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作者

来源

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS,Vol.41,Issue3,P.415-417

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

Xavier University

摘要

In Betty Smith’s 1943 novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, young Francie Nolan senses that her public encounters in her neighborhood’s streets, stores, libraries, and playgrounds made her feel “a definite part of something, part of a community” (p. 93). But when she tries to describe her experiences to a friend from outside the neighborhood, all she can manage is “there’s a feeling” (p. 93). Rowan’s stimulating study brings Francie’s feeling alive, examining its consequences for the quality of urban life. The argument hinges on the contrast between a discourse of sympathy (privileging intimate, familial relationships) and a discourse of sociability (recognizing the value of public and casual relationships). Rowan traces the discourse of sympathy through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as reformers countered the impersonal life of the streets by promoting familial, intimate, and domestic spaces and experiences. But by the mid-20th century, an urbanist discourse of sociability championed a more public and communal fellow feeling that flourished in the same streets from which earlier reformers provided refuge. The discourse of sociability, Rowan concludes, deepened our appreciation of how public experience built community and added to the pleasures of city life.Through a creative reading of novels, plays, memoirs, literary journalism, and museum exhibits, Rowan links the discourses of sympathy and sociability to changes in the built environment. In the mid-19th century, reformers worried that the city discouraged sympathetic fellow feeling. Crowded sidewalks produced a wariness toward others, and cultural instability, economic volatility, and the influx of immigrants and migrants deepened the suspicion of strangers. Following the logic of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), reformers understood sympathy as an imaginative process of conceiving what others felt, resulting in something familial and intimate. Thus, reformers created places such as Frederick Law Olmsted’s parks, which “completely shut out the city” so as to “stimulate and keep alive the more tender sympathies” associated with family life (pp. 4–5).Whereas Olmsted worried that close contact drove urbanites apart psychologically, early 20th-century settlement leaders believed physical segregation undercut the potential for sympathy. As the flood of immigrants and migrants rose and the affluent moved to suburban neighborhoods, Jane Addams worried that the “social organism” had “broken down,” leaving urbanites to live “without knowledge of each other, without fellowship” (p. 16). But settlement leaders had a different, less domestic vision of sympathy than Olmsted and his generation. To counter the lack of public interaction, the settlement house operated as a semipublic space, providing new channels for a sympathy based more on friendship than familial feeling.Settlement leaders failed, Rowan argues, because they overestimated the potential for cross-class exchange. Here Rowan might consider the experiments in participatory democracy that came out of the settlement movement (Mattson, 1998). But he convincingly argues that the discourse of sympathy returned to its domestic roots in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in the design of public housing projects. Worried that substandard housing undercut the intimacy of families, city planners designed large-block, inward-turning projects at the expense of streets, commercial enterprises, and small public spaces. The Chicago sociologists reinforced this trend by ascribing urban pathologies to the dominance of secondary (casual and temporary) relationships over primary (intimate and longer term) relationships, a distinction rooted in the discourse of sympathy. Treating the rural communities from which immigrants and migrants came as normative, the sociologists worked with city planners to recreate village conditions in big cities. Clarence Perry’s neighborhood unit scheme won over sociologists, planners, developers, and policymakers as a means of making the city safe for primary relations.The new urbanist discourse of sociability launched a critique of the most ambitious of public housing projects, the Williamsburg Houses that opened in 1937. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Smith, 1943) described the project as a sterile “place of living where sunlight and air were to be trapped, measured and weighed, and doled out so much per resident” (p. 75). The novel also celebrated the “companionable” fellow feelings urbanites developed in the public spaces of the old neighborhood (p. 75). Literary journalists at the New Yorker similarly championed the value of sociability. They defended places slated for demolition like Stewart’s Cafeteria near New York’s Sheridan Square, where struggling artists gathered, and people like Mazie P. Gordon, who collected tickets at the box office of a Bowery movie theater. Gordon’s “wry but genuine fondness” (p. 83) for the characters she met, from priests and gamblers to detectives and bartenders, fell short of intimacy but had value nonetheless.The urbanist discourse of sociability also found support from a new generation of “community ecologists” who argued that cooperation should rank with competition as key biological forces. Ecologists filled scientific journals with examples of instinctive “proto-cooperation,” plants and animals modifying the environment in ways that promoted survival for others. They showed how sociability could be based on physiological dependencies and gregarious instincts as much as physical familiarity and intersubjective emotions. Community ecology gave opponents of urban renewal a new language, as well as new facts, values, and metaphors. In the same 1951 issue of the New Yorker where Rachel Carson described proto-cooperation in the sea, the magazine reviewed Albert Parr’s new exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History designed to teach urbanites about proto-cooperation on land. Both Parr and Carson linked their work to the sociability they saw as essential to city life and urged city planners to be cautious in remaking the built and natural environments upon which social and biological interdependence rested.No place had been more traumatized by urban renewal than East Harlem, gutted by the construction of thousands of units of public housing. Convinced that planners placed no value on sociability, William Kirk of the Union Settlement sought new ways of describing its importance. In 1955, he approached the editors of Architectural Forum and found a willing partner in Jane Jacobs (whose earlier journalism had already advanced the discourse of sociability). Kirk led Jacobs on tours of East Harlem and helped her to see the danger of standardized projects and their homogeneous populations. As Jacobs engaged issues of race and poverty, she better appreciated the fragile order that urban renewal disrupted. Big cities did not promote intimacy, Jacobs concluded, but in their public spaces they could develop the sociable relations that made it easier to negotiate racial, ethnic, and other differences.When urban renewal threatened her West Village neighborhood, Jacobs marshaled the discourse of sociability in opposition. Her defense of diversity, density, and mixed-use districts arose from her journalism, her knowledge of East Harlem, and her study of ecology. Ecology gave her the language and the credibility to defend fragile city districts and to challenge as unscientific those who thought of slum clearance or highway construction as simple problems. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jacobs crafted what Herbert Gans called a “badly needed urban myth” (Gans, 1969, p. 30) for a society that underestimated the value of public experience.The discourse of sociability, Rowan recognizes, is more relevant than ever. As urban planning and design focus ever more on privatization, exclusion, and security, we need to reconsider the value of sociability. This fine study will advance that cause. Short, rich, free of jargon, and a pleasure to read, it should appeal not only to scholars and practitioners but to undergraduates in urban history, architecture and planning, and sociology. It might also work well in film studies courses because the social problems films of the 1930s and film noir in the 1940s and early 1950s reflect the shift in discourse from sympathy to sociability (Dimendberg, 2007; Sanders, 2003).ReferencesDimendberg, E. (2007). Film noir and the spaces of modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]Jacobs, J. (1961). The death and life of great American cities. New York, NY: Random House. [Crossref], [Google Scholar]Gans, H. (1969, June 7). The Dream of human cities. New Republic, p. 30. [Google Scholar]Mattson, K. (1998). Creating a democratic public: The struggle for urban participatory democracy in the progressive era. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. [Google Scholar]Sanders, J. (2003). Celluloid skyline: New york and the movies. New York: Knopf. [Google Scholar]Smith, B. (1943). A tree grows in Brooklyn. New York, NY: Harper. [Google Scholar]