A metropolitan world - DU Portfolio

8/3/19, 8(38 AMIntellectual life is still catching up to urbanisation | Aeon Essays

Page 1 of 8https://aeon.co/essays/intellectual-life-is-still-catching-up-to-ur…11_07_25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-674fa0fd67-68782437

A metropolitan worldUrbanisation might be the most profound changeto human society in a century, more telling thancolour, class or continentMichael Goebel

At some unknown moment between 2010 and 2015, for the first time in humanhistory, more than half the world’s population lived in cities. Urbanisation is unlikelyto reverse. Every week since, another 3 million country dwellers have becomeurbanites. Rarely in history has a small number of metropolises bundled as mucheconomic, political and cultural power over such vast swathes of hinterlands. In somerespects, these global metropolises and their residents resemble one another morethan they do their fellow nationals in small towns and rural area. Whatever is new inour global age is likely to be found in cities.



For more than two decades, geographers and sociologists have debated the characterand role of cities in globalisation. Historians have been a step behind, producing lessand more cautious work on cities and globalisation, and struggling to find readers."e relative silence is notable. As early as 1996, the sociologist Charles Tilly wrote<http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/009614429602200603> thathistorians have ‘the opportunity to be our most important interpreters of the waysthat global social processes articulate with small-scale social life’. Generally, historiansdid not answer the call. We still don’t have the powerful insights of historicalperspective on many aspects of the historic urbanisation through which we are living.

For centuries, philosophers and sociologists, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to GeorgSimmel, have alerted us to how profoundly cities have formed our societies, mindsand sensibilities. "e widening political polarisation between big cities and ruralareas, in the United States as well as Europe, has driven home the point of quite howmuch the relationship between cities and the provinces, the metropolis and thecountry, shapes the political lives of societies. "e history of cities is an extraordinaryguide to understanding today’s world. Yet, compared with historians at large, as wellas more present-minded scholars of urban studies, urban historians have not featuredprominently in public conversation as of late.

Current politics can be a good place to start. In the US presidential elections of 2016,urban and rural people voted so differently that county-population density was abetter electoral predictor than race, income, education or gender. Spatial politicalclustering could grow more pronounced. What the journalist Bill Bishop in 2004called ‘the big sort’ has helped to shape the rancorous tone, and terms, of politicaldebates, as an antagonism between the ways of authentic small-town and countrypeople versus the contaminating forces of ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘globalism’ in thebig city.

Although city-loathing has lately acquired an unusual salience in the US, theimportance of the rural-urban divide in politics is not of recent vintage. Some claimthat Jeffersonian agrarianism indelibly engraved ruralist biases into US politicalculture. But anti-urban political ideologies thrive around the world. Russia’s narodniki,a group of middle-class intellectuals in the 1860s and ’70s, preached peasantromanticism. Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China pursued a back-to-the-land agendano less than the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal vision of razing city life altogether inCambodia. Both Germany’s turn-of-the-century Lebensreform movement andGandhi’s asceticism appealed to the apparent moral superiority of country life. Early20th-century Argentine intellectuals converted the stalwart, rural figure of the gaucho

into the prime symbol of national identity. At the same time, they saw the tango ofBuenos Aires as a ‘mongrel product’, the degenerate musical genre of an immigrantport city.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/009614429602200603



olitical differences between the city and the countryside do not spring merelyfrom populist fantasies: urban and rural people have indeed often supported

different politics. As long as they competed in democratic elections, the parties ofMussolini and Hitler collected a significantly greater share of the vote in rural areas ofItaly and Germany than in larger cities, even as rural traditionalism and parts of theCatholic Church hampered the inroads that fascists could make in some regions. Inthe German Reichstag elections of 1932, for example, the rural-urban gap in the Nazivote was roughly 20 points in regions such as Schleswig-Holstein or Franconia.Today, European Right-wing populist parties, such as France’s National Front,Austria’s Freedom Party or Hungary’s Civic Alliance (Fidesz), don’t usually performwell in cities. In fact, they do particularly badly in these countries’ capitals. Likewise,French, Austrian and Hungarian populist parties express resentment against theParisian, Viennese or Budapest elite.

Some scholars look all the way back to the new systems of political organisation andthe peculiar social life generated by the first cities. "e political anthropologist JamesScott has recently speculated that human beings devised the first states as a responseto the ‘ecological effects of urbanism’. Democracy was deeply, perhaps inextricablylinked to the Greek polis, as observers from Aristotle to John Stuart Mill havediscussed. "e medieval German adage ‘City air makes you free’ expressed acustomary law stipulating that one year of life in the city liberated rural serfs. "esaying is still in use today. In Romance languages, all the variations of the word‘citizen’ betray the deep ties between the city and ideas about political community.Conversely, the English term ‘denizen’, which lacks the etymological association withthe city, casts doubt on full belonging.

Modern anti-urbans in turn figuratively expel city dwellers from the politicalcommunity; and sometimes literally, as in the infamous case of the Khmer Rougeregime. "e idea that urbanites lack national character is at least as old as modernnationalism. Want to know a nation? ‘Study a people outside of its cities; it is only inthis way that you will know it,’ advised Rousseau in Émile, or Treatise on Education

(1762). "e government’s spirit, he wrote, ‘is never the same in the city and thecountry’ and it is ‘the country which constitutes the land, and it is the people of thecountry who constitute the nation’.

Typically urban types such as the dandy exemplifiedunproductiveness

By the beginning of the 20th century, the effects of the city on people’s minds andpatterns of life had led to the creation of a new academic discipline called sociology.Some early sociologists continued the animus against urbanites. In his essay ‘"e

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Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903), Simmel diagnosed that people in big citiessuffered ‘the rapid crowding of changing images … and the unexpectedness ofonrushing impressions’ and thus the ‘intensification of nervous stimulation’. Simmelfound the over-stimulation of city life produced a ‘blasé’ personality typecharacteristic of the metropolis. "is ‘metropolitan type of man’ according to Simmel,‘reacts with his head instead of his heart’.

Like Max Weber, another German sociologist, Simmel viewed it as a defining trait ofcities that their inhabitants were not primarily engaged in producing anythingindispensable for human life, such as food. Instead, urbanites specialised in morallymurky market exchanges between mutually anonymous stakeholders who interactedonly for pecuniary purposes. In contrast to the peasant’s earthy forthrightness, citydwellers seemed fishy and of dubious morality. Typically urban types, for example thedandy, lacked any relationship to the land and its harvest, and exemplifiedunproductiveness and superficial emotions.

"e notion that corrosive and corrupt social groups were concentrated in cities wasnothing new. Late medieval Europe harboured suspicion of merchants, aquintessentially urban social group, for fear that they endangered the moral order.But Simmel and other early sociologists brought together a bundle of ideas aboutcities that remain easily recognisable. Cities, he wrote, were ‘the seat of the moneyeconomy’, distinguished by the fact that they produced nothing real. What cities diddo, Simmel conceded, was bring ‘the purchasability of things to the fore much moreimpressively than do smaller locales. "at is why cities are also the genuine locale ofthe blasé attitude.’ "e concentration and multiplication of market exchangesentailed the increasing anonymity between traders, growing specialisation, andabstractions in value, so that cities became homes of ‘intellectuality’ and‘cosmopolitanism’.

Despite his brief against cities, Rousseau signed most of his works with the lofty line‘citizen of Geneva’. Simmel, born in Berlin in 1858, embodied as many metropolitanfeatures as was then possible for a German: the scion of a bourgeois Jewish familythat converted to Christianity, his father was a chocolate manufacturer with a stake inthe renowned Sarotti brand. Simmel grew up on the corner of Leipziger Straße andFriedrichstraße, and attended a prestigious classical Gymnasium nearby Berlin’siconic Friedrichstraße station, built during his first high-school year. Straight after, hewent on to study philosophy and history at the University of Berlin (today HumboldtUniversity) just around the corner, right on Unter den Linden boulevard. Simmel’sunflattering appraisal of ‘"e Metropolis and Mental Life’ was born of intimateknowledge.



n spite of Simmel’s antipathy towards big-city life, few authors shaped 20th-century thinking about cities, their nature and place in the world as much as he

did. Simmel’s influence ran especially deep in the early Chicago School of Sociology.It found an able exponent in the sociologist Louis Wirth, another German Jew.Wirth’s upbringing could hardly have differed more from Simmel’s: he was born in1897 to a cattle-dealer father in the provincial town of Gemünden, which the WeimarRepublic’s chief comedian Joachim Ringelnatz commended for its ‘quaint alleyways’.In 1911, Wirth left for Omaha in Nebraska to live with his uncle, and from there wenton to the University of Chicago. At Chicago, still only 31 years old, Wirth publishedhis book !e Ghetto (1928), a study of how Jews in the Old and the New Worldflocked together in urban spaces. "e book’s stress on voluntary clustering due tosocioeconomic reasons, rather than enforced separation, still shapes how manyAmericans think about residential segregation in their cities today.

Simmel, Wirth and other early 20th-century sociologists perplexed over the pace ofurbanisation and the profoundness of its social changes. More than any dislike orendearment, Simmel and Wirth’s writings express exhilaration over the hustle andbustle: the incessant succession of crowded trains above and below ground, thecarpet of lights on a winter night, and the unbridled consumerism of departmentstores. "ey were real-time eyewitnesses of how all that had seemed solid melted intoair. In fact, of course, city life made many things more solid, petrified, built withconcrete. Within Simmel’s lifetime (1858-1918), Berlin’s population more thanquadrupled from 460,000 to 1.9 million. During the decades prior to Wirth’s move toChicago, the city had grown almost 10-fold, from 298,000 in 1870 to 2.7 million in1920. "e world’s urbanisation rate, meanwhile, rose from 12 per cent in 1870 to 20per cent in 1900.

Considering how formative the 20th-century’s vertiginous urbanisation was forSimmel and Wirth, and for the creation of sociology as a modern social science, thetransformation of urban space itself played a surprisingly marginal role in sociology.Chicago School studies of ethnic segregation in cities, including Wirth’s own !e

Ghetto, are rather indifferent towards the transformation of cityscapes. In theirwritings, the city appears as a given, an immovable and unchanging setting for thepeople who inhabit it.

"e ahistorical approach to studying cities has persisted, with historians having hadlittle influence in how we think about and understand urbanism. Although thesubfield of urban history had its own institutions and journals since the 1960s,sociologists and other urban scholars have paid little attention to its output. Ashistorians turned to culture, the social-science methods out of which urban historywas born became increasingly unpopular over the past generation or two, and urbanhistory suffered. "e recent rise of global history, with its affection for long-distance

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connections and movement, has done nothing to help urban history.

All cities have more than two parents, some local and othersglobal

"e resulting present-mindedness of urban studies leads to blind spots. Cities, afterall, are products of history and, as such, they change over time. For example, where aspecific ethnic community lives in any given city often depends on how their arrivalrelated to the development in time of the city itself. In contrast to New York, BuenosAires never gave birth to a Little Italy. Chicago School scholarship explained thisdifference by pointing to the so-called social-distance hypothesis, according to whichgreater cultural difference between an immigrant group and the host society results inhigher levels of the immigrants’ residential concentration. "e argument holds thatsince Italians were socio-culturally not so distant from Argentina’s Catholic Spanish-speaking mainstream, they did not end up in specifically Italian neighbourhoods.

But as an explanation for why a Little Italy formed in New York but not in BuenosAires, the social-distance hypothesis turns out not to work. It rests on the flawedassumption that the city had a definite shape and we have to ask ourselves only howpeople spread in it. Yet we also know that Spanish immigrants in Buenos Aires, whoshared even more socio-cultural traits with Argentine society than Italians did,nonetheless clustered much more spatially comparatively. Rather than culturaldifferences between population groups, the key to understanding Buenos Aires’sabsent Little Italy is essentially historical, to be found in conditions existing at thetime when Italian immigrants arrived and no longer present later, when Spanishimmigrants came to Buenos Aires. Italian immigrants arrived earlier and they oftensettled on small rural plots in the then pampas, before the massive growth of thenearby city set in. "e Italian immigrants’ wider spread over semi-urban areas (whichthe metropolis subsequently ate up) led to their relatively even distribution in spaceshown in later censuses. "e city came to the immigrants, not the immigrants to thecity; a process for which there is little room in Chicago School theory.

Much in the life and character of a city depends on when it was born, and by whatkind of parents. All cities have more than two parents, some local and others global.Singapore, for example, rose to the rank of global city due to the forces of Britishcolonialism, the opening of the Suez Canal, the political, economic and social historyof China, and eventually Southeast Asia’s decolonisation. Even where the builtenvironment itself remains relatively stable over several decades, the nature and themeanings of neighbourhoods can change radically over time. In the 20th-century US,inner cities were widely associated with poverty and decay, while moving to thesuburbs meant a step up the social ladder. In the 1990s, many pundits still believed



that the technological revolution of the internet would soon allow for the completedecoupling of workplace from residence, and thus abet the old American dream ofcomplete ruralisation. "e opposite happened. "e tech sector turned out to valuedensity even more than mass manufacturing had, and it helped to gentrify cities,reversing the trend towards suburbanisation and making central cities unaffordablefor all but the rich. "e decline of manufacturing and the digital revolution thusfuelled an inversion of the peculiarly US premium on the suburb, and the associatedstigma of the inner city.

Urban scholars interested in global cities, for all theirsensitivity to space, forgot the dimension of time

Yet, even as the socio-spatial organisation of US cities has become less idiosyncraticin recent decades, another change looms on the horizon. Alongside the gentrificationof their inner cities, a few metropolises have amassed an ever-rising share of wealthwhile blocking the building of more housing that could ease overpricing. "e logjamexacerbates rural-urban polarisation and fans anti-urban resentment. But it alsochokes the social mix of dense central districts, endangering the very characteristicsthat made these quarters so attractive in the first place. Whereas in 2002 the urbantheorist Richard Florida still championed the metropolitan clustering of what hecalled the ‘creative class’ as an engine of prosperity and urban renewal, his 2017 book<https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/richard-florida/the-new-urban-crisis/9780465079742/> diagnoses an ‘urban crisis’ as a result of the verygentrification he once advocated.

Greater interest in the long-term historical change of cities, or a look beyond thespecific case of North America, might well have spared him changing track fromfêting to foreboding with regard to what the ‘creative class’ does to our habitat. AsFrederick Cooper, a historian of Africa, has pointed out in Tensions of Empire (1997),globalisation, whether in the past 50 years or in the late-19th century, is ‘filled withlumps, places where power coalesces surrounded by those where it does not’. Usually,the lumps have been located in specific parts of specific cities. "e 19th-centurycommodity entrepôts of the global South, such as Buenos Aires or Singapore, providetelling examples of how bridgeheads of globalisation work. "eir city centres werepivots of power and wealth, while their outskirts accommodated the neverendingstream of rural poor migrating towards cities. Urban theory today would be welladvised to learn from such precedents.

Acknowledging that global and local forces together, over time, shape our cities andour social life therein amounts to no more than recognising every historian’s clichéthat ‘time and place matter fundamentally’, as Tilly admonished. And yet, in

https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/richard-florida/the-new-urban-crisis/9780465079742/



Michael Goebel

aeon.co

understanding global cities, one of the two is all too often dropped. "e historianJeremy Adelman warned <https://aeon.co/essays/is-global-history-still-possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment> recently that the rise of global history underestimated ‘thepower of place’. Conversely, urban scholars interested in global cities, for all theirsensitivity to space, forgot the dimension of time.

Urbanisation continues to proceed apace; and is unlikely to reverse. But that morethan half of all humans now live in cities is not the only reason why the urbanenvironment matters. As early 20th-century sociologists such as Simmel knew, socialdifferentiation as a whole has been centred in, and driven by, cities. Anyone interestedin globalisation and inequality therefore must look at the urban lumps in which vastglobal processes interact with small-scale social life. Sociologists, and urban theorists,are well aware of this urgency, which has lent some of them the status of intellectualcelebrities. But their writings lack the historical depth necessary to understand ourglobal urban present. Historians must step up to providing this depth.

is professor of global and Latin American history at the Freie Universität

Berlin. He is the author of Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of !ird

World Nationalism <http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/twentieth-

century-european-history/anti-imperial-metropolis-interwar-paris-and-seeds-third-world-

nationalism?format=HB#KgIvrcPbgSW4pzH2.97> (2015).

24 April, 2018

https://aeon.co/essays/is-global-history-still-possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment

http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/twentieth-century-european-history/anti-imperial-metropolis-interwar-paris-and-seeds-third-world-nationalism?format=HB#KgIvrcPbgSW4pzH2.97

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A metropolitan world - DU Portfolio