world of matter. By a succession of discoveries we have been led
to an essentially different view of life and thought from any dreamed
of before the new birth of science; and at this day, and in our own
metropolis, we have Sir Henry Holland telling us how certain
treatment of this or that department of the nervous system will
generate this or that state of belief and experience, as well as
sensation. We have Dr. Carpenter disclosing facts of incalculable
significance about brain-action without consciousness, and other
vital mysteries. We have Dr. Maudsley showing, in the cells of the
lunatic asylum, not only the very realm of Satan, as our fathers
would have thought, but the discovery that it is not Satan, after all,
that makes the havoc, but our own ignorance which has seduced us
into a blasphemous superstition, instead of inciting us to the study
of ourselves. And these are not all our teachers. Amid the conflict of
phenomena of the human mind and body, we have arrived now at
the express controversy of Psychology against Physiology. Beyond
the mere statement of the fact we have scarcely advanced a step.
The first can not be, with any accuracy, called a science at all, and
the other is in little more than a rudimentary state; but it is no small
gain to have arrived at some conception of the nature of the
problem set before us, and at some liberty of hypothesis as to its
conditions. In brief, and in the plainest terms, while there is still a
multitude deluding and disporting itself with a false hypothesis about
certain mysteries of the human mind, and claiming to have explained
the marvels of Spiritualism by making an objective world of their
own subjective experience, the scientific physiologists [those
especially who are true phrenologists] are proceeding, by
observation and experiment, to penetrate more and more secrets of
our intellectual and moral life.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2156822-250609124904-28483de9/75/Understanding-The-City-Contemporary-And-Future-Perspectives-John-Eade-66-2048.jpg)
![[1] Address on the Present State of Therapeutics. Delivered at
the opening meeting of the Clinical Society of London, January
10, 1868. By Sir Thomas Watson, Bart., M.D.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2156822-250609124904-28483de9/75/Understanding-The-City-Contemporary-And-Future-Perspectives-John-Eade-67-2048.jpg)
![with great persistence until driven up into a corner. It simply
assumes the name of “Planchet,” leaving off the feminine
termination of the word; and “on being remonstrated with for
illiteracy, it defended itself by saying, ‘I always was a bad speler,’—
an orthographical blunder,” says the writer, “that no one in the room
was capable of making.”
Although the writer in the paragraph above quoted disclaims all
theories on the subject, he does propound a theory, such as it is; but
of this we defer our notice until we come to put the several theories
that have been offered into the hopper and grind them up together;
at which time we will take some further notice of the amusing
peculiarities of this writer’s Planchette.
The Ladies’ Repository of November, 1868, contains an article,
written by Rev. A. D. Field, entitled “Planchette; or, Spirit-Rapping
Made Easy.” This writer mentions a number of test questions asked
by him of Planchette, the answers to which were all false. Yet he
acknowledges that “the mysterious little creature called Planchette is
no humbug; that some mysterious will-power causes it to answer
questions, and that it is useless to ignore these things, or to laugh at
them.” The writer submits a theory by which he thinks these
mysteries may be explained, in a measure, if not wholly, but this,
with others, will be reserved for notice hereafter.
Harper’s Monthly Magazine for December, 1868, contains an article
entitled “The Confessions of a Reformed Planchettist.” In this article,
the writer, no doubt drawing wholly or in part from his imagination,
details a series of tricks which he had successfully practiced upon
the credulity of others, and concludes by propounding a very sage
and charitable theory to account for all Planchette phenomena, on
which theory we shall yet have a word to offer.
Hours at Home, of February, 1869, contains an article, by J. T.
Headley, entitled “Planchette at the Confessional.” In this article, the
writer cogently argues the claims of these new phenomena upon the
attention of scientific men. He says: “That it [the Planchette] writes
things never dreamed of by the operators, is proved by their own
testimony and the testimony of others, beyond all contradiction;”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2156822-250609124904-28483de9/75/Understanding-The-City-Contemporary-And-Future-Perspectives-John-Eade-76-2048.jpg)
Understanding The City Contemporary And Future Perspectives John Eade
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- 6. Studies in Urbanand Social Change Published by Blackwell in association with the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Series editors: Chris Pickvance, Margit Mayer and John Walton. Published Fragmented Societies Enzo Mingione Free Markets and Food Riots John Walton and David Seddon Post-Fordism Ash Amin (ed.) The People’s Home? Social Rented Housing in Europe and America Michael Harloe Cities After Socialism: Urban and Regional Change and Conflict in Post-Socialist Societies Gregory Andrusz, Michael Harloe, and Ivan Szelenyi (eds.) Urban Poverty and the Underclass: A Reader Enzo Mingione Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the City Linda McDowell Contemporary Urban Japan: A Sociology of Consumption John Clammer Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen (eds.) The Social Control of Cities? A Comparative Perspective Sophie Body-Gendrot Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.) The New Chinese City: Globalization and Market Reform John R. Logan (ed.) Understanding the City: Contemporary and Future Perspectives John Eade and Christopher Mele (eds.) Forthcoming European Cities in a Global Age: A Comparative Perspective Alan Harding (ed.) Urban South Africa Alan Mabin and Susan Parnell Urban Social Movements and the State Margit Mayer
- 7. UNDERSTANDING THE CITY CONTEMPORARY AND FUTUREPERSPECTIVES Edited by John Eade and Christopher Mele Blackwell Publishers
- 8. © 2002 byBlackwell Publishers Ltd a Blackwell Publishing company except for editorial arrangement and introduction © 2002 by John Eade and Christopher Mele Editorial Offices: 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK Tel: +44 (0)1865 791100 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5018, USA Tel: +1 781 388 8250 The right of John Eade and Christopher Mele to be identified as the Authors of the editorial material has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2002 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for. ISBN 0–631–22406–8 (hbk) 0–631–22407–6 (pbk) A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 101 /2 on 12 Baskerville MT by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall For further information on Blackwell Publishers, visit our website: www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk
- 9. Contents List of Illustrationsviii List of Tables ix List of Contributors x Series Editors’ Preface xv Preface xvii Part I: Introduction 1 1 Understanding the City 3 John Eade and Christopher Mele Part II: A Middle Ground? Difference, Social Justice, and the City 25 2 Rescripting Cities with Difference 27 Ruth Fincher, Jane M. Jacobs, and Kay Anderson 3 The Public City 49 Sophie Watson 4 Social Justice and the South African City 66 David M. Smith 5 The Dangerous Others: Changing Views on Urban Risks and Violence in France and the United States 82 Sophie Body-Gendrot
- 10. Part III: TheGlobal and Local, the Information Age, and American Metropolitan Development 107 6 Power in Place: Retheorizing the Local and the Global 109 Michael Peter Smith 7 Depoliticizing Globalization: From Neo-Marxism to the Network Society of Manuel Castells 131 Peter Marcuse 8 Urban Analysis as Merchandising: The “LA School” and the Understanding of Metropolitan Development 159 Mark Gottdiener Part IV: Urban Research in Particular Regions of the Globe 181 9 State Socialism, Post-socialism, and their Urban Patterns: Theorizing the Central and Eastern European Experience 183 Chris Pickvance 10 The China Difference: City Studies Under Socialism and Beyond 204 Dorothy J. Solinger and Kam Wing Chan 11 Economic Miracles and Megacities: The Japanese Model and Urbanization in East and Southeast Asia 222 J. S. Eades Part V: Urban Processes and City Contexts: India and the Middle East 245 12 Cities of the Past and Cities of the Future: Theorizing the Indian Metropolis of Bangalore 247 Smriti Srinivas 13 The Syntax of Jerusalem: Urban Morphology, Culture, and Power 278 Shlomo Hasson 14 Muslim Civil Society in Urban Public Spaces: Globalization, Discursive Shifts, and Social Movements 305 Paul M. Lubeck and Bryana Britts vi Contents
- 11. Part VI: UrbanProcesses and City Contexts: The United States 337 15 The Bullriders of Silicon Alley: New Media Circuits of Innovation, Speculation, and Urban Development 339 Michael Indergaard 16 Fear and Lusting in Las Vegas and New York: Sex, Political Economy, and Public Space 363 Alexander J. Reichl 17 Efficacy or Legitimacy of Community Power? A Reassessment of Corporate Elites in Urban Studies 379 Leonard Nevarez 18 Dream Factory Redux: Mass Culture, Symbolic Sites, and Redevelopment in Hollywood 397 Jan Lin Index 419 Contents vii
- 12. Illustrations 12.1 Map ofSouth Asian urban sites and places associated with the Sai Baba movement 248 12.2 Map of the Bangalore metropolitan area in 1995 255 12.3 Shivamma Thayee’s house and temple constructed by her in Rupena Agrahara 261 12.4 The black stone image of Shirdi Sai Baba in Rupena Agrahara 262 12.5 The Shirdi Sai Baba temple in Someshvarapura 264 12.6 Sathya Sai Baba (left) and Shirdi Sai Baba (right) 267 12.7 Sai Darshan in Indiranagar 270 13.1 Map of the cities of Jerusalem 280
- 13. Tables 9.1 The housingsituation of different occupational groups in two provincial cities in Hungary in 1968 189 14.1 Population trends of major Muslim cities 306 14.2 Gender, education, and labor force participation 326 18.1 Domestic box-office market shares 404 18.2 Diverse media and entertainment conglomerates 405
- 14. Contributors Kay Anderson isProfessor of Geography at Durham University. Her pub- lished work includes books and articles on race, place, and nation in Australia and Canada, such as Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Global Times (1991). She co-edited (with Fay Gale) Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geogra- phy (1992/1999) and, more recently, she has been writing about the nexus of culture/nature/colonialism. Sophie Body-Gendrot is a Professor of Political Science and American Civilization at the Sorbonne in Paris and a CNRS researcher. Her research focuses on comparative public policies, urban unrest, ethnic and racial issues, and citizen participation. Among her books in English are The Social Control of Cities? A Comparative Perspective (2000), The Urban Moment (edited with R. Beauregard, 1999), and Minorities in European Cities (edited with M. Martiniello, 2000). Bryana Britts was awarded an honors degree in Sociology at the Univer- sity of California, Santa Cruz, where she teaches and researches urban social policy. Currently a postgraduate researcher at the Center for Global, International, and Regional Studies, she is conducting research on globa- lization, Islamic movements, civil society, and human rights. She plans to pursue a graduate degree in international public policy and human rights advocacy. Kam Wing Chan is a Professor in Geography at the University of Wash- ington. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. He is the author of Cities with Invisible Walls (1994) and has written extensively on China’s urbanization, migration, the household registration system, labor market, and economic development. He has also served as a consultant to the Asian Development Bank, International Labor Office, World Bank, and the Chinese government.
- 15. John Eade isProfessor of Sociology and Anthropology at Roehampton University of Surrey. He has undertaken research in Calcutta and, for the last twenty years, in the “East End” of London. He is the author of The Politics of Community (1989) and Placing London (2000). He also edited Living the Global City (1997) and co-edited (with Tim Allen) Divided Europeans (1999) and (with Michael Sallnow) Contesting the Sacred (1991). He is also a founder editor of Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing (Berghahn). J. S. (Jerry) Eades is Professor of Asia Pacific Studies at the Ritusmeikan Asia Pacific University in Beppu, Japan, and Senior Honorary Research Fellow in the Anthropology Department of the University of Kent, where he formerly lectured. His early research concentrated on West Africa, migra- tion, ethnicity, and the informal sector, but after teaching at the University of Tokyo from 1991 to 1994, his interests now extend to the Asia Pacific region, urbanization, the environment, and tourism. He is co-editor of the mono- graph series, Japan in Transition (SUNY Press), and Asian Anthropologies (Berghahn). Ruth Fincher is Professor of Urban Planning and Adjunct Professor of Geography at the University of Melbourne. She received her Ph.D. from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her research and writing about inequality and locational disadvantage and the politics of difference in cities are informed by feminist and political economic conceptualizations of insti- tutions. Her recent work includes Creating Unequal Futures? Rethinking Poverty, Inequality and Disadvantage (co-edited with Peter Saunders, 2001), Cities of Dif- ference (co-edited with Jane M. Jacobs, 1998), and Australian Poverty Then and Now (co-edited with John Nieuwenhuysen, 1998). She is currently conducting research on practices of ethnic differentiation in the residential construction industry, for a major project entitled “Building on Ethnicity.” Mark Gottdiener is Professor of Sociology and Adjunct Professor of Archi- tecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo. His interests are in con- temporary theory, semiotics, urbanism, and cultural studies. Among his many books are The Social Production of Urban Space (2nd edition), The New Urban Soci- ology (2nd edition with Ray Hutchison), The Theming of America (2nd edition), Las Vegas: the Social Production of an All-American City (with C. Collins and D. Dickens), and, as editor, New Forms of Consumption. His latest research is on the emerging social world of air travel and some of this work was recently pub- lished as Living in the Air: Surviving the New Culture of Air Travel. Shlomo Hasson is Professor of Geography and Urban Planning at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of Urban Social Movements in Jerusalem (1993) and co-author of Neighbourhood Organizations and the Welfare Contributors xi
- 16. State (1994). Heis currently writing on issues of divided cities, identity, culture, and urban morphology. Michael Indergaard is Associate Professor of Sociology at St. John’s University. He has published on economic restructuring and urban redevel- opment in journals such as Urban Affairs Review, Social Problems, and Research in Urban Sociology. Jane M. Jacobs is an Associate Professor in the School of Anthropology, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Melbourne. She gained her Ph.D. from University College, London. She has published widely in the area of cultural geography, with special interests in the cultural politics of cities, contested heritage, and postcolonial spaces. She is the author of Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (1996), co-author (with Ken Gelder) of Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (1988), and co-editor (with Ruth Fincher) of Cities of Difference (1998). She is currently writing a book on the cultural technologies of the globalized residential highrise. Jan Lin is Associate Professor of Sociology at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He taught previously at Amherst College and the University of Houston. He is Principal Investigator on a three-year grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to Occidental College for the Northeast Los Angeles Community Outreach Partnership Center. He is the author of Reconstructing Chinatown: Ethnic Enclave, Global Change (1998). He is currently engaged in research for a forthcoming book, tenta- tively titled: Bright-Light Company Town: Redevelopment, Globalization, and Labor in Hollywood. Paul M. Lubeck is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Global, International, and Regional Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His first book, Islam and Urban Labor in Northern Nigeria: The Making of a Muslim Working Class, won the Herskovits Prize. Besides researching the potential of information technology as a regional development strategy in Southeast Asia, Mexico, and Africa, Lubeck directs a Carnegie Corporation- funded working group analyzing the impact of globalization and Islamic social movements on the capacity of national states to govern and sustain national identities. Peter Marcuse is Professor of Urban Planning at Columbia University in New York City, where he teaches urban planning. He has also taught in the Union of South Africa and in both West and East Germany. He has written extensively on housing, urban development, and globalization. His most xii Contributors
- 17. recent book, co-editedwith Ronald van Kempen, is Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? (1999). He is working on a book on the history of working-class housing in New York City. Christopher Mele is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City (2000) and a number of articles on urban devel- opment and residential development in New York. He is currently complet- ing a book-length study of regional development in southeastern North Carolina. Leonard Nevarez is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vassar College. He writes on corporate power and urban politics in the new economy, high- technology work and organizations, and the political economy of natural re- source development. He is currently publishing a book on the local politics of “new economy” industry. Chris Pickvance is Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury. His interests include urban theory, urban protest, locality, comparative analysis, and Central and Eastern Europe. He co-edited (with E. Preteceille) State Restructuring and Local Power (1991) and (with K. Lang- Pickvance and N. Manning) Environmental and Housing Movements: Grassroots Experience in Hungary, Russia and Estonia (1997). He is currently writing a book on local environmental policy implementation in Hungary. Alexander J. Reichl is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Queens College of the City University of New York. He is the author of Reconstruct- ing Times Square: Politics and Culture in Urban Development (1999), and he has pub- lished in the Journal of Urban Affairs and Urban Affairs Review. His current research examines the place of public housing in the changing social and physical landscape of US cities. David M. Smith retired from his post as Professor of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London, in 2001. His research interests cover geograph- ical perspectives on inequality, social justice, and morality, combining theory with case studies set in the United States, Eastern Europe, Israel, and South Africa. His books include Geography and Social Justice (1994), Human Geography: A Welfare Approach (1997), and Moral Geographies: Ethics in a World of Difference (2000). He lived and worked in South Africa for a year during the era of apartheid and has been a regular, recent visitor. In addition to publishing papers on South Africa he has edited two collections on urbanization and social change: Living under Apartheid (1982) and The Apartheid City and Beyond (1992). Contributors xiii
- 18. Michael Peter Smithis Professor of Community Studies and Development at the University of California-Davis, and a Faculty Associate of the Center for California Studies at the University of California-Berkeley. He has pub- lished several influential books on cities, global migration, and urbanism, including The City and Social Theory (1979), The Capitalist City (1987), City, State, and Market (1988), The Bubbling Cauldron (1995), Transnationalism from Below (1998), and, most recently, Transnational Urbanism (2001). He is the editor in chief of the Comparative Urban and Community Research book series. His latest publication in this series is City and Nation: Rethinking Place and Identity (2001), co-edited with Thomas Bender. Smith is currently conducting a bi-national field research project, investigating a transnational community development initiative which links Mexican migrants from Napa, California, to economic and community development projects in their home town of Timbinal, Mexico. Dorothy J. Solinger is Professor of Political Science in the School of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Her most recent book is Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, The State and the Logic of the Market (1999). She is also co-editor of States and Sovereignty in the Global Economy (1999). She has also published China’s Transition from Socialism (1993), a collection of essays about the reform of socialism in China’s urban areas. Smriti Srinivas received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics, India, and worked at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, India from 1994 to 1997 as an Assistant Professor (Soci- ology). Between 1997 and 1998 she was attached as a Rockefeller Fellow to the International Center for Advanced Studies, New York University, and was a Mellon Fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of Maryland, College Park, in 1998–9. She is currently Assistant Professor, Division of Comparative Studies in the Humanities, Ohio State University. She is the author of The Mouths of People, the Voice of God: Buddhists and Muslims in a Fron- tier Community of Ladakh (1998), and Landscapes of Urban Memory: The Sacred and the Civic in India’s High-Tech City (2001). Her research interests are in the study of cities and contemporary religious forms and practices. Sophie Watson is Professor of Urban Cultures at the University of East London. She was formerly Professor in Policy Studies at the University of Bristol, and Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at Sydney. She wrote (with Peter Murphy) Surface City: Sydney at the Millennium (1997), and edited (with K. Gibson) Metropolis Now (1995) and Postmodern Cities and Spaces (1995), and (with Gary Bridge) The Blackwell Companion to the City (2001). She is cur- rently working on public space and the multicultural city. xiv Contributors
- 19. Series Editors’ Preface Inthe past three decades there have been dramatic changes in the fortunes of cities and regions, in beliefs about the role of markets and states in society, and in the theories used by social scientists to account for these changes. Many of the cities experiencing crisis in the 1970s have undergone revitalization while others have continued to decline. In Europe and North America new policies have introduced privatization on a broad scale at the expense of col- lective consumption, and the viability of the welfare state has been challenged. Eastern Europe has witnessed the collapse of state socialism and the uneven implementation of a globally driven market economy. Meanwhile, the less developed nations have suffered punishing austerity programs that divide a few newly industrializing countries from a great many cases of arrested and negative growth. Social science theories have struggled to encompass these changes. The earlier social organizational and ecological paradigms were criticized by Marxian and Weberian theories, and these in turn have been disputed as all- embracing narratives. The certainties of the past, such as class theory, are gone and the future of urban and regional studies appears relatively open. The aim of the series Studies in Urban and Social Change is to take forward this agenda of issues and theoretical debates. The series is committed to a number of aims but will not prejudge the development of the field. It encour- ages theoretical works and research monographs on cities and regions. It explores the spatial dimension of society, including the role of agency and of institutional contexts in shaping urban form. It addresses economic and polit- ical change from the household to the state. Cities and regions are understood within an international system, the features of which are revealed in com- parative and historical analyses. The series also serves the interests of university classroom and professional readers. It publishes topical accounts of important policy issues (e.g., global adjustment), reviews of debates (e.g., post-Fordism) and collections that explore various facets of major changes (e.g., cities after socialism or the new
- 20. urban underclass). Theseries urges a synthesis of research and theory, teach- ing and practice. Engaging research monographs (e.g., on women and poverty in Mexico or urban culture in Japan) provide vivid teaching materials, just as policy-oriented studies (e.g., of social housing or urban planning) test and redi- rect theory. The city is analyzed from the top down (e.g., through the gen- dered culture of investment banks) and the bottom up (e.g., in challenging social movements). Taken together, the volumes in the series reflect the latest developments in urban and regional studies. Subjects which fall within the scope of the series include: explanations for the rise and fall of cities and regions; economic restructuring and its spatial, class, and gender impact; race and identity; convergence and divergence of the “east” and “west” in social and institutional patterns; new divisions of labor and forms of social exclusion; urban and environmental movements; international migration and capital flows; politics of the urban poor in devel- oping countries; cross-national comparisons of housing, planning, and devel- opment; debates on post-Fordism, the consumption sector, and the “new” urban poverty. Studies in Urban and Social Change addresses an international and interdisci- plinary audience of researchers, practitioners, students, and urban enthusi- asts. Above all, it endeavors to reach the public with compelling accounts of contemporary society. Editorial Committee John Walton, Chair Margit Mayer Chris Pickvance xvi Series Editors’ Preface
- 21. Preface This volume isthe product of a virtual community of scholars who were invited to contribute to a multidisciplinary analysis of (1) the directions that urban research has taken during the 1990s and (2) the avenues that may open up during the early part of the twenty-first century. The book provides a wide- ranging insight into recent debates where the widespread influence of politi- cal economy perspectives, as well as other, non-Marxist approaches, has been challenged by explorations of cultural processes and social difference. In par- ticular, Understanding the City: Contemporary and Future Perspectives shows the degree to which a middle ground has emerged between political economy and cul- tural turn approaches. We are grateful to the editors of the Blackwell Studies in Urban and Social Change series, especially Chris Pickvance and John Walton, for inviting us to produce this volume. They readily responded to our ideas and to the usual twists and turns involved in compiling a multi-authored work. Indeed, Chris Pickvance generously agreed to contribute a chapter on developments in Central and Eastern Europe. Sarah Falkus and Joanna Pyke at Blackwell also provided support and advice during the preparation of the volume. We thank Christina Weber and Joan A. Cabral, graduate students in sociology at the University of Buffalo, for their editing assistance. Last but not least, we should like to thank our colleagues for their forbearance and understanding. A special debt of gratitude is owed by John Eade to his wife, Caroline Egan-Strang, who understands well the obsessions of academics. John Eade Christopher Mele
- 22. Part I Introduction 1 Understandingthe City 3 John Eade and Christopher Mele
- 23. 1 Understanding the City JohnEade and Christopher Mele The beginning of the twenty-first century is an exciting time for those wanting to understand the city. There is a growing realization that the “cultural turn,” through its emphasis on meaning, identity and the politics of difference, for example, provides the cutting edge of urban research. At the same time the cultural turn has contributed to the fragmentation of urban studies and has had little impact on traditional urban investigations. When culturalist analy- ses of cities have directly engaged with political economy or the older urban ecology approaches, they have usually sought to move beyond those perspec- tives. Here we resist this tendency and explore the dynamic interplay between the cultural turn and political economy. We want to contribute to closing this gap through explorations of a middle ground where the traditional concerns within urban studies – restructuring, globalization, North/South urbaniza- tion, for instance – may intersect with culturalist approaches. In Understanding the City: Contemporary and Future Perspectives, we aim to provide the first concerted effort at addressing this emergent middle ground. What, then, does “understanding the city” entail? In our opinion it does not mean a descriptive survey of contemporary epistemological and theoretical approaches to the city. Furthermore, we do not want to place ourselves within a unified body (school or paradigm) of scholarship frozen in a particular moment of time or based exclusively upon a limited range (i.e., Western) of cases. We prefer to define “understanding” as an ongoing and continual transdisciplinary practice: an enterprise which is both an individual process of scholarly research and writing, and a collective dialogue with other people’s work. This is an enterprise which corresponds to changes not only in the social world (globalization, migration, etc.) but also within the larger theoretical advances that derive from those changes and seek to comprehend (and change) them, such as feminist theory, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism. In practical terms, understanding the city consists of multiple and modest endeavors aiming to reconcile the ways in which urban social processes (com- prised of the cultural as well as the political and economic) are constituted at
- 24. particular historical moments.At the same, this approach accepts that the reconciliation can never be fully comprehensive nor complete. It insists on an open scholarly awareness (recognition – but not necessarily full inclusion) of theoretical and empirical advances. It also calls for a conscious acknowledg- ment of the significance of structural forms of political economy and the indeterminacy of social and cultural processes to one’s own work and to urban studies in general. Perhaps most importantly, the perspective affirms that the initial issues of power, conflict, and social resistance in the urban context, which defined a paradigm shift three decades ago, remain critical. Those concerns are clearly political economic as well as cultural and social. The work of understanding the city is, therefore, not to fix and define, once and for all, the relationship between (or hierarchy among) the social, the cultural, and the political eco- nomic. Rather, it needs to problematize these connections in particular cities and time periods and continuously strive to develop new and innovative ways to comprehend their intersections. The theoretical acknowledgment of the importance of signification and of the indeterminacy of the social to urban studies has, if anything, heightened the need for careful empirical work that produces situated knowledges (as opposed to static models or all-encompassing theories) about the city. While no single epistemology or related methodology appears comparatively better suited for understanding the city, the approaches taken by the contributors to Understanding the City identify a valuable set of prescriptions and precautions for urban studies. They examine the need for: 1 reconceptualizing scale beyond the simplified micro/macro (global–local) and, consequently, the city as a process as opposed to a fixed and defined object; 2 developing a more comprehensive conceptualization of agency as consti- tutive of race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and their intersections, as well as the dynamic and fluid nature of their formation; 3 integrating the analysis of rhetoric and urban discourses in the produc- tion of urban spaces and consequent struggles over representation, signi- fication, and meanings of the city; 4 analyzing the important role played by memory and the imaginary as interpretive schema by which different social groups experience and know the city; 5 paying careful attention to everyday practices and experience to gauging the relevance of structural processes (and vice versa); 6 rejecting the conventional positivist inclination to devise models or exem- plars based on a single case; 7 being wary of any simplistic adaptation of Western-based theories to study cities outside the West and affirming historical specificity and the 4 John Eade and Christopher Mele
- 25. distinctiveness of culturaland ideological processes as relevant to the understanding of cities – non-Western and Western. Yet before we proceed to a detailed introduction to the chapters comprising this volume, we want to develop our view of how we have come to this current, exciting, and emergent juncture in urban studies, where the city stands as a central subject of debate and research. Symbols, Signs, and Discourse The aftermath of the political and social upheavals of 1968 prompted a dramatic critique of urban studies in the West and hastened along a para- digmatic shift in the epistemologies, theories, and methods of studying the city. This shift crystallized over time as a considerable body of scholarship linked various aspects of cities and their historical and contemporary forma- tions to capitalist political economic processes. Influenced by Karl Marx’s writings (and, to varying degrees, by Max Weber’s), post-1968 urban studies in the United States and Western Europe was committed to understanding processes of accumulation, including real estate speculation, investment, and disinvestment and the importance of state intervention in urban processes such as private development. The built environment of the city was a social construct subjected to dominant power relations, exploitation, and conflict always in play in capitalist social formations. Simultaneously, mounting a cri- tique of mainstream urban studies (particularly, human ecology) and address- ing social justice concerns, these structural approaches sought to disentangle the political and economic processes producing uneven development within, and between, cities and, for that reason, the debilitating effects upon the housing conditions, employment opportunities, and overall lifestyles of the urban poor and ethnic and racial minorities. Underlying most writings was a strong normative affirmation of the potential for emancipatory class politics or social movements. Despite the intellectual legacy of such key figures as Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, whose writings on culture and the city are extensive and influential, the (re)emergence of and subsequent challenge from culturalist perspectives came relatively late to urban studies in comparison to other disciplines. Interestingly, the point of entry for most discussions of the cen- trality of cultural representation and signification to city life was through established concerns fundamental to critical political economy approaches. Following on the heels of David Harvey’s influential work, The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), in which the interrelationship between cultural changes (postmodernism) and political economic changes (post-Fordism) are clearly articulated, urbanists in North America and Western Europe embarked on Understanding the City 5
- 26. efforts to integrateanalyses of cultural production and consumption into urban theories. Sharon Zukin’s work in the 1990s, in particular, provided the theoretical armature and empirical foundation for the now-accepted claim of cultural signification as intrinsic to the economic structure of the modern city (Zukin 1991, 1995). Significant changes in capitalist accumulation – namely, the shift toward the production of services and spectacle – have placed the analysis of symbols and imagery to the fore of studies of urban development (see King 1996). New “cultural” fields that have since been instituted in the academy include “tourism/leisure studies” and “consumption studies,” but American urban- ists have largely approached such studies in the context of political economic considerations. Mark Gottdiener, for example, has developed his notion of “theming” from European and American theories of semiotics and argues that the deployment of cultural forms as place themes is a development strat- egy in an era of increasing economic competition between cities (Gottdiener 1997). Recent work in a similar vein argues that prevailing discourses and representations about the city are intrinsic to the political economy of urban change, serving as key sources of legitimation and social control over processes such as community abandonment and redevelopment (Mele 2000; Reichl 1999). Such approaches are evidence of considerable synthesis. As Kian Tajbakhsh notes, they nudge political economic approaches a significant step beyond the orthodoxy of Marxism, especially with respect to the theorization of culture (2001: 20–5). Within such work, the challenge has been to incor- porate newer understandings of the symbolic and the cultural without doing away with the traditional focus on the state, class, and urban accumulation. Drawing on poststructuralist theories, it is increasingly apparent that the forms of discourse used to describe, analyze, and construct the city are central to social, cultural, political, and economic processes that produce the city and occur within it. Although material processes, such as the development of the urban built environment and the effects on urban employment, are not ignored, the analytical focus is shifted to the production and interpretation of their meanings. Tactics deployed within the real estate industry, including skillful use of language and the use of symbols to evoke particularly desirable themes, require textual and semiotic analyses. Yet the implications of these symbolic manipulations for material practices within the city are quite clear. The embrace of the symbolic and discursive within urban studies has, as one would expect, moved beyond reference to political economic implications. The urban imaginary has become viewed as a constitutive element in the social production of the city. Within such conceptualizations, the built form of the city and the interpretive schemas of different social groups are in active engagement. Individuals and social groups make sense of and experience the places where they shop, socialize, and live, thereby shaping and being shaped 6 John Eade and Christopher Mele
- 27. by past, present,and future urban environments. These imaginings are as diverse and manifold as the social groups inhabiting the city. The ability of certain powerful urban stakeholders (e.g., planners, state bureaucrats, devel- opers, and other city builders) to “realize” their notions of the city over others is not denied. Nonetheless, the focus upon the imaginary illuminates the mul- tiplicity of experience and as such downplays any one notion of the city as defining or overly influencing all others. The imaginary, then, acts and is acted upon through the production of the city. James Donald has problematized the relationship between the physical and the imaginary – between the vast arrays of city structures and their mean- ingful articulation in the everyday lives of city dwellers. He shifts toward the subjective experience of the city. Consciousness, memory, and processes of imagination rise to the fore of analysis. Consequently, his approach eschews a linear, causal connection between structure, experience, and action and embraces instead contingent and opaque relations. The city, as Donald writes, is understood as “a historically specific mode of seeing” (1999: 92), narrated and described and represented by different sets of actors with corresponding interests. These imaginings and other experiential processes have conse- quences for the type of social, economic, and cultural practices and structures that occur within the city and vice versa. Novels, cinema, and other mass media forms mediate these interrelationships between structure and experience. The Indeterminacy of the Social As explained earlier, urban studies’ approaches in the critical political economy tradition have capably absorbed an analysis of cultural forms into a theory of social production of space. While clearly these approaches were concerned with the city as a force that shapes the everyday lives of urban dwellers, their main intent was to add much-needed complexity to an under- standing of the structural forces that produce the city itself. An expansive notion of cultural processes – one that includes a broad range of identities and subjectivities in addition to class – was not a central epistemological concern but was viewed as a contemporary or postmodern condition ema- nating from materialist conditions (see Harvey 1989). There were important and early efforts among urban theorists to account for new forms of social difference and identity within the political economic paradigm. Katznelson, in Marxism and the City (1993), sought to explain the emergence of new forms of group identities (ethnicity, race, territory) not by moving beyond Marxism but pushing and stretching the theoretical frame- work to include these new realities. Castells, particularly in The City and the Grassroots (1983), sought to incorporate new forms of social identities (other Understanding the City 7
- 28. than class) bygoing even further and moving beyond conventional Marxist frameworks, through an emphasis on consumption processes and their role in the reproduction of labor. The limitations of these approaches within political economy were laid bare in feminist theoretical advances, which questioned the emphasis placed on economic factors, especially by class-based theories. Among other things, feminist theories of difference have pointed toward the inadequacy of efforts to “capture” or fix the complexity of social life, to freeze various aspects of identity and subjectivity into categories, and the inability to allow for inter- sections, fluidity, and hybridity of social relations. Approaches wedded to a structuralist epistemology exclude subjective processes of becoming (what we are calling social indeterminacy) from understandings of the social and the cultural. Feminist theories draw our attention to the ways in which knowledge about the city and our study of that knowledge is created by discourses that reflect gendered power relations. The privileged representation of the city as site of, and for, capitalist reproduction is criticized as both narrow and ex- cluding (see Deutsche 1991). Feminist critiques of the political economy of gentrification, for example, challenged the exclusive focus on the class rela- tions in urban restructuring, arguing that it renders silent (and therefore insignificant) the powerful gender dimension inherent in the production and consumption of the city. Along with feminist theory, postcolonial perspectives, which we address more fully in the following section, have questioned the normative assump- tions implicit within political economy analysis and critiqued essentialized conceptions of class, race, gender, and sexuality. Their attention to the multiple and complex constitution of subjectivities seeks to challenge more conventional analyses of urban enclaves, “ghettoes,” local communities, and the First World/Third World dichotomy. Work in this vein has called atten- tion to the connections between social difference (defined both in its repre- sentational forms and in terms of subjectivity formation) and spatial practices. While retaining interest in the material consequences of these practices, these works tend to focus on revealing the larger power dynamics that the deploy- ment of representations tap into, such as marginalization and exploitation. Cities, then, may be seen as the materialization of practices which are not simply political economic but also cultural. Likewise, spatial forms and the design of the built environment have considerable influence upon the consti- tution of social identities and subjectivities – the city as productive. Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Globalization Analytical interest in social difference and cultural heterogeneity has intensi- fied as scholars whose work intersects or overlaps with postcolonial and 8 John Eade and Christopher Mele
- 29. transnational studies haveturned their gaze to the study of the city. Postcolonial and transnational studies have had a profound influence upon contemporary urban studies, prompting a critical interrogation of many of the field’s earlier theoretical assumptions. Postcolonialism and trans- nationalism represent a multiplicity of disciplinary focuses and related epistemologies and methodologies. Nonetheless, there are certain premises which these approaches share and which have a direct bearing on the study of the city. Both perspectives point toward the narrative of a privileged center infused in representations of the West and its relations to the “other” and the system of binaries that have historically categorized and essentialized subjects. Bhabha’s Nation and Narration (1990), for example, dismantles and unmasks the constitution of the colonized world by the West – concep- tions which define the Third World as unidimensional and naturally subordinate. Such unmasking is part of a larger project of recognizing how given truths (nations, authorities, etc.) have been produced historically and how categories of social difference and identity have been accorded the appearance of stability and permanence. Both postcolonial and transnational studies call for analyses which destabilize (oversimplified) binaries and examine interstitial, in-between (borders) and overlapping (hybrid) spaces where subjectivities and identities are negotiated. Race, gender, sexuality, and class, for example, do not exist as discrete categories in isolation but come into being through conflict and negotiation with each other. Arjun Appadurai’s ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes, for example, con- stitute nonhierarchical realms of experience which reflect the complex every- day realities of tourists, refugees, exiles, and immigrants, among others (Appadurai 1990). This focus on the terrain of intersubjectivity and experience has direct implications for urban analysis outside the political economy tradition. There has been considerable recent interest in the stranger as a primary feature of urban society, prompting scholars to return to the works of Georg Simmel. Simmel’s work on the stranger is relevant to the analysis of diaspora and other indeterminacies of the global migrant experience – of mobility, shifting frames of reference, and not belonging. Recent discussions of postcolonial- ism raise the issue of the relevance of 1970s and 1980s Weberian analyses of British urban conflicts in the context of both race and ethnicity, for example (see Rex and Moore 1967; Rex and Tomlinson 1979), as well as non-Marxist empirical analyses of urban politics and policy. The concern with identity, borders, and hybridity in postcolonial condi- tions has led some scholars to analyze the social and cultural dimensions of globalization. They have focused on so-called global cities, where they have placed less emphasis on the political economic dimensions of flows and more on the impact (and feedback) on social and cultural relations at the local level. Understanding the City 9
- 30. The effect isa greater understanding of how globalization is locally expressed – not as an unambiguous effect of structural processes of globalization but as experienced and understood by various social groups within the city. The potential for further synthesis here is promising, because such approaches concede the importance of political economic theories of globalization and yet embrace the indeterminacy of the social. Flows of information, capital, and people heighten the indeterminacy of social relations at the local level. Structural processes, such as accumulation, which further material in- equalities, are no less apparent, but the range of meanings attached to such processes and the experiences of them by different social groups resist simplistic categorization. Instead, meaning and experience at the local level are increasingly mediated by transnational and global processes, further compounding the complexity of social relations (community organizing and resistance, attachments to neighborhood, the construction of diasporic com- munities, etc.) within the city. Local, bounded physical spaces of neighbor- hoods are not necessarily the spatial referent for new forms of identity and the multiplicity of social identities. For transnational migrants, for example, notions of home and community are inclusive of multiple and often con- tradictory spaces and are fused from an array of imaginations, personal memories, and mediated representations. So far this complex fusion has been explored by relatively few urban schol- ars. The rich empirical research on transnationalism, supported by national funding in both the United States and Britain, has largely taken the city as the background to discussion of social and cultural processes among migrant communities. Many studies of Britain’s “ethnic minorities,” for example, are still framed within an anthropological tradition which affirms the determin- ing role of kinship and marriage regulations, related to religious practices, in sustaining communal bonds across national borders (see Ballard 1994; Werbner 1997; Shaw 2001). The limitations of this approach have been exposed by Brah (1996), Anthias (1998), and Eade (2000), for example, as well as by an emerging cohort of urbanists (Alexander 1996; Sharma et al. 1996; Fortier 2000) who have been inspired by the work of Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, in particular. Critical work has also been developed by a group of scholars at Roehampton in the southwestern suburbs of the global city – London. Their blend of the- oretical and empirical work was the basis for Living the Global City (Eade 1997), where they sought to locate global flows within the context of the social. M. P. Smith (2000 and chapter 6 in this volume) takes forward their empha- sis on the social, while the work of Fincher and Jacobs (1998 and, with Ander- son, chapter 2 in this volume) and Marcuse’s critique of Castells (see chapter 7 below) also develop this area in quite different ways. 10 John Eade and Christopher Mele
- 31. Toward Understanding theCity The more recent emphasis in critical social theory on identities and differ- ence has problematized the assumption within political economy approaches that structural processes order – in ways both obvious and unambiguous – social relations and conditions within the contemporary city. Influenced by feminist and poststructuralist theories, the focus upon the construction of social difference demands an examination of the social world from varied per- spectives of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other identifying social attach- ments in which social positions do not reflect a stable range of interests. There are always practices and related identities that exist outside the gaze of social structure, that exist “in the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of proprietary powers” (de Certeau 1984: 37). Recent work on the complex ways in which social difference, subjectivities, and identities are constituted and mediated problematize positivist-oriented efforts to demonstrate patterns of (structural) cause and (social) effect. The wide range of different subject positions within and among social groups who inhabit the city can never be bundled together as singular, all-inclusive categories that operate simply in relation to social structures. Following, it becomes necessary within an analysis of the city to map subjects (in short, to specify their formations and linkages to structural processes). These approaches suggest identities are terrains in which various social processes (in addition to economics) are imprinted (if temporarily) in complex, over- lapping patterns (Fincher and Jacobs 1998; Featherstone and Lash 1999; Yon 2000). In the problematizing of the constitution of subjectivity, the city – as site of multiple differences – becomes pivotal as the location where identities are constituted: the city transforms and is transformed by these processes. This, in turn, has led to newer and different meanings of the object of urban studies, the city itself. The city is conceived less as something found or simply “out there” and more as something constituted partially through representation and discourse and as a site of interlocking and conflicting meanings of cultural, political, and economic relations. The wholeness of the city (often presented uncomplicatedly in conventional urban studies, using geographic boundaries to demarcate and define) is viewed not only as a physical entity but also as a narrative device and as a plethora of signs and symbols infused with power relations. These newer approaches are less a critique of political economic modes of urban studies than a plea to move beyond them, to disentangle the processes of social experience and articula- tion from (the essentializing tendencies of) more materialist-oriented approaches. Understanding the City 11
- 32. About this Volume Thisvolume has been shaped around the theoretical and substantive inter- ests of people from various disciplines, who are working on urban issues around the globe. We invited people who had not only already contributed to the intersection between culturalist and political economy approaches through edited volumes and single-authored work, for example, but also those who were beginning to examine the impact of these approaches within their area of urban research. From the individual responses to our invitation a volume of six parts has emerged. After this Introduction, which comprises Part I, Part II brings together those who have mostly worked outside the confines of American urban sociology. Drawing on feminist perspectives, Anderson, Fincher, Jacobs, and Watson have made highly influential contributions to the development of cultural geography during the last twenty years. Issues of urban social justice in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa have been a major theme of D. M. Smith’s work, while Body-Gendrot has focused on urban violence in both the United States and Western Europe. The opening chapter in Part II carefully explores the emergence of a middle ground between political economy and the cultural turn. The influ- ence of the cultural turn on their approach is evident as Ruth Fincher, Jane M. Jacobs, and Kay Anderson begin by discussing the ways in which the “study of cities produces scripts of their coming into being, their logics and their inhabitants.” Difference-directed rescriptings have “opened out impor- tant new questions that enhance our understandings of cities, implore us to pursue new trajectories of inquiry, and offer invigorated scope for construct- ing more just cities.” These rescriptings reveal the limitations of three highly influential contemporary scripts – global city analyses, the “un-natural” city, and the “disorderly” city. Yet their analysis of difference leads them toward, rather than away from, the concerns of political economy. They conclude that “difference perspec- tives protect against indifference to the subtle and diverse ways that injustice can be perpetuated” and provide the political means to uncover varied dis- criminations. These perspectives help “define new ways to be politically effec- tive, as well as producing significant situated knowledges.” In chapter 3 Sophie Watson emphasizes the cultural turn’s critique of early political economy approaches toward the public city. She examines the ways in which “the ‘public’ in all its various guises has been subject to a series of radical transformations during the last two decades.” The attempt by Ortho- dox Jews in north London to establish an eruv is examined to support her argu- ment that the “new approaches have opened up, or in some cases excavated, different terrains which extend the boundaries of what it means to construct 12 John Eade and Christopher Mele
- 33. a more fullydemocratic public realm.” The case study reveals that “how to live difference in the city, especially when it is awkward to address rather than easy to celebrate the exotic, has to be a central focus of urban research and action over the following decades.” Moreover, the power of symbolic space is revealed through a clash between the rational city of planning discourse and a symbolic city constructed through an ancient Jewish text. The cultural turn produces new understandings of the material inequalities and divisions highlighted by earlier political economy approaches. A more just city can be created through the new ways of thinking about the public city and public space. The issues involved in creating a more just city are also investigated by David M. Smith. Focusing on the city and urbanization in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, he reviews the debate about social justice and the city during the last thirty years. He draws on such influential figures as Harvey, Rawls, Walzer, and Young, as well as making vivid use of his own experience and fieldnotes, to argue that “the challenge ahead is . . . not so much social scientific as ethical: to help devise a new theory of the good, incorporating inclusive material standards combined with an ethic of respon- sibility to the weak and vulnerable, persuasive enough to be a source of moral motivation as well as of social understanding. This would be progress in ‘urban studies.’” The theme of social justice is continued in chapter 5. Sophie Body- Gendrot considers changing views concerning urban violence from the per- spective of the criminal justice system. She outlines the development of urban violence and its causes during the 1980s and 1990s through a comparison between French and American cities. She tracks the movement toward the contemporary “politicization of the crime issue” and the role played by “politicians, the media, and public opinion spokespersons [in taking] advan- tage of a global feeling of insecurity to pursue their own strategies.” A new situation has emerged where elites are more willing to legitimate repressive policies than support preventive measures. This process is not globally uniform since it is shaped by local conditions across the United States and Europe. France and many other European countries subscribe to “social pre- vention” and reject policies articulated initially in America. Moreover, across Europe the symbolic unity of civic life is “often more valued than the expres- sion of differences,” and urban violence is seen as avoidable. She ends on a more upbeat note than David M. Smith, calling for a “new urban literature” which can tell us “the good news” – presumably, where our understanding of urban violence in America can draw on European traditions rather than the other way round. In Part III we bring together three American urbanists who advance a critique of highly influential contemporary perspectives in order to propose future directions for research. Michael Peter Smith sets out an urban research Understanding the City 13
- 34. agenda for thetwenty-first century through a theorizing of the local and global. He challenges two approaches: (1) understanding locality as an embed- ded community where personal meanings, cultural values, and “traditional ways of life are enunciated and lived,” and (2) where the global replaces the urban “as a metaphor for the central outside threat to the primary social ties binding communities.” He questions both the structuralist “grand narratives of macro-social development” advanced by Harvey and Castells, for example, and the postmodern celebration of local ethnography, “partial truths,” and the postcolonial subject. Through a reimagination of the politics of everyday life, Smith moves toward “a transnationalized mode of ethnographic practice.” Setting out the deficiencies of various perspectives, he argues for a careful analysis of “the intricacy involved in sorting out the social interactions and processes at mul- tiple spatial scales that constitute the complex politics of place-making under contemporary conditions of transnational interconnectivity.” Smith wants to move beyond not only the structuralist formulations of such leading urban- ists as Harvey and Castells, but also the postmodern cultural studies and the study of the politics of everyday life. He advocates an analysis of “transna- tional urbanism” where the social is reintroduced and where the focus is on “power relations and meaning-making practices.” We then move to Peter Marcuse’s critique of Castells’s recent work on the “information age” which has had such a deep impact on the issues discussed by Michael Peter Smith. Marcuse argues that Castells has abandoned his neo-Marxist stance of the late 1960s and 1970s as he has been caught up in the contemporary enthusiasm for the study of the information age and glob- alization. Although he eagerly acknowledges Castells’s vital contribution to urban studies over the last four decades, Marcuse regards his more recent publications as an implicit depoliticization where power and conflict disap- pear, classes play a subordinate role, and capitalism is ambiguously conflated with globalization. Powerful “groupings, actors and agents,” shaping con- temporary globalization, are replaced by a highly generalized “we” who can only hope to persuade “those in power” to respond to “our” interests. Castells remains committed to changing society but in ways which suppress the polit- ical. Marcuse’s critique leaves us with a challenge – how to reformulate polit- ical economic perspectives in ways which embrace the ambiguous complexity of transnational linkages, global flows of capital, goods, information, and people, and local transformations where class solidarities decline in the face of fragmentary identity movements. The cultural turn during the 1990s has been deeply influenced by geog- raphers working at the University of California’s Los Angeles campus. Ed Soja’s publications have made a major contribution to postmodern investiga- tions of space, while Soja’s colleague, Michael Dear, has outlined an agenda for cultural geography’s study of postmodern urban society in The Postmodern 14 John Eade and Christopher Mele
- 35. Urban Condition (2000).There have been some moves toward a battle of the schools, with the Chicago School’s approach toward the modern city being contrasted with its apparent successor – the LA School – and its study of Los Angeles as the archetypal, postmodern, “edge” city. Mark Gottdiener seeks to cut the LA School down to size. In an impas- sioned critique, he challenges what he sees as the media hyping of particular LA academics. More generally, he questions the promotion of Los Angeles as “the exemplary suburban auto-era city” and the attempt to replace the Chicago School. Both moves fail to take into consideration the course of history. Suburbanization characterizes all American cities while the “Chicago School paradigm has been dead and buried for decades.” The “new urban sociology,” developed across the United States since the late 1970s, has directed attention away from the “bounded, centralized city that organizes its hinterland” toward multi-centered metropolitan regions where centralized cities are absorbed “in a matrix of increasingly personal, political, and business decisions.” Indeed, some areas of the country have no centralized cities at all. Orange County, for example, is typical of areas which are “neither suburbs nor cities, yet they are fully urbanized.” Hence, for Gottdiener, Las Vegas, rather than Los Angeles, exemplifies the multi-centered metro- politan region, as well as the decentered, postmodern cultural forces high- lighted by Soja and Dear. Having said this, Gottdiener also claims that we must move beyond looking at particular cities as exemplary; rather, research needs to examine “the processes that have worked and reworked settlement space.” The contributors to Part II indicate the immense influence exercised by American urbanists upon research around the globe. The Chicago School and its later rivals have made a deep impact upon debates concerning urban structures and processes in Europe, the Pacific Rim, and the Middle East, for example. In Part IV we are able to follow these debates, as well as track research pursuing different directions, largely in response to particular his- torical, political, and ideological conditions. We want especially to draw atten- tion to socialist and postcolonial perspectives, which resist American preoccupations and developmental models based on the assumption that – put crudely – “what America does today the rest of the world will do tomorrow.” Chris Pickvance’s contribution to the “new urban sociology” has already been acknowledged by contributors to the previous sections. Here he reviews research undertaken in Central and Eastern Europe “as a context for theo- rizing about state socialism and post-socialism, and their associated urban patterns.” During the 1970s state socialism and urban development became a central theme of international urban sociological debates while research focused on “the pattern of urban development, the allocation of housing, and urban spatial patterns.” Understanding the City 15
- 36. International models ofindustrialization and modernization led to analy- ses of the degrees to which Central and Eastern European societies were underurbanized. A generic pattern was identified which was “directly attrib- utable to state socialism in its forced growth phase” and which could be applied beyond the region to other state socialist societies and China in particular. Housing allocation was another major theme and a third research question focused on “whether there was a specifically socialist residential social pattern.” Since 1989 the combination of political and economic changes in Central and Eastern European has “provided a unique natural experiment.” Rapid transformation challenged the explanatory capacities of social scientists. Pick- vance contends that reliance on the “ubiquitous concept of ‘transition’ has concealed the fact that social science as a whole did not have ready a set of theories capable of understanding the process of macroscopic change” taking place across the region. Although theories of transition have provided limited explanatory purchase, “it remains to be seen” whether the application of “culturally based theories . . . will prove to have a parallel capacity for a com- parative understanding of the questions they address.” In the next chapter in Part IV we move to China. Dorothy J. Solinger and Kam Wing Chan claim that urban research here “has not been driven by trends and fads in scholarship so much as it has been shaped by the nature of China itself as fashioned by the state (and later the market), and by the momentous shifts the nation has weathered because of political decisions.” The study of Chinese urban processes by Western social scientists has been patchy. Economic geographers and planners have been more in evidence than anthropologists, for example, while cultural issues have only recently been examined. This situation is explained in terms of local exigencies where “three decades of fairly idiosyncratic socialist ideology and practices in China have made a big difference.” The late arrival of cultural studies, for example, is partly “a function of the homogeneous nature of Chinese life, at least up until the early 1980s,” and urban studies only emerged as a substantial subject during the 1980s and 1990s. The trends reviewed by Solinger and Chan lead them to suggest two future directions for urban research in China. One locates the country along the same path trodden by “other industrializing, modernizing societies (such as Taiwan),” while the other suggests a much more bumpy journey charac- terized by conflict and serious social problems. Researchers will need to “develop theories that encompass and interrelate the new urban vitality, as citizens thrive on the new consumption, along with the various types of social breakdowns that accompany the evisceration of past and ruptured solidarities.” The contributors so far have written from the perspective of sociology, planning, criminology, and geography. J. S. Eades (not related to John Eade) 16 John Eade and Christopher Mele
- 37. introduces an anthropologicalapproach in his survey of urban developments across East and Southeast Asia. He moves quickly from such well-established themes as the contrast between rural and urban society, aging, labor, educa- tion, and the family to more recent research, especially consumption, popular culture, and the environment. Analyses of how the global becomes local through consumption, personal choice, and the media have been comple- mented by research into the political economy of high-speed growth. The interweaving of consumption and the political economy can be seen most strikingly in the urban environment of eastern Asia. The “rich empirical diversity in urban life,” especially in Japan, leads Eades to explore changing theoretical interpretations and Castells’s contribution in particular. His discussion of Castells’s recent publications concerning the information age leads toward Gottdiener’s earlier argument about Amer- ican cities – “the more advanced, informational, and globalized a society becomes, the more the divisions between town and country become blurred, and the more the concept of what constitutes the city begins to disappear.” Understanding this process has encouraged researchers to work across academic boundaries and to ground analyses of urban culture more firmly in political economy processes than many contributors to the cultural turn would like. This deconstruction ensures that there is no such thing as the “Pacific Asian city,” despite the similarities between what has been occurring in Japan and other cities across the region. Looking to the future, Eades suggests that globalization, however defined, has moved researchers toward new subjects and methodologies. The analysis of cultural processes, such as consumption, will go hand in hand with the exploration of the urban envi- ronment, leading toward a multi-faceted activism promoted through cyber- space and cybercultures. In Part V we explore the ways in which the processes outlined in the pre- vious sections operate within different urban contexts. We begin with Smriti Srinivas’s chapter on the Indian city of Bangalore, which lies at the heart of the country’s “Silicon Valley.” She wants to build on “subaltern histories of the sociological discipline” so that she can advance beyond political economy and culturalist approaches. Since Indian urban sociology has been seriously hampered by the disconnection between sociology and history, Srinivas wants to analyze “discourses of return, ‘quest’ stories that tie institutional and per- sonal biographies together” in the context of five models of the city. These narratives are related to the “creation of new metropolitan fringes” which occupy sites “abundant with spatial and ritual memories.” Discourses of return use the languages of a “sacred quest” which are explored through a case study of the Sai Baba cult and three religious sites on the fringes of Ban- galore. Through a mnemonics of space and an analysis of embodied memory, Srinivas reveals “a reorientation within the city, recovering spatially periph- eral tracts and older axes of the city from a zone of urban amnesia, and also Understanding the City 17
- 38. using contemporaneous axesand institutional sites in other patterns of meaning.” In the process she seeks to reveal the lacunae in models of the city and stage “other possibilities of the urban tied to the inner, affective, cultural, and spiritual worlds of the subject of the metropolis.” History is also the focus of Shlomo Hasson’s investigation of urban morphology, culture, and power. In the context of Jerusalem he examines the relationship between different cultures and landscapes, the relation- ship between cultures, and the relationship between landscapes over time. Through a discussion of “urban morphology and design, cultural landscapes, political relationships between landscapes, and the factors that shape these relationships,” Hasson shows how the city’s landscape embodies three main cultures shaped by (1) religion, (2) nationalism and modernity, and (3) national conflict, consumerism, and globalism. The premodern, early, and late modern periods in Jerusalem’s history refer to specific morphologies of the city which are, in turn, related to religion, the nation-state, and a more recent consumerist society. Roads, residential areas, land-use patterns, public and private space, and the city’s outskirts are shaped by these different forces, leading Hasson to ask how the three cities of Jerusalem relate to one another today. Responses to this question take two forms – a dominant, closed-hegemonic discourse and a subordinate, open- dialogical discourse. The dominance wielded by the closed-hegemonic dis- course is explained in terms of three power systems (political, economic, and cultural), but Hasson also explores the resistance strategies adopted by Arab residents and the factional divisions among their Jewish neighbors. In this struggle the religious premodern city and the nationalist early modern city are dominated by the late modern, outer city. This dominance offers “the potential to reduce tensions and create a city that is less clannish, fanatical, less steeped in ceaseless conflict.” At the same time Hasson urges decision-makers to appreciate Jerusalem’s other cities and their unity “which lends the city its unique character and image.” Urban development depends, therefore, upon understanding and respecting each city’s “rules and resources, which crystallized during the course of history.” The final chapter in Part V examines Muslim cities in the Middle East and elsewhere in the context of civil society, social movements, and globalization. Paul Lubeck and Bryana Britts consider the future of the Muslim city where “Muslim discourses and civil society groups coalesce to launch a diverse stream of urban social movements united in their opposition to what they view as an illegitimate and failed postcolonial order.” They outline the his- torical emergence of Islamism or political Islam – a “modern urban move- ment empowered by a profound discursive shift” across society which challenges the postcolonial nation-state weakened by “neo-liberal global restructuring.” This shift is analyzed within the context of political economic 18 John Eade and Christopher Mele
- 39. structural factors, theIranian revolution, the development of Islamism in Egypt, “the contradictory positions expressed by women representing them- selves in urban public space,” as well as “the novel discursive practices of Muslim feminist groups.” The future of Muslim cities will, therefore, be deeply influenced by Islamism because “globalization, state withdrawal, and rising urban inequal- ity create a social milieu ideally suited for the efflorescence of Islamist civil society groups.” Islamists’ observance of democratic practices once they have acquired power will depend on how far their interests are included by exist- ing regimes. Urban theorists and policy-makers need to engage in dialogue with Islamist movements “and include them in their policy and planning agendas.” In Part VI we focus on three American cities (New York, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles), as well as South California’s Silicon Valley. As the other chap- ters have shown, any discussion of a particular city has to account for both its unique characteristics and the commonalities it shares with other cities. Furthermore, transnational and global processes ensure that the issues inves- tigated are not necessarily bounded by specific administrative and political structures of the city, region, or nation-state. Consequently, when Michael Indergaard comes to explore new media circuits of innovation, speculation, and urban development in New York, the urban locality is the site for a cyberspatial transformation where the global interweaves with the local. He raises a question already examined more theoretically by the contributors to Part I, in particular: “Can a just and coherent city emerge amidst a swirl of financial, cultural, and technological forces?” Indergaard shares the view of others in this volume – a critical urban theory needs to answer this question by confronting “the problem of recon- ciling material and cultural analyses.” New centers of power will be required to control and explain the relationship between real and virtual business spaces. We must rethink the assumption that “financial flows are divorced from, and antagonistic to, culture and social relations” and explore the ways in which “Silicon Alley has served as an institutional nexus for weaving together circuits and a matrix of power for making relationships, identities, and spaces.” Lower Manhattan illustrates how entrepreneurs have sought to eliminate boundaries between virtual and real worlds. They have broken New York’s traditional role as a supplier of venture capital to other parts of the country by organizing district circuits through social networks. Rather than global capital flows shaping local fortunes, Silicon Alley actors were able to connect “the dot.com segment to the bull market.” New media stock options and images formed a currency which led to a real estate boom in Manhattan which threatened to displace “not just individual firms but entire sectors” in Understanding the City 19
- 40. the older economy– a threat alleviated by the Spring 2000 crash. However, images of Silicon Alley are employed by real estate developers as the focus shifts to the Times Square area. Venture capitalists and real estate developers have “mobilized power through their ability to create and link circuits, and convert ‘currencies.’” As for the question of social justice, imagined cyberspace has played a key role “in transforming real space and in creating new forms of inequality.” City government has encouraged this process through supporting a “development that is neither inclusive nor sustainable” and a strategy which promotes the “hypergrowth of a new monoculture in the short term, but depletes the city’s rich milieu.” The relationship between cultural processes and political economy is also the principal theme of Alexander J. Reichl’s study of sex, political economy, and public space. He locates the cultural turn within “a long tradition of drawing on the urban landscape as a blueprint to the circuitry of power.” Culture does not simply provide “ideological support for the capitalist order” but plays a crucial role in producing economic wealth. However, more clarity is required concerning “how new cultural forms of urban development might serve as an instrument of political power.” Recent political developments in the United States make it even more important to understand “the impact of spatial practices on democratic political life.” Reichl pursues this argument through an empirical study of “sex-related adult entertainment” in Las Vegas and New York. Sexual practices promise new insights into the relationship between culture and urban political economy because they are a contested terrain. A prominent feature of this contestation in both cities is the institutional “desire to control public space.” This conflict is expressed through different political strategies in the two cities: “Adult entertainment circulated differently into the symbolic representations of each city, reinforcing the seductive appeal of Las Vegas and the percep- tions of disorder and decline in New York.” Reichl concludes his chapter by linking his empirical analysis to theories concerning the political value of public space. This space should be under- stood as a “forum for open political expression” where sex-related businesses, for example, should be governed by standards concerning the use of that space. Reliance should be placed on local political action rather than zoning laws. Democratic, First Amendment public space “presupposes nothing about who should be present or what they should be ‘saying’; but it does presuppose a limited degree of corporate or state control, such as that exercised by the casinos of Las Vegas or the public–private authorities in charge of Times Square. Above all, a valuable public space must be a place of possibility.” Leonard Nevarez also wants to engage the poststructural (cultural) turn through his training as an urban political economist. He focuses on reassess- 20 John Eade and Christopher Mele
- 41. ing corporate elitesin the light of two developments: (1) the challenge pre- sented by sociospatial and poststructural perspectives to assumptions con- cerning urban elites and (2) “recent changes in corporate organization associated with the new economy.” Nevarez pursues his reassessment through a discussion of how the elite concept has been used since the 1960s. The recent collapse of cohesive urban elites with the expansion of rootless capital and its management has led scholars to question “whether urban agency, urban politics, and, implicitly, urban elites matter any more.” Yet although poststructuralist critiques appear to “undermine the theoretical value of the urban elite concept as constructed by urban political economy,” they also create a theoretical space where urban elites as objects, not subjects, of rep- resentation can be investigated. The role of new economy executives can still be analyzed through an analytical framework which “infuses the urban polit- ical economy problematic of urban elites with the poststructural focus on local meaning.” Empirically, the chapter rests on a study of new economy executives, busi- ness leaders, and political activists in Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo. The executives can be described as ambiguous and inarticulate urban elites “because their local interests are illegible to themselves and to others.” A new structural mechanism has emerged – “the capacities of labor markets to organize production and capital investment in new economy sectors” – which “gives elite workers a political economic stake in the quality of life district different from the conventional corporate interest in ‘pro- business’ social relations.” Because these workers are unaware of this mech- anism, a crisis has emerged in the representation of their local interests to both themselves and others, ensuring that their political future is unclear. We remain in California for the last chapter by Jan Lin. He investigates the relationship between mass culture, symbolic sites, and urban redevelop- ment in Hollywood. Like others in this volume, Lin draws on the “new urban sociology,” especially the critical cultural perspective shaped by Sharon Zukin and Mark Gottdiener, in particular, and its examination of “how metro- politan fortunes under postindustrialism are increasingly derived from the fabrication of thematic sites and symbols.” Hollywood provides Lin with an analytical window through which he can “augment our understanding of Los Angeles as a world city, while contributing to our theoretical and empirical understanding of the connections between globalization, consumption, and urban sociology.” An outline of the historical development of Hollywood as a machine of mass cultural production leads to a discussion of dream palaces, mass spec- tacle, and urban iconography. Recent redevelopment schemes center around the proposal to build a $388 million complex at the intersection of Holly- wood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, which would greatly encourage tourism. The proposal was challenged by local residents and businesses on Understanding the City 21
- 42. environmental grounds, aswell as by those who “drew attention to the host of social problems besetting the low-income population of Hollywood.” Bibliography Alexander, C. 1996: The Art of Being Black. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Anthias, F. 1998: Evaluating “diaspora”: beyond ethnicity? Sociology 32 (3): 557–80. Appadurai, A. 1990: Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. In M. Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity. London: Sage. Ballard, R. (ed.) 1994: Desh Pardesh: The South Asian Presence in Britain. London: Hurst. Bhabha, H. (ed.) 1990: Nation and Narration. New York: Routledge. Brah, A. 1996: Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London and New York: Routledge. Castells, M. 1983: The City and the Grassroots. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dear, M. 2000: The Postmodern Urban Condition. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell. De Certeau, M. 1984: The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deutsche, R. 1991: Boys’ town. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 9: 5–30. Donald, J. 1999: Imagining the Modern City. London: Athlone Press. Eade, J. (ed.) 1997: Living the Global City: Globalization as Local Process. London and New York: Routledge. ——2000: Placing London: From Imperial Capital to Global City. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. ——and Mele, C. 1998: Global margins: the Lower East Side of New York and the East End of London. Rising East 3 (1): 52–73. Featherstone, M. and Lash, S. 1999: Introduction. In M. Featherstone and S. Lash (eds.), Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World. London: Sage. Fincher, R. and Jacobs, J. M. (eds.) 1998: Cities of Difference. New York and London: Guilford Press. Fortier, A.-M. 2000: Migrant Belongings: Memory, Space, Identity. Oxford and New York: Berg. Gottdiener, M. 1997: The Theming of America: Dreams, Visions, and Commercial Spaces. Westview Press. Harvey, D. 1989: The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Katznelson, I. 1993: Marxism and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. King, A. D. 1996: Introduction: cities, texts, and paradigms. In A. D. King (ed.), Re-Presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital, and Culture in the Twenty-first-century Metropolis. New York: New York University Press, 1–22. Massey, D. 1994: Space, Place, and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mele, C. 2000: Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Reichl, A. J. 1999: Reconstructing Times Square: Politics and Culture in Urban Development. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 22 John Eade and Christopher Mele
- 43. Rex, J. andMoore, R. 1967: Race, Community and Conflict. London: Oxford University Press. ——and Tomlinson, S. 1979: Colonial Immigrants in a British City: A Class Analysis. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Sharma, S. et al. (eds.) 1996: Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music. London and New Jersey: Zed Press. Shaw, A. 2001: Kinship, cultural preference and immigration: consanguineous mar- riage among the Pakistanis. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7 (2): 315–34. Smith, M. P. 2000: Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell. Tajbakhsh, K. 2001: The Promise of the City: Space, Identity, and Politics in Contemporary Social Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Werbner, P. 1997: Essentialising essentialism, essentialising silence: ambivalence and multiplicity in the constructions of racism and ethnicity. In P. Werbner and T. Modood (eds.), Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-cultural Identities and the Politics of Antiracism. London and New Jersey: Zed Books. Yon, D. 2000: Elusive Culture: Schooling, Race and Identity in Global Times. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Zukin, S. 1991: Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——1995: The Cultures of Cities. Oxford: Blackwell. Understanding the City 23
- 44. Part II A MiddleGround? Difference, Social Justice, and the City 2 Rescripting Cities with Difference 27 Ruth Fincher, Jane M. Jacobs, and Kay Anderson 3 The Public City 49 Sophie Watson 4 Social Justice and the South African City 66 David M. Smith 5 The Dangerous Others: Changing Views on Urban Risks and Violence in France and the United States 82 Sophie Body-Gendrot
- 45. 2 Rescripting Cities withDifference Ruth Fincher, Jane M. Jacobs, and Kay Anderson The study of cities produces scripts of their coming into being, their logics, and their inhabitants. These urban explanations are at the same time posi- tioned narratives that work to legitimate or naturalize particular interpreta- tions of urban events, calling for the collection of data in certain ways to bolster this understanding. The interdiscipline of urban studies has hosted an array of these scripts. They have coexisted, influencing each other and yet retaining their standpoints. Our use of the term “script” in this chapter refers, then, to the ways in which cities are subject to certain explanatory modes that bring different aspects of urbanism and urbanization into view at the expense of other cities, other lives, and other processes. For example, in the 1970s and 1980s, political economy perspectives on the city provided a broad and sophisticated framework for many in urban studies, who used it to form persuasive analyses of power and class, and to establish norms about what was progressive and regressive in urban change. In the 1990s, by contrast, urban studies came under the influence of various theories of difference emanating from feminist and postcolonial perspectives and queer theory. As Tony King (1996: 2) notes, explanations of urbanism and urbanization that had become the “privileged territory” of certain subsets of social science now share that terrain with a range of urban commentaries constituted by way of quite different categories of knowledge and disciplinary concerns. To this diversification of explanatory perspectives is added the dis- tinctive scripts produced by “different genders, ethnicities, ideologies, races, classes, sexual orientations, nationalities.” These brought into view the “cul- tural logics” of urbanism and new sensitivity to the axes of difference that contribute to disadvantage. More challengingly, they “read” the city not in terms of explanatory processes but in terms of surface effects, turning the city into a “text,” a semiotic space shaped by struggles over meaning and signifi- cation. Within what is itself a diverse set of rescriptings, it is not surprising that some urbanists have viewed theories of difference as destabilizing the progressive certainties and the reforming intent of urban studies grounded in
- 46. a radical politicaleconomy. Yet this cacophony of difference-directed rescript- ings has also opened out important new questions that enhance our under- standings of cities, implore us to pursue new trajectories of inquiry, and offer invigorated scope for constructing more just cities. The ways in which theories of difference have contributed to bringing these other city scripts into view is the specific focus of this chapter. Situated Scripts All explanatory representations of cities, despite claims about their universal applicability, are in fact always situated knowledges. This contradiction is nowhere more clearly expressed than in the case of the Chicago School of urban sociologists. Often treated as a universal spatial typology of the city, their famous concentric circle model was constructed from very specific field studies of a particular place and time. Specifically, their models of racialized “ghetto” formation and stages of “invasion” and “succession” drew upon Chicago in the 1920s. This was a time when African Americans and others were migrating in great numbers to the northern and eastern cities of the United States, a migration understood to be causing “disturbances” to the healthy “metabolism” of the city (Duncan 1996: 257). On the one hand, the model was an attempt to account objectively and scientifically for the logic of change in cities. But, on the other, it was produced from anxieties about urban disorder and dysfunction, those anxieties resulting from specific new experi- ences of cohabiting with racialized difference. In this sense, the model had embedded in it a set of normative ideas about proper urban living and appro- priate (i.e., manageable) urban subjectivities (Jacobs and Fincher 1998: 6). So a historically and geographically specific moral stance in relation to urban life – and one “generated inductively” from detailed observations of the “labo- ratory” called Chicago – was presumed to apply to “any town or city” (Burgess [1925] 1967: 50, quoted in Duncan 1996: 257). This is a classic example of what Rob Shields (1996: 229) described as the way such representations (and especially those valorized by the authority of science) come to “replace or stand in for the city.” As he (and the Chicago model) so graphically reminds us, such representations can become “treacherous metaphors, summarizing the complexity of the city in an elegant model.” The universal claims of the Chicago model are an easy target for chal- lengers. Not least, the “truth claims” of such abstracted models challenge our commonsense notion of how applicable they really might be to other cities. There is a more recent example of this type of synecdoche, whereby the expe- riences of one place are expected to stand for the experiences of all cities. Nowhere is such a bold claim more apparent than in the emergence of the “Los Angeles School” (Dear 2000: 10). It is certain that there is a large body 28 Ruth Fincher, Jane M. Jacobs, and Kay Anderson
- 47. of scholarship onthe patterns of growth, urban forms, lifestyle choices, eco- nomic restructurings, technological innovations, and social conditions of Los Angeles and its surrounds. By volume of output alone, it is quite reasonable for scholars of LA urbanism to claim for their city and their scripts a “para- digmatic” status (Soja 1989: 221). The claim that this is the city within which all contemporary urban logics are embodied was greatly advanced when the renowned urban commentator, Mike Davis, put pen to paper in the 1990s and doodled his own LA version of the Chicago concentric circle model. In redrawing the Chicago model with LA’s condition of “fear,” much of what that model stood for was challenged, albeit not for the first time. If Davis’s model was intended to query the applicability of the Burgess one, then it did so very belatedly, arriving after decades of critical research and alternate model-making. Davis’s rescripting of the Chicago model was probably a simple borrowing of an existing urban model of iconographic status. The effects of that borrowing, and the epistemological aspirations it stood for, are evidenced in the kind of claims made by contemporary schol- ars of LA. Although few have offered an alternate schematic model, Dear’s “Keno capitalism” model (2000: 157–8) being an exception, many claim that the processes evidenced in LA are symptomatic of urbanisms worldwide. All this claim-making is made in and through the logics of postmodernism, such that the will to script a “paradigmatic city” sits, albeit uncomfortably, along- side a political and theoretical commitment to heterodoxies of all kinds. One of the problems that claimants of the LA School have had with pre- decessors like the “Chicago model” is the way in which they cast the condi- tions of cities like Los Angeles as quirky “exceptions” to a set of urbanistic “rules” derived from elsewhere (Dear 2000: 10). Yet it is true that all urban scripts are, in various ways, the products of “exceptional” circumstances. The LA School is a case in point. It is itself an outcome of a peculiar convergence of urban conditions, scholars, funding opportunities, and theoretical tradi- tions. Of course, not all urban scripts or their script-makers seek to, or can, claim such authority, nor can they rely on such conducive conditions. Not least, the formation of both academic and pragmatic urban studies scripts is often influenced by structures of governance that may encourage or discour- age certain forms of knowledge about cities. The urban rescriptings of particular interest to us in this chapter present a “difference perspective,” delivered by way of a variety of theoretical openings, for example, feminism, queer theory, poststructuralism, and post- colonialism. Framed by a “difference perspective,” explanations of urban processes and city lives have proceeded with a careful sensitivity to diversity of experiences and subtle differentials of power. In part, this rescripting has brought into view certain category groups whose experiences of and circum- stances within cities had previously been relegated to the margins, or con- strued only in terms of deviations from standardized norms or generalized Rescripting Cities with Difference 29
- 48. patterns. Furthermore, throughthis rescripting new questions have been raised of many of the mainstream concerns of urban studies such as processes of urbanization, and the distribution of services and amenity. Under the influ- ence of difference perspectives, cities that were previously understood in terms of undifferentiated (often global) processes or undifferentiating (hegemonic) logics came to be populated with an ever more differentiated set of urban inhabitants, each living in a world in which power relations were more complexly and contingently configured. In the two sections of this chapter to follow, we consider, first, theoretical debates being played out now, in attempts to evaluate the usefulness of dif- ference-directed perspectives. We then discuss some benefits of difference- influenced thinking about the urban, by evaluating three influential scripts about cities. These are: globalization and the world city, the city as an entity set apart from nature, and the city as disorderly and in need of social cohesion. The three scripts we have elected to interrogate in this chapter may seem unlikely in terms of the many issues and processes that preoccupy contemporary urbanists. Yet respectively they each reveal important lines of narrative inclusion and exclusion: first, which cities come to be seen (or are privileged) in our explanatory models and which are rendered invisible (marginalized); second, what is brought into view, and what is left out of view by our urban narratives; and third, what conditions are judged acceptable by them and what unacceptable. Difference in Urban Analysis – Theoretical Takes An interest in difference has helped to write new or amended scripts for urban studies. Not least, it has been a significant part of what Ed Soja (1996: 193) refers to as a “new terrain of critical urban studies.” This new terrain appeared not simply because of some epistemological imperative. Cities have changed as have the forces that structure them and the lives lived in them. As Soja notes: To continue to approach the postmodern metropolis with the same analytic frameworks and confident epistemologies that were applied to understand the capitalist city in the 1970s is now highly unlikely to provide the same powerful insights. Recognizing this, the new critical urban studies has itself become rad- ically expanded in scope, involving in the study of urbanism not just the . . . political economy . . . that dominated radical modernist approaches but a much wider range of disciplines and critical perspectives. (1996: 193) Susan Fainstein, reflecting upon differing explanatory paradigms for the urban, tackles the transformation in urban explanations from the other direc- tion. In her view the contribution of poststructuralist theory to urban studies 30 Ruth Fincher, Jane M. Jacobs, and Kay Anderson
- 49. has been “inits recognition of diverse bases of social affiliation and multiple roots of oppression” (Fainstein 1996: 26). Significantly, she notes that this viewpoint results in what she describes, somewhat skeptically, as “a venera- tion of diversity.” There are those who would see difference-sensitive rescriptings as entirely beneficial to the development of the interdisciplinary field of urban studies. Not least, they have usefully complicated our knowledge of cities. And cer- tainly one might imagine that those whose lives and circumstances were pre- viously unrecognized or misrecognized by urban explanations would be beneficiaries of this new scholarship. The work of Saskia Sassen on the “global city” is exemplary in this regard. Sassen has used difference perspec- tives to elaborate the logics by which world cities function. Her investigation of the “analytic borderlands” (Sassen 1996: 185) has brought into view gen- dered and racialized “presences that are not represented” in the dominant “facts and narratives about the economy of the city” (1996: 183). Sectors, firms, and workers, whose role in the economy of world cities had been over- looked or devalorized, have been revealed as she asks (1996: 184): “How do we construct a narrative about the city, and particularly the economy of the city, that includes rather than evicts?” Her work reminds us of lives and cultures evicted from the corporate image-making of cities. It is important not to assume any necessary relationship between differ- ence and poststructuralist explanations. Sassen, of course, has used difference as a thread by which to elaborate a political economy of the world city. Other urbanists, often those identified as poststructuralist, may use difference as a way of entering into a more cultural explanatory frame. Fainstein (1996: 27), in questioning the political potential of poststructuralist approaches to the city, argues that in this scripting “culture rather than economics becomes the root of political identity.” Fainstein’s account concludes that the political ambition of poststructuralist urbanisms is to eradicate “social subordination” and to facilitate what she refers to as “the free expression of group difference” (1996: 28). This is, she notes, a political model entirely consistent with liberal plu- ralism which gives rise only to a “weak . . . largely oppositional” political expression (1996: 29). Fainstein’s critique reiterates the radical skepticism emerging from schol- ars who are in principle sympathetic to the political and intellectual intentions of theories of difference, but concerned about perceived limits or risks to this perspective. These critiques focus primarily on the way in which certain dif- ference perspectives have replaced a politics of claims-making based on redis- tribution with one based on recognition. That is, a materially linked politics of equity seems to have lost ground to a politics of identity, and just at the moment when, as Fraser puts it, “an aggressively expanding capitalism is rad- ically exacerbating economic inequality” (2000: 108; and see Harvey 1996). In almost all cases this skepticism is influenced by a clear set of assump- tions that difference perspectives lead to an overemphasis on identity politics. Rescripting Cities with Difference 31
- 50. So, for example,explanatory scripts concerning themselves with inequity or urbanization or social polarization might be assumed to have been replaced by seemingly less analytical, and presumably less political, descriptions of the machinations of subject formation, or the violence of certain processes of subjection (of people or places), or the strategies certain identifiable groups use to reclaim their sense of complete and rightful selfhood. This kind of “radical skepticism” about difference scripts sees them as disturbing political economy – compromising its politics and the clean links of these politics to the Marxist theorization of capitalist social relations as based on class. Nancy Fraser, although “disturbed” by the consequences of the new “grammar” of difference scripts, seeks a reconciliation between the politics of recognition she sees as emerging from difference-based perspectives that use a variety of group attributes to cement identities for political strategy, and the politics of redistribution deriving from solidly class-based perspectives. Such reconciliation is necessary, she says, because of the disadvantaging out- comes that can attend moves to replace redistribution with recognition in political practice (Fraser 2000: 108). She argues that issues to do with iden- tity and recognition (what she also glosses as the “identity model” or “culture”) are in fact meaningful associates of redistribution, often “deeply imbricated with economic inequality” (2000: 109). The explicit value of Fraser’s critique of the “identity model” of difference is that it reminds us that the costs of being misrecognized or “disesteemed” are not simply compromising of one’s (“healthy”) sense of oneself or what she refers to, somewhat disparagingly, as “cultural harm” (2000: 109, 110). Misrecognition can fundamentally struc- ture a person’s material circumstances. For example, institutional judgments can work to “misrecognize” individuals by considering them of lesser status, so reducing their capacity for full social participation. Much of contemporary urban studies that is fueled by an interest in difference reveals the roots of institutionalized regimes of difference in capitalist social relations. In her case against recognition or the “identity model,” Fraser’s work con- verges with one of the significant strands in Iris Marion Young’s argument about a politics of difference. Like Fraser, Young seeks to bring a recognition politics (read “culture”) back in touch with a redistributive politics (read “polit- ical economy”). Not least, Young’s model is of particular interest to us because it comes from thinking through the matter of justice and difference in the context of the urban condition. In doing so Young rejects a schema of reform based simply on recognition. She questions the value and necessity, for just outcomes, of radically different but co-present subjects becoming “transpar- ent” to each other. Not least, she implies that such processes of recognition, while seemingly acknowledging difference, are often based on an assimila- tionist fantasy of community. In this sense Young is very serious about accept- ing that cities are constituted out of both “seen and unseen strangers” (Young 1990: 237) and that justice cannot simply await, nor can it simply be effected 32 Ruth Fincher, Jane M. Jacobs, and Kay Anderson
- 51. by, a stateof transparency produced by a process of “proper” recognition. She does not indulge the utopian fantasy that recognition needs to be based on mutual transparency or a kind of face-to-face intimacy that the intensity and scale of city life have long been unable to sustain. Of course utopian models of how highly differentiated urban populations might coexist frequently differ from actual lives lived together. As is discussed below, difference is often so difficult to negotiate that the response is willful separation, a geography of exclusion. Scholarship on gated communities, for example, has shown that new urban sociospatialities arise from an admixture of an intensified class differentiation (social polarization) and an anxious sen- sitivity on the part of the middle classes to the disturbances and threats various others are presumed to produce. Such geographies of fear are often supple- mented by another, more complex stance in relation to urban diversity. In those political conditions where there is a recognition of difference and pro- visions for those who are unfairly differentiated – we might think here of the self-consciously multicultural city – a number of aberrant reactions can arise. On the one hand, resentments can develop among those whose privilege has suddenly had to give way to the special interests of minorities. This can lead to new expressions of resentment and the development of what Neil Smith (1996) has termed the revanchist city. On the other hand, Merrifield (1996: 204) has suggested that political models that “celebrate otherness” can be subverted by a “dialectical twist” through which an “openness to unassimi- lated difference” (to use Young’s terms) spirals off toward a proliferation of exclusive or separatist claims. In this apparently free market of claims-making, questions arise: who adju- dicates the more important differences among the many differences being claimed, and, on the basis of what moral or political terrain are such adju- dications being made? In short, who manages the city of difference? Recent work on self-consciously multicultural states, for example, has suggested that this structure for inclusion does not always displace the power of those who are seen to be without “ethnicity,” that is, those who are “white” and who remain in charge of the purpose and fortunes of multicultural policy (Hage 1998; Povinelli 1998). Indeed, such inclusionary models often operate as struc- tures to stabilize certain normative notions of what difference should be and how it should be expressed. Three Contemporary Scripts about Cities Differentiating the global city Urban studies has long invested in globally scoped explanations of urbaniza- tion and universally applicable models of urban form. Wallerstein’s world Rescripting Cities with Difference 33
- 52. systems theory andits legacy of theories of globalization is foundational, par- ticularly its designation of cities as of First or Third Worlds, North or South. These theories absorbed cities across the globe into an integrated develop- mental narrative. In this narrative, cities come to be known for their place in a global urban hierarchy produced by one single force that has spatially dif- ferentiated outcomes. Cities are centered and empowered, or marginalized and dominated. Within this integrated script of urbanization certain cities and urban con- ditions presented a quandary. Those cities not fitting the processes and tra- jectories diagnosed in this explanation – usually “Third World Cities” or cities of the “South” – became cities that, quite literally, did not “make sense.” Scholarship on cities of the South or the Third World City attempted to detail such differences and provide logical alternative models. We might take as an example that proposed by Terry McGee (1967, 1989, 1991) to account for the morphology and socioeconomic development of Southeast Asian cities. His now famous desakota model proposed that the Southeast Asian urban system was a unique mix of kota (town) and desa (village or country), in which rural and urban lifestyles and economies integrated in ways not seen in First World Cities. McGee was suggesting that in Southeast Asia the city followed a distinctive trajectory of urbanization, incommensurate with that found in the First World. Such conceptually useful (or empirically real) deviations have not managed to dislodge the hold of integrated, globally scoped explanations of urbaniza- tion. Rather than losing ground to the suggestive evidence of these different urbanization logics, a globally broad explanation of urbanization has been invigorated by the newly felt intensities of globalization. For example, Rimmer and Dick (1998) have recently suggested that urban geographies of Southeast Asian cities need to move “beyond” the idea of the Third World City. They criticize explanations like that of desakota for being too differenti- ated and for having “shut out First World elements.” In their words, “global- isation has made the paradigm of the Third World City obsolete in south-east Asia” (1998: 2304). Rimmer and Dick even go so far as to suggest that the identification of an explicitly “South-east Asian” urban logic is “orientalist” (1998: 2314). It is perhaps here that we see the kind of “dialectical twist” that Merrifield implied could be associated with theoretical and political stances seeking to admit difference. In this post-orientalist adjudication of how to script the Southeast Asian city, it is simply not possible to stand outside the West. To claim difference is apparently to activate an essentialist (area studies) stereotype, to deny difference is to assume integration into what Rimmer and Dick refer to as “a single urban discourse” (1998: 2303). This double bind is most suggestive of the dangerously integrative power of current scripts about the process of urbanization. 34 Ruth Fincher, Jane M. Jacobs, and Kay Anderson
- 53. To illustrate theneed to abandon highly differentiated, area-specific scripts for Southeast Asian cities, Rimmer and Dick refer to the appearance of gated residential communities in Jakarta. In following this strategy they build on a wide body of scholarship charting the appearance of the gated community throughout cities of varying sizes and locations. The role of the gated com- munity in recent scripts of globalization and urbanization may well be an example of what Amin and Graham (1997: 416) refer to as the “problem of synecdoche” – the “methodological dangers of overgeneralizing from one or a few examples or overemphasizing particular spaces, senses of time and partial representations within the city.” There is now a vast scholarship on gated communities in cities of the First and Third World, cities of the North and of the South, and cities in the West and the East. As McLaughlin and Muncie (1999: 117) note: “[i]n an ever- increasing number of global contexts, the middle and upper classes in cities are opting . . . to live, shop, and work in privately guarded, security conscious, fortified enclaves.” The gated community, no matter its location and no matter its circumstance, acts as artifactual evidence not simply of globalization, but of globalization’s peculiar urbanistic outcomes. In the case of the gated com- munities of Jakarta, Rimmer and Dick (1998: 2309) suggest that although the “debates and literatures” on US and Southeast Asian gated communities are separate, “in reality many issues are the same.” The way in which gated communities are scripted in current urban liter- ature is a useful example of the complex and uneven ways in which theories of difference have percolated through to our understandings of urban processes. On the one hand, much of the analysis of gated communities is premised on recognizing and theorizing the kinds of fears and antagonisms that a lived experience of radical difference in urban settings can produce. Yet the gated community that is the outcome of this condition of hyperdif- ferentiation lends itself well to globally broad explanations that reduce every- thing to the same. As Teresa Caldeira (1999: 83) argues, in the context of São Paulo, “the proliferation of fortified enclaves has created a new model of spatial segregation . . . in many cities around the world.” Indeed, for Caldeira (1999: 83, 84), the story of gated communities in São Paulo offers a “carica- ture” of “a pattern of segregation that is widespread in cities throughout the world.” Here we glimpse a mirror image of the claims made for Los Angeles: São Paulo as the “paradigmatic” city. If we are alert to the very peculiar ways in which specific cities come to be connected to aspects of the global economy, then the apparent evidence of sameness can be approached differently, in a way that sees difference in that sameness. For example, detailed ethnographic accounts of gated communi- ties, like that offered by Caldeira, also suggest certain processes that are not so readily encompassed into a globally scripted model of hyperdifferentiation. Rescripting Cities with Difference 35
- 54. As Caldeira (1999:90) notes, the dream of fortified separation sought by the middle classes in São Paulo is utterly dependent upon maintaining relations with their servants, the very people they disdain. There is an obvious reso- nance between Caldeira’s account and that given by Sassen of the “under- belly” of the finance sectors of global cities. And certainly, similar observations about connections and dependencies have been noted about other examples of urban hyperseparation, such as the divided cities of South Africa. Globalization provides us with repeated instances in which some thing or some process manifests itself again and again in different times and places. As we make out scripts of urban spaces we have theoretical, repre- sentational, and political choices as to how we interpret and script those instances of sameness. In short, there are different ways of receiving what appears as repetition. And how that repetition is received and which theo- retical stance it comes to serve is no small matter, for it is itself a response to representational imperatives such as (say) assembling more proof of global convergence. Nowhere is the link between repetition and sameness more entangled than in commonsense understanding of globalization-as-homogenization – and a phenomenon like the gated community readily serves such scripts. Recent scholarship has contributed to dismantling such interpretations of globaliza- tion. Yet for all this work, there remains a tendency to assume that global- ization works against difference. Globalization may intensify certain kinds of social polarization, it may cleverly market local specificities, and it may even excite new kinds of resistant differentiations. But such difference is then con- strued skeptically as simply coming into being in and through globalization’s single and inexorable purpose. In this way the globally scoped scripts of urbanization enact their own misrecognitions, assimilating both repeated instances and expressions of difference to the same. The “unnatural” city Among the most enduring of city scripts in urban studies scholarship and policy has been the narrative placement of the space of the urban outside, or beyond, the natural world. In simple terms, the city has been portrayed as an unnatural artifact that has lifted itself “out” of nature. Here we witness the reiteration of a broader opposition in Western philosophical thought between the spheres of the sociocultural and the natural, a separation that has itself relied on the longstanding dichotomy between the human and non- human. The city, in somehow gathering together all the attributes of the human world, long since acquired an essential character and separate positioning from nature. 36 Ruth Fincher, Jane M. Jacobs, and Kay Anderson
- 55. Another Random Documenton Scribd Without Any Related Topics
- 56. house. In orderto show what it was that the accusers did admit, we must make room for Ann Putnam’s confession: “‘I desire to be humbled before God for that sad and humbling providence that befell my father’s family in the year about ’92; that I, then being in my childhood, should, by such a providence of God, be made the instrument for the accusing of several persons of a grievous crime, whereby their lives were taken away from them, whom now I have just grounds and good reason to believe they were innocent persons; and that it was a great delusion of Satan that deceived me in that sad time, whereby I justly fear that I have been instrumental with others, though ignorantly and unwittingly, to bring upon myself and this land the guilt of innocent blood; though what was said or done by me against any person I can truly and uprightly say, before God and man, I did it not out of any anger, malice, or ill-will to any person, for I had no such thing against one of them; but what I did was ignorantly, being deluded by Satan. And particularly, as I was a chief instrument of accusing Goodwife Nurse and her two sisters, I desire to lie in the dust, and to be humbled for it, in that I was a cause, with others, of so sad a calamity to them and their families; for which cause I desire to lie in the dust, and earnestly beg forgiveness of God, and from all those unto whom I have given just cause of sorrow and offense, whose relations were taken away or accused. (Signed) Ann Putnam.’ “This confession was read before the congregation, together with her relation, August 25, 1706; and she acknowledged it. “J. Green, Pastor.” (Vol. ii. p. 510.) THE TRANSITION. The most agreeable picture ever afforded by this remarkable community is that which our eyes rest on at the close of the story. One of the church members had refused to help to send Mr. Parris away, on the ground that the village had had four pastors, and had gone through worse strifes with every one; but he saw a change of scene on the advent of the fifth. The Rev. Joseph Green was
- 57. precisely the manfor the place and occasion. He was young—only two-and-twenty—and full of hope and cheerfulness, while sobered by the trials of the time. He had a wife and infants, and some private property, so that he could at once plant down a happy home among his people, without any injurious dependence on them. While exemplary in clerical duty, he encouraged an opposite tone of mind to that which had prevailed—put all the devils out of sight, promoted pigeon-shooting and fishing, and headed the young men in looking after hostile Indians. Instead of being jealous at the uprising of new churches, he went to lay the foundations, and invited the new brethren to his home. He promoted the claims of the sufferers impoverished by the recent social convulsion; he desired to bury not only delusions, but ill offices in silence; and by his hospitality he infused a cheerful social spirit into his stricken people. The very business of “seating” the congregation was so managed under his ministry as that members of the sinning and suffering families— members not in too direct an antagonism—were brought together for prayer, singing, and Sabbath-greeting, forgiving and forgetting as far as possible. Thus did this excellent pastor create a new scene of peace and good-will, which grew brighter for eighteen years, when he died at the age of forty. At the earliest moment that was prudent, he induced his church to cancel the excommunication of Rebecca Nurse and Giles Corey. It was ten years more before the hard and haughty mother church in Salem would do its part; but Mr. Green had the satisfaction of seeing that record also cleansed of its foul stains three years before his death. Judge Sewall had before made his penitential acknowledgment of proud error in full assembly, and had resumed his seat on the bench amid the forgiveness and respect of society; Chief Justice Stoughton had retired from the courts in obstinate rage at his conflicts with Satan having been cut short; the physicians hoped they should have no more patients “under the evil hand,” to make them look foolish and feel helpless; and the Tragedy was over. There were doubtless secret tears and groans, horrors of shame and remorse by night and by day, and indignant removal of the bones of the murdered from outcast graves; and abstraction of painful pages from books of record, and much stifling of any
- 58. conversation which couldgrow into tradition. The Tragedy was, no doubt, the central interest of society, families, and individuals throughout the Province for the life of one generation. Then, as silence had been kept in the homes as well as at church and market, the next generation entered upon life almost unconscious of the ghastly distinction which would attach in history to Massachusetts in general, and Salem in particular, as the scene of the Delusion and the Tragedy which showed the New World to be in essentials no wiser than the Old. How effectually the story of that year 1692 was buried in silence is shown by a remark of Mr. Upham’s—that it has been too common for the Witch Tragedy to be made a jest of, or at least to be spoken of with levity. We can have no doubt that his labors have put an end to this. It is inconceivable that there can ever again be a joke heard on the subject of Witchcraft in Salem. But this remark of our author brings us at once home to our own country, time, and experience. It suggests the question whether the lesson afforded by this singular perfect piece of history is more or less appropriate to our own day and generation. THE FETISH THEORY THEN AND NOW. We have already observed that at the date of these events, the only possible explanation of the phenomena presented was the fetish solution which had in all ages been recurred to as a matter of course. In heathen times it was god, goddess, or nymph who gave knowledge, or power, or gifts of healing, or of prophecy, to men. In Christian times it was angel, or devil, or spirit of the dead; and this conception was in full force over all Christendom when the Puritan emigrants settled in New England. The celebrated sermon of the Rev. Mr. Lawson, in the work before us, discloses the elaborate doctrine held by the class of men who were supposed to know best in regard to the powers given by Satan to his agents, and the evils with which he afflicted his victims; and there was not only no reason why the pastor’s hearers should question his interpretations, but no possibility that they should supply any of a different kind. The
- 59. accused themselves, whileunable to admit or conceive that they were themselves inspired by Satan, could propose no explanation but that the acts were done by “some bad spirit.” And such has been the fetish tendency to this hour, through all the advance that has been made in science, and in the arts of observation and of reasoning. The fetish tendency—that of ascribing one’s own consciousness to external objects, as when the dog takes a watch to be alive because it ticks, and when the savage thinks his god is angry because it thunders, and when the Puritan catechumen cries out in hysteria that Satan has set a witch to strangle her—that constant tendency to explain everything by the facts, the feelings, and the experience of the individual’s own nature, is no nearer dying out now than at the time of the Salem Tragedy; and hence, in part, the seriousness and the instructiveness of this story to the present generation. Ours is the generation which has seen the spread of Spiritualism in Europe and America, a phenomenon which deprives us of all right to treat the Salem Tragedy as a jest, or to adopt a tone of superiority in compassion for the agents in that dismal drama. There are hundreds, even several thousands, of lunatics in the asylums of the United States, and not a few in our own country, who have been lodged there by the pursuit of intercourse with spirits; in other words, by ascribing to living but invisible external agents movements of their own minds. Mr. Parris remarked, in 1692, that of old, witches were only ignorant old women; whereas, in his day, they had come to be persons of knowledge, holiness, and devotion who had been drawn into that damnation; and in our day, we hear remarks on the superior refinement of spirit-intercourses, in comparison with the witch doings at Salem; but the cases are all essentially the same. In all, some peculiar and inexplicable appearances occur, and are, as a matter of course, when their reality can not be denied, ascribed to spiritual agency. We may believe that we could never act as the citizens of Salem acted in their superstition and their fear; and this may be true; but the course of speculation is, in “spiritual circles,” very much the same as in Mr. Parris’ parlor.
- 60. And how muchless excuse there is for our generation than for his! We are very far yet from being able to explain the well-known and indisputable facts which occur from time to time, in all countries where men abide and can give an account of themselves; such facts as the phenomena of natural somnambulism, of double consciousness, of suspended sensation while consciousness is awake, and the converse—of a wide range of intellectual and instinctive operations bearing the character of marvels to such as can not wait for the solution. We are still far from being able to explain such mysteries, in the only true sense of the word explaining —that is, being able to refer the facts to the natural cause to which they belong; but we have an incalculable advantage over the people of former centuries in knowing that for all proved facts there is a natural cause; that every cause to which proved facts within our cognizance are related is destined to become known to us; and that, in the present case, we have learned in what direction to search for it, and have set out on the quest. None of us can offer even the remotest conjecture as to what the law of the common action of what we call mind and body may be. If we could, the discovery would have been already made. But, instead of necessarily assuming, as the Salem people did, that what they witnessed was the operation of spiritual upon human beings, we have, as our field of observation and study, a region undreamed of by them—the brain as an organized part of the human frame, and the nervous system, implicating more facts, more secrets, and more marvels than our forefathers attributed to the whole body. THE VIEWS OF MODERN INVESTIGATORS. It is very striking to hear the modern lectures on physiological subjects delivered in every capital in Europe, and to compare the calm and easy manner in which the most astonishing and the most infernal phenomena are described and discussed, with the horror and dismay that the same facts would have created if disclosed by divines in churches three centuries ago. Dr. Maudsley, in his recent work on “The Physiology and Pathology of Mind,” and other
- 61. physicians occupied inhis line of practice, lead us through the lunatic asylums of every country, pointing out as ordinary or extraordinary incidents the same “afflictions” of children and other morbid persons which we read of, one after another, in the Salem story. It is a matter of course with such practitioners and authors to anticipate such phenomena when they have detected the morbid conditions which generate them. Mr. Upham himself is evidently very far indeed from understanding or suspecting how much light is thrown on the darkest part of his subject by physiological researches carried on to the hour when he laid down his pen. His view is confined almost exclusively to the theory of fraud and falsehood, as affording the true key. It is not probable that anybody disputes or doubts the existence of guilt and folly in many or all of the agents concerned. There was an antecedent probability of both in regard to Mr. Parris’ slaves, and to such of the young children as they most influenced; and that kind of infection is apt to spread. Moreover, experience shows us that the special excitement of that nervous condition induces moral vagaries at least as powerfully as mental delusions. In the state of temper existing among the inhabitants of the Village when the mischievous club of girls was formed at the pastor’s house, it was inevitable that, if magic was entered upon at all, it would be malignant magic. Whatever Mr. Upham has said in illustration of that aspect of the case his readers will readily agree to. But there is a good deal more, even of the imperfect notices that remain after the abstraction and destruction of the records in the shame and anguish that ensued, which we, in our new dawn of science, can perceive to be an affair of the bodily organization. We are, therefore, obliged to him for rescuing this tremendous chapter of history from oblivion, and for the security in which he has placed the materials of evidence. In another generation the science of the human frame may have advanced far enough to elucidate some of the Salem mysteries, together with some obscure facts in all countries, which can not be denied, while as yet they can not be understood. When that time comes, a fearful weight of imputation will be removed from the name and fame of many agents and sufferers who have been the subjects of strange maladies and
- 62. strange faculties, inall times and countries. As we are now taught the new discoveries of the several nerve-centers, and the powers which are appropriated to them; and when we observe what a severance may exist between the so-called organ of any sense or faculty and the operation of the sense or faculty; and how infallibly ideas and emotion may be generated, and even beliefs created in minds sane and insane, by certain manipulations of the nerves and brain, we see how innocently this phenomenon may be presented in natural somnambulism. Sleepwalkers have been known in many countries, and treated of in medical records by their physicians, who could not only walk, and perform all ordinary acts in the dark as well as in the light, but who went on writing or reading without interruption though an opaque substance—a book or a slate—was interposed, and would dot the i’s and cross the t’s with unconscious correctness without any use of their eyes. There is a wide field of inquiry open in this direction, now that the study of the nervous system has been begun, however minute is the advance as yet. IMPORTANCE OF THE SUBJECT. It is needless to dwell on the objection made to the rising hopefulness in regard to the study of Man, and the mysteries of his nature. Between the multitude who have still no notion of any alternative supposition to that of possession or inspiration by spirits, or, at least, intercourse with such beings, and others who fear “Materialism” if too close an attention is paid to the interaction of the mind and the nerves, and those who always shrink from new notions in matters so interesting, and those who fear that religion may be implicated in any slight shown to angel or devil, and those who will not see or hear any evidence whatever which lies in a direction opposite to their prejudices, we are not likely to get on too fast. But neither can the injury lapse under neglect. The spectacle presented now is of the same three sorts of people that appear in all satires, in all literatures, since the pursuit of truth in any mode or direction became a recognized object anywhere and under any conditions. Leaving out of view the multitude who are irrelevant to the case,
- 63. from having noknowledge, and being therefore incapable of an opinion, there is the large company of the superficial and light- minded, who are always injuring the honor and beauty of truth by the levity, the impertinence, the absurdity of the enthusiasm they pretend, and the nonsense they talk about “some new thing.” No period of society has been more familiar with that class and its mischief-making than our own. There is the other large class of the cotemporaries of any discovery or special advance, who, when they can absent themselves from the scene no longer, look and listen, and bend all their efforts to hold their ground of life-long opinion, usually succeeding so far as to escape any direct admission that more is known than when they were born. These are no ultimate hindrance. When Harvey died, no physician in Europe above the age of forty believed in the circulation of the blood; but the truth was perfectly safe; and so it will be with the case of the psychological relations of the nervous system when the present course of investigation has sustained a clearer verification and further advance. On this point we have the sayings of two truth-seekers, wise in quality of intellect, impartial and dispassionate in temper, and fearless in the pursuit of their aims. The late Prince Consort is vividly remembered for the characteristic saying which spread rapidly over the country, that he could not understand the conduct of the medical profession in England in leaving the phenomena of mesmerism to the observation of unqualified persons, instead of undertaking an inquiry which was certainly their proper business, in proportion as they professed to pursue science. The other authority we refer to is the late Mr. Hallam. A letter of his lies before us from which we quote a passage, familiar in its substance, doubtless, to his personal friends, to whom he always avowed the view which it presents, and well worthy of note to such readers as may not be aware of the observation and thought he devoted to the phenomena of mesmerism during the last quarter-century of his long life. “It appears to me probable that the various phenomena of mesmerism, together with others, independent of mesmerism properly so called, which have lately [the date is 1844] been brought to light, are fragments of some general law of nature which we are not yet able
- 64. to deduce fromthem, merely because they are destitute of visible connection—the links being hitherto wanting which are to display the entire harmony of effects proceeding from a single cause.” [Persons curious to know what has been developed in this class of studies may find the same in a work published at this office, entitled The Library of Mesmerism and Psychology—comprising the Philosophy of Mesmerism, Clairvoyance, and Mental Electricity; Fascination, or the Power of Charming; The Macrocosm, or the World of Sense; Electrical Psychology, or the Doctrine of Impressions; The Science of the Soul, treated Physiologically and Philosophically. Complete in one illustrated volume. Price, $4.] What room is there not for hopefulness when we compare such an observation as this with Mr. Parris’ dogmatical exposition of Satan’s dealings with men! or when we contrast the calm and cheerful tone of the philosopher with the stubborn wrath of Chief Justice Stoughton, and with the penitential laments of Judge Sewall! We might contrast it also with the wild exultation of those of the Spiritualists of our own day who can form no conception of the modesty and patience requisite for the sincere search for truth, and who, once finding themselves surrounded by facts and appearances new and strange, assume that they have discovered a bridge over the bottomless “gulf beyond which lies the spirit-land,” and wander henceforth in a fools’ paradise, despising and pitying all who are less rash, ignorant, and presumptuous than themselves. It is this company of fanatics—the first of the three classes we spoke of— which is partly answerable for the backwardness of the second; but the blame does not rest exclusively in one quarter. There is an indolence in the medical class which is the commonest reproach against them in every age of scientific activity, and which has recently been heroically avowed and denounced in a public address by no less a member of the profession than Sir Thomas Watson.[1] There is a conservative reluctance to change of view or of procedure. There is also a lack of moral courage, by no means surprising in an order of men whose lives are spent in charming away troubles, and easing pains and cares, and “making things
- 65. pleasant”—by no meanssurprising, we admit, but exceedingly unfavorable to the acknowledgment of phenomena that are strange and facts that are unintelligible. This brings us to the third class—the very small number of persons who are, in the matter of human progress, the salt of the earth; the few who can endure to see without understanding, to hear without immediately believing or disbelieving, to learn what they can, without any consideration of what figure they themselves shall make in the transaction; and even to be unable to reconcile the new phenomena with their own prior experience or conceptions. There is no need to describe how rare this class must necessarily be, for every one who has eyes sees how near the passions and the prejudices of the human being lie to each other. These are the few who unite the two great virtues of earnestly studying the facts, and keeping their temper, composure and cheerfulness through whatever perplexity their inquiry may involve. It is remarkable that while the world is echoing all round and incessantly with the praise of the life of the man spent in following truth wherever it may lead, the world is always resounding also with the angry passions of men who resent all opinions which are not their own, and denounce with fury or with malice any countenance given to mere proposals to inquire in certain directions which they think proper to reprobate. Not only was it horrible blasphemy in Galileo to think as he did of the motion of the earth, but in his friends to look through his glass at the stars. This Salem story is indeed shocking in every view—to our pride as rational beings, to our sympathy as human beings, to our faith as Christians, to our complacency as children of the Reformation. It is so shocking that some of us may regret that the details have been revived with such an abundance of evidence. But this is no matter of regret, but rather of congratulation, if we have not outgrown the need of admonition from the past. How does that consideration stand? At the end of nearly three centuries we find ourselves relieved of a heavy burden of fear and care about the perpetual and unbounded malice of Satan and his agents. Witchcraft has ceased to be one of
- 66. the gravest cursesof the human lot. We have parted with one after another of the fetish or conjectural persuasions about our relations with the world of spirit or mind, regarded as in direct opposition to the world of matter. By a succession of discoveries we have been led to an essentially different view of life and thought from any dreamed of before the new birth of science; and at this day, and in our own metropolis, we have Sir Henry Holland telling us how certain treatment of this or that department of the nervous system will generate this or that state of belief and experience, as well as sensation. We have Dr. Carpenter disclosing facts of incalculable significance about brain-action without consciousness, and other vital mysteries. We have Dr. Maudsley showing, in the cells of the lunatic asylum, not only the very realm of Satan, as our fathers would have thought, but the discovery that it is not Satan, after all, that makes the havoc, but our own ignorance which has seduced us into a blasphemous superstition, instead of inciting us to the study of ourselves. And these are not all our teachers. Amid the conflict of phenomena of the human mind and body, we have arrived now at the express controversy of Psychology against Physiology. Beyond the mere statement of the fact we have scarcely advanced a step. The first can not be, with any accuracy, called a science at all, and the other is in little more than a rudimentary state; but it is no small gain to have arrived at some conception of the nature of the problem set before us, and at some liberty of hypothesis as to its conditions. In brief, and in the plainest terms, while there is still a multitude deluding and disporting itself with a false hypothesis about certain mysteries of the human mind, and claiming to have explained the marvels of Spiritualism by making an objective world of their own subjective experience, the scientific physiologists [those especially who are true phrenologists] are proceeding, by observation and experiment, to penetrate more and more secrets of our intellectual and moral life.
- 67. [1] Address onthe Present State of Therapeutics. Delivered at the opening meeting of the Clinical Society of London, January 10, 1868. By Sir Thomas Watson, Bart., M.D.
- 68. THE PLANCHETTE THE PLANCHETTEMYSTERY. WHAT PLANCHETTE IS AND DOES. HIS little gyrating tripod is proving itself to be something more than a nine days’ wonder. It is finding its way into thousands of families in all parts of the land. Lawyers, physicians, politicians, philosophers, and even clergymen, have watched eagerly its strange antics, and listened with rapt attention to its mystic oracles. Mrs. Jones demands of it where Jones spends his evenings; the inquisitive of both sexes are soliciting it to “tell their fortunes;” speculators are invoking its aid in making sharp bargains, and it is said that even sagacious brokers in Wall Street are often found listening to its vaticinations as to the price of stocks on a given future day. To all kinds of inquiries answers are given, intelligible at least, if not always true. A wonderful jumble of mental and moral possibilities is this little piece of dead matter, now giving utterance to childish drivel, now bandying jokes and badinage, now stirring the conscience by unexceptionably Christian admonitions, and now uttering the baldest infidelity or the most shocking profanity; and often discoursing gravely on science, philosophy, or theology. It is true that Planchette seldom assumes this variety of theme and diction under the hands of the same individual, but, in general, manifests a peculiar facility of adapting its discourse to the character of its associates. Reader, with your sanction, we will seek a little further acquaintance with this new wonder. The word “Planchette” is French, and simply signifies a little board. It is usually made in the shape of a heart, about seven inches long and six inches wide at the widest part, but we suppose that any
- 69. other shape andconvenient size would answer as well. Under the two corners of the widest end are fixed two little castors or pantograph wheels, admitting of easy motion in all horizontal directions; and in a hole, pierced through the narrow end, is fixed, upright, a lead pencil, which forms the third foot of the tripod. If this little instrument be placed upon a sheet of printing paper, and the fingers of one or more persons be laid lightly upon it, after quietly waiting a short time for the connection or rapport to become established, the board, if conditions are favorable, will begin to move, carrying the fingers with it. It will move for about one person in every three or four; and sometimes it will move with the hands of two or three persons in contact with it, when it will not move for either one of the persons singly. At the first trial, from a few seconds to twenty minutes may be required to establish the motion; but at subsequent trials it will move almost immediately. The first movements are usually indefinite or in circles but as soon as some control of the motion is established, it will begin to write—at first, perhaps, in mere monosyllables, “Yes,” and “No,” in answer to leading questions, but afterward freely writing whole sentences, and even pages. For me alone, the instrument will not move; for myself and wife it moves slightly, but its writing is mostly in monosyllables. With my daughter’s hands upon it, it writes more freely, frequently giving, correctly, the names of persons present whom she may not know, and also the names of their friends, living or dead, with other and similar tests. Its conversations with her are grave or gay, much according to the state of her own mind at the time; and when frivolous questions are asked, it almost always returns answers either frivolous or, I am sorry to say it, a trifle wicked. For example, she on one occasion said to it: “Planchette, where did you get your education?” To her horror, it instantly wrote: “In h—l,” without, however, being so fastidious as to omit the letters of the word here left out. On another occasion, after receiving from it responses to some trival questions, she said to it: “Planchette, now write something of your own accord without our prompting.” But instead
- 70. of writing wordsand sentences as was expected, it immediately traced out the rude figure of a man, such as school children sometimes make upon their slates. After finishing the outlines—face, neck, arms, legs, etc., it swung around and brought the point of the pencil to the proper position for the eye, which it carefully marked in, and then proceeded to pencil out the hair. On finishing this operation, it wrote under the figure the name of a young man concerning whom my daughter’s companions are in the habit of teasing her. My wife once said to it: “Planchette, write the name of the article I am thinking of.” She was thinking of a finger ring, on which her eye had rested a moment before. The operator, of course, knew nothing of this, and my wife expected either that the experiment would fail, or else that the letters R-i-n-g would be traced. But instead of that, the instrument moved, very slowly, and, as it were, deliberately, and traced an apparently exact circle on the paper, of about the size of the finger ring she had in her mind. “Will you try that over again?” said she, when a similar circle was traced, in a similar manner, but more promptly. During this experiment, one of my wife’s hands, in addition to my daughter’s, was resting lightly upon the board; but if the moving force had been supplied by her, either consciously or unconsciously, the motion would evidently have taken the direction of her thought, which was that of writing the letters of the word, instead of a direction unthought of. While Planchette, in her intercourse with me, has failed to distinguish herself either as a preacher or a philosopher, I regret to say that she has not proved herself a much more successful prophet. While the recent contest for the United States Senatorship from the State of New York was pending, I said to my little oracular friend: “Planchette, will you give me a test?” “Yes.” “Do you know who will be the next U. S. Senator from this State?” “Yes.” “Please write the name of the person who will be chosen.” “Mr. Sutton,” was written. Said I, “I have not the pleasure of knowing that gentleman; please tell me where he resides.” Ans. “In Washington.”
- 71. I do notrelate this to disturb the happy dreams of the Hon. Reuben E. Fenton by suggesting any dire contingencies that may yet happen to mar the prospect before him. In justice to my little friend, however, I must not omit to state that in respect to questions as to the kind of weather we shall have on the morrow? will such person go, or such a one come? or shall I see, or do this, that, or the other thing? its responses have been generally correct. To rush to a conclusion respecting the rationale of so mysterious a phenomenon, under the sole guidance of an experience which has been so limited as my own, would betray an amount of egoism and heedlessness with which I am unwilling to be chargeable; and my readers will now be introduced to some experiences of others. A friend of mine, Mr. C., residing in Jersey City, with whom I have almost daily intercourse, and whose testimony is entirely trustworthy, relates the following: Some five or six months ago he purchased a Planchette, brought it home, and placed it in the hands of Mrs. B., a widow, who was then visiting his family. Mrs. B. had never tried or witnessed any experiments with Planchette, and was incredulous as to her power to evoke any movements from it. She, however, placed her hands upon it, as directed, and to her surprise it soon began to move, and wrote for its first words: “Take care!” “Of what must I take care?” she inquired. “Of your money.” “Where?” “In Kentucky.” My friend states that Mrs. B.’s husband had died in Albany about two years previous, bequeathing to her ten thousand dollars, which sum she had loaned to a gentleman in Louisville, Ky., to invest in the drug business, on condition that she and he were to share the profits; and up to this time the thought had not occurred to her that her money was not perfectly safe. At this point she inquired: “Who is this that is giving this caution?” “B—— W——.” (The name of a friend of hers who had died at Cairo, Ill., some six years before.) Mrs. B. “Why! is my money in jeopardy?” Planchette. “Yes, and needs prompt attention.” My friend C. here asked: “Ought she to go to Kentucky and attend to the matter?” “Yes.”
- 72. So strange andunexpected was this whole communication, and so independent of the suggestions of her own mind, that she was not a little impressed by it, and thought it would at least be safe for her to make a journey to Louisville and ascertain if the facts were as represented. But she had at the time no ready money to pay her traveling expenses, and not knowing how she could get the money, she asked: “When shall I be able to go?” “In two weeks from to- day,” was the reply. She thought over the matter, and the next day applied to a friend of hers, a Mr. W., in Nassau Street, who promised to lend her the money by the next Tuesday or Wednesday. (It was on Thursday that the interview with Planchette occurred.) She came home and remarked to my friend: “Well, Planchette has told one lie, anyhow; it said I would start for Louisville two weeks from that day. Mr. W. is going to lend me the money, and I shall start by next Thursday, only one week from that time.” But on the next Tuesday morning she received a note from Mr. W. expressing regret that circumstances had occurred which would render it impossible for him to let her have the money. She immediately sought, and soon found, another person by whom she was promised the money still in time to enable her to start a couple of days before the expiration of the two weeks—thus still, as she supposed, enabling her to prove Planchette to be wrong in at least that particular. But from circumstances unnecessary to detail, the money did not come until Wednesday, the day before the expiration of the two weeks. She then prepared herself to start the next morning; but through a blunder of the expressman in carrying her trunk to the wrong depot, she was detained till the five o’clock P.M. train, when she started, just two weeks, to the hour, from the time the prediction was given. Arriving in Louisville, she learned that her friend had become involved in consequence of having made a number of bad sales for large amounts, and had actually gone into bankruptcy—reserving, however, for the security of her debt, a number of lots of ground, which his creditors were trying to get hold of. She thus arrived not a
- 73. moment too soonto save herself, which she will probably do, in good part, at least, if not wholly—though the affair is still unsettled. Since this article was commenced, the following fact has been furnished me from a reliable source. It is offered not only for the test which it involves, but also to illustrate the remarkable faculty which Planchette sometimes manifests, of calling things by their right names. A lady well known to the community, but whose name I have not permission to disclose, recently received from Planchette, writing under her own hands, a communication so remarkable that she was induced to ask for the name of the intelligence that wrote it. In answer to her request, the name of the late Col. Baker, who gallantly fell at Ball’s Bluff, was given, in a perfect fac-simile of his handwriting. She said to him: “For a further test, will you be kind enough to tell me where I last saw you?” She expected him to mention the place and occasion of their last interview when she had invited him to her house to tea; but Planchette wrote: “In the hall of thieves.” “In the hall of thieves,” said the lady; “what on earth can be the meaning of that? O! I remember that after he was killed, his body was brought on here and laid in the City Hall, and there I saw him.” THE PRESS ON PLANCHETTE. In Planchette, public journalists and pamphleteers seem to have caught the “What is it?” in a new shape, and great has been the expenditure of printer’s ink in the way of narratives, queries, and speculations upon the subject. There are now lying before me the following publications and articles, in which the Planchette phenomena are noticed and discussed,—from which we propose to cull and condense such statements of fact as appear to possess most intrinsic interest, and promise most aid in the solution of the mysteries. Afterward we shall discuss the different theories of these writers, and also some other theories that have been propounded. “Planchette’s Diary,” edited by Kate Field, is an entertaining pamphlet, consisting of details in the author’s experience, with little
- 74. or no speculationas to the origin or laws of the phenomena. The author herself was the principal medium of the communications, but she occasionally introduces experiences of others. The pamphlet serves to put one on familiar and companionable terms with the invisible source of intelligence, whatever that may be, illustrating the leading peculiarities of the phenomena, giving some tests of an outside directing influence more or less striking, and candidly recording the failures of test answers which were mixed up with the successes. We extract two or three specimens: “May 26th—Evening. Our trio was reinforced by Mr. B., a clever young lawyer, who regarded Planchette with no favorable eye—had no faith whatever in ‘Spiritualism,’ and maintained that for his part he thought it quite as sensible, if not more so, to attribute unknown phenomena to white rabbits as to spirits.... Planchette addressed herself to Mr. B. thus: ‘You do not think that I am a spirit. I tell you that I am. If I am not an intelligence, in the name of common sense what am I? If you fancy I am white rabbits, then all I have to say is, that white rabbits are a deal cleverer than they have the credit of being among natural historians.’ Later, doubt was thrown upon the possibility of getting mental questions answered, and Planchette retorted: ‘Do you fancy for one moment that I don’t know the workings of your brain? That is not the difficulty. It is the impossibility—almost—of making two diametrically opposed magnetisms unite.’ After this rebuke, Mr. B. asked a mental question, and received the following answer: ‘I am impelled to say that if you will persevere in these investigations, you may be placed en rapport with your wife, who would undoubtedly communicate with you. If you have any faith in the immortality of the soul, you can have no doubt of the possibility of spiritual influences being brought to bear upon mortals. It is no new thing. Ever since the world began, this power has been exerted in one way or another; and if you pretend to put any faith in the Bible, you surely must credit the possibility of establishing this subtile connection between man and so-called angels.’ This communication was glibly written until within eleven words of the conclusion, when Planchette stopped, and I asked if she had finished. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Then why don’t you go on?’ I continued. ‘I can write faster than this.’ Planchette grew exceeding wroth at this, and dashed off an answer:
- 75. ‘Because, my goodgracious! you are not obliged to express yourself through another’s brain.’ I took it for granted that Planchette had shot very wide of the mark in the supposed response to Mr. B.’s mental query, and hence was not prepared to be told that it was satisfactory, in proof of which Mr. B. wrote beneath it: ‘Appropriate answer to my mental question, Will my deceased wife communicate with me?—I. A. B.’” “May 28th. At the breakfast-table Mr. G. expressed a great desire to see Planchette perform, and she was brought from her box. Miss W. was also present. After several communications, Miss W. asked a mental question, and Planchette immediately wrote: ‘Miss W., that is hardly possible in the present state of the money market; but later, I dare say you will accomplish what you desire to undertake.’ Miss W. ‘Planchette is entirely off the track. My question was, Can you tell me anything about my nephew?’ Mr. G. ‘Well, it is certainly very queer. I asked a mental question to which this is to a certain extent an answer.’ Mr. G. was seated beside me, thoroughly intent upon Planchette. Miss W. was at a distance, and not in any way en rapport with me. If this phenomenon of answering mental questions be clairvoyance, the situation of these two persons may account for the mixed nature of the answer, beginning with Miss W. and finishing with Mr. G.” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine for December, 1868, contains an interesting article entitled “Planchette in a New Character.” What the “new character” is in which it appears, may be learned from the introductory paragraph, as follows: “We, too, have a Planchette, and a Planchette with this signal merit: it disclaims all pretensions to supermundane inspirations; it operates freely—indeed, with extraordinary freedom; it goes at the tap of the drum. The first touch of the operators, no matter under what circumstances it is brought out to reveal its knowledge, sets it in motion. But it brings no communications from any celestial or spiritual sources. Its chirography is generally good, and frequently excellent. Its remarks evince an intelligence often above that of the operators, and its talent at answering or evading difficult questions is admirable. We have no theories about it.” It seems, from other passages in the article, that this Planchette disclaims the ability to tell anything that is not contained in the minds of the persons present, although it frequently gives theories in direct contradiction to the opinions of all present, and argues them
- 76. with great persistenceuntil driven up into a corner. It simply assumes the name of “Planchet,” leaving off the feminine termination of the word; and “on being remonstrated with for illiteracy, it defended itself by saying, ‘I always was a bad speler,’— an orthographical blunder,” says the writer, “that no one in the room was capable of making.” Although the writer in the paragraph above quoted disclaims all theories on the subject, he does propound a theory, such as it is; but of this we defer our notice until we come to put the several theories that have been offered into the hopper and grind them up together; at which time we will take some further notice of the amusing peculiarities of this writer’s Planchette. The Ladies’ Repository of November, 1868, contains an article, written by Rev. A. D. Field, entitled “Planchette; or, Spirit-Rapping Made Easy.” This writer mentions a number of test questions asked by him of Planchette, the answers to which were all false. Yet he acknowledges that “the mysterious little creature called Planchette is no humbug; that some mysterious will-power causes it to answer questions, and that it is useless to ignore these things, or to laugh at them.” The writer submits a theory by which he thinks these mysteries may be explained, in a measure, if not wholly, but this, with others, will be reserved for notice hereafter. Harper’s Monthly Magazine for December, 1868, contains an article entitled “The Confessions of a Reformed Planchettist.” In this article, the writer, no doubt drawing wholly or in part from his imagination, details a series of tricks which he had successfully practiced upon the credulity of others, and concludes by propounding a very sage and charitable theory to account for all Planchette phenomena, on which theory we shall yet have a word to offer. Hours at Home, of February, 1869, contains an article, by J. T. Headley, entitled “Planchette at the Confessional.” In this article, the writer cogently argues the claims of these new phenomena upon the attention of scientific men. He says: “That it [the Planchette] writes things never dreamed of by the operators, is proved by their own testimony and the testimony of others, beyond all contradiction;”
- 77. and goes sofar as to assert that to whatever cause these phenomena may be attributed, “they will seriously affect the whole science of mental philosophy.” He relates a number of facts, more or less striking, and propounds a theory in their explanation, to which, with others, we will recur by-and-by. The foregoing are a few of the most noted, among the many less important, lucubrations that have fallen under our notice concerning this interesting subject—enough, however, to indicate the intense public interest which the performances of this little board are exciting. We will now proceed to notice some of the theories that have been advanced for the solution of the mystery. THEORY FIRST—THAT THE BOARD IS MOVED BY THE HANDS THAT REST UPON IT. It is supposed that this movement is made either by design or unconsciously, and that the answers are either the result of adroit guessing, or the expressions of some appropriate thoughts or memories which had been previously slumbering in the minds of the operators, and happen to be awakened at the moment. After detailing his exploits (whether real or imaginary he has left us in doubt) in a successful and sustained course of deception, the writer in Harper’s reaches this startling conclusion of the whole matter: “It would only write when I moved it, and then it wrote precisely what I dictated. That persons write ‘unconsciously,’ I do not believe. As well tell me a man might pick pockets without knowing it. Nor am I at all prepared to believe the assertions of those who declare that they do not move the board. I know what operators will do in such cases; I know the distortion, the disregard of truth which association with this immoral board superinduces.” This writer has somewhat the advantage of me. I confess I have no means of coming to the knowledge of the truth but those of careful thought, patient observation, and collection of facts, and deduction from them. But here is a mind that can with one bold dive reach the inner mysteries of the sensible and supersensible world, penetrate the motives and impulses that govern the specific moral
- 78. acts of men,and disclose at once to us the horrible secret of a conspiracy which, without preconcert, has been entered into by thousands of men, women, and children in all parts of the land, to cheat the rest of the human race—a conspiracy, too, in which certain members of innumerable private families have banded together to play tricks upon their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters! I feel awed by the overshadowing presence of such a mind—in fact, I do not feel quite at home with him, and therefore most respectfully bow myself out of his presence without further ceremony. As to the hypothesis that the person or persons whose hands are on the board move it unconsciously, this is met by the fact that the persons are perfectly awake and in their senses, and are just as conscious of what they are doing or not doing as at any other time. Or if it be morally possible to suppose that they all, invariably, and with one accord, lie when they assert that the board moves without their volition, how is it that the answers which they give to questions, some of them mentally, are in so large a proportion of cases, appropriate answers? How is it, for example, that Planchette, under the hands of my own daughter, has, in numerous cases, given correctly the names of persons whom she had never seen or heard of before, giving also the names of their absent relatives, the places of their residence, etc., all of which were absolutely unknown by every person present except the questioner? A theory propounded by the Rev. Dr. Patton, of Chicago, in an article published in The Advance, some time since, may be noticed under this head. He says: “How, then, shall we account for the writing which is performed without any direct volition? Our method refers it to an automatic power of mind separate from conscious volition. * * * Very common is the experience of an automatic power in the pen, by which it finishes a word, or two or three words, after the thoughts have consciously gone on to what is to follow. We infer, then, from ordinary facts known to the habitual penman, that if a fixed idea is in the mind at the time when the nervous and volitional powers are exercised with a pen, it will often express itself spontaneously through the pen, when the mental faculties are at work otherwise. We suppose, then, that Planchette is simply an arrangement by which, through the outstretched arms and fingers, the mind comes into such relation with the delicate movements of the pencil, that its automatic power finds play, and the
- 79. ideas present inthe mind are transferred unconsciously to paper.” (Italics our own.) That may all be, Doctor, and no marvel about it. That the “fixed idea”—“the ideas present in the mind,” should be “transferred unconsciously to paper,” by means of Planchette, is no more wonderful than that the same thing should be done by the pen, and without the intervention of that little board. But for the benefit of a sorely mystified world, be good enough to tell us how ideas that are not present, and that never were present, in the mind, can be transferred to paper by this automatic power of the mind. Grant that the mind possesses an automatic power to work in grooves, as it were, or in a manner in which it has been previously trained to work, as is illustrated by the delicate fingerings of the piano, all correct and skillful to the nicest shade, while the mind of the performer may for the moment be occupied in conversation; but not since the world began has there been an instance in which the mind, acting solely from itself, by “automatic powers” or otherwise, has been able to body forth any idea which was not previously within itself. That Planchette does sometimes write things of which the person or persons under whose hands it moves never had the slightest knowledge or even conception, it would be useless to deny. THEORY SECOND—IT IS ELECTRICITY, OR MAGNETISM. That electricity, or magnetism (a form of the same thing), is the agent of the production of these phenomena, is a theory which, perhaps, has more advocates among the masses than any other. It is the theory urged by Mr. Headley with a great amount of confidence in his article already referred to; and with his arguments, as those of an able and, in some sense, representative writer on this subject, we shall be principally occupied for a few paragraphs. When this theory is offered in seriousness as a final solution of the mystery in question, we are tempted to ask, Who is electricity? what is his mental and moral status? and how and where did he get his education? Or if by “electricity” is here simply meant the subtile,
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