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I thought this book's contents looked of interest to some maps-l folk, Alice.
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Subject: REVIEW: Rotenberg/McDonogh, CULTURAL MEANING OF URBAN SPACE
Author: "Martha J. Bianco; H-Urban Co-Editor" <[log in to unmask]> at
Internet
Date: 2/20/96 9:03 AM
Posted by Amanda Seligman <[log in to unmask]>
Robert Rotenberg and Gary McDonogh, editors. THE CULTURAL MEANING OF
URBAN SPACE. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1993. xix + 226 pp.
Illustrations, plans, references. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-897-89319-0;
paper, $16.95, ISBN 0-897-89320-4.
Reviewed by Amanda Seligman for H-Urban, January 1996
Northwestern University and the Newberry Library
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Contents:
Introduction Robert Rotenberg
Part I: THE LANGUAGE OF PLACE
Ch. 1 The Geography of Emptiness Gary McDonogh
Ch. 2 On the Salubrity of Sites Robert Rotenberg
Ch. 3 Chinese Privacy Deborah Pellow
Ch. 4 Rediscovering Shitamachi: Subculture, Class, and Tokyo's
"Traditional" Urbanism Theodore C. Bestor
Part II: PLACE IN THE CITY
Ch. 5 We Have Always Lived under the Castle: Historical Symbols and
the Maintenance of Meaning John Mock
Ch. 6 Cultural Meaning of the Plaza: The History of the
Spanish-American Gridplan Plaza Urban Design Setha M. Low
Ch. 7 Italian Urbanscape: Intersection of Private and Public
Donald S. Pitkin
Ch. 8 Mapping Contested Terrains: Schoolrooms and Streetcorners
in Urban Belize Charles Rutheiser
Part III: PLANNING AND RESPONSE
Ch. 9 Beyond the Built Form and Culture in the Anthropological
Study of Residential Community Spaces Margaret Rodman
Ch. 10 Housing Abandonment in Inner-City Black Neighborhoods:
A Case Study on the Effects of the Dual Housing Market
Susan D. Greenbaum
Ch. 11 Access to the Waterfront: Transformations of Meaning
on the Toronto Lakeshore Matthew Cooper
Ch. 12 Public Access on the Urban Waterfront: A Question of Vision
R. Timothy Sieber
_The Cultural Meaning of Urban Space_ originated as a symposium
at the 1990 meeting of the American Anthropological Association
dedicated to exploring "what commonalities exist in the process of
giving meaning to urban spaces in various cities" (p. xi). Editors
Robert Rotenberg and Gary McDonogh assembled the presented papers and
additional solicited articles into the three parts of the published
volume. Rotenberg claims in his introduction that "all urbanites share
life experiences through the commonalities or [sic] urban conditions
and the shared metropolitan knowledge....city dwellers share meanings
regardless of the particular city they inhabit or the history that has
shaped their particular culture" (p. xii). Although this book falls
short of demonstrating Rotenberg's claim that one can find some
universal urban meaning, the variety of approaches deployed by the
authors does suggest that urban historians might venture more boldly
into exploring the meanings of spaces.
Rotenberg's ahistoricism is apparent both in the volume's
introduction and in his chapter "On the Salubrity of Sites." In this
article Rotenberg juxtaposes the writings of the first-century Roman
architect Vitruvius with the musings of his own late-twentieth-century
Viennese informants. In _De Architectura_, Vitruvius gave directions
for choosing healthy locations for cities in order (in Rotenberg's
words) "to minimize the noxious influences of nature on the lives of
the people" (p. 18). Although the writings of Vitrivius disappeared
from most of Europe until the Renaissance, his ideas, writes Rotenberg,
continued to influence interpretations of nature in Central Europe,
particularly in Vienna (p. 19). In the twentieth century, wealthy
residents of Vienna take great pleasure in their private gardens,
hurrying home from work to enjoy the fresh air and exercise of
gardening. From this dubious continuity, Rotenberg concludes that the
"fundamental problem of urban life" is "that, at its heart, urban
agglomeration is pestilential in character" (pp. 27-28). Anticipating
his argument in the volume's introduction, Rotenberg writes, "there is
magic in the feelings of wholesomeness and longevity that people
attribute to their life in garden. It is a place we all know" (p. xv).
Yet the other articles in this volume, rather than suggesting that
urbanites seek and find a mystical place they all know, show that city
dwellers discover in their surroundings a variety of pleasures and
displeasures.
Scholars have come to call "urban" an area of human habitation
characterized by concentration of population. Students of sociology,
anthropology, history, and other social sciences have devoted much
attention in the twentieth century to discerning the consequences of
urbanism, including the important question of whether there is some
common urban experience. Rotenberg takes this logic a step further,
assuming not only that there is a common experience, but also that
common experience gives rise to common meaning: thus both of the nouns
in the book's title are singular, not plural. But most of the articles
are quite sensitive to context, suggesting that meanings arise in
particular times and places. In exploring how scholars can approach
the search for meanings and demonstrating a variety of ways urban people
have interpreted spaces, the rest of the volume provides readers with
fruitful lessons.
The four articles in the first section of the book, "The
Language of Place," approach the problem of urban space through
particular concepts, examining what those concepts can reveal about
cities. The most promising of these is offered by Gary McDonogh, the
volume's co-editor, in "The Geography of Emptiness." Reasoning that if
denseness is the defining characteristic of cities, then empty spaces
within cities profoundly disturb their character (p. 7), McDonogh
studies allegedly empty spaces as sites of conflict (p. 4). From such
sites of conflict we can learn what matters to urban residents about
their surroundings--from which we can begin to discover the cultural
meanings of urban space. For example, McDonogh points to "the
Rambles," Barcelona's downtown promenade, which he was warned away from
because "no one" went there. Yet, the Rambles are full of activity
carried out by people whose presence is a sore point for those who
warned McDonogh to stay away (pp. 9-10). From this and other similar
episodes he concludes that by attending to the ways in which people
talk about the "empty" spaces in cities, one can learn about "points of
trace and conflict in history, across social divisions, in planning"
(p. 13). In comparison to Rotenberg's insistence (also in this section
of the book) that salubrity held a continuous value for European
urbanites, McDonogh's article gently suggests how to seek out such
meanings, yet is much more instructive.
Similarly, Deborah Pellow's article on "Chinese Privacy" traces
across time how residents of the crowded city of Shanghai have
responded to their shortage of living space while privacy has come to
be valued as much for individuals as for families (p. 34). Theodore C.
Bestor's piece "Rediscovering Shitamachi" investigates the
transformations in local interpretations of two areas within Tokyo and
how the spaces themselves have represented distinct ways of life. The
lesson of these articles is that the interpretations of local spaces
are not fixed, but are instead historically dynamic and, in that
dynamism, revealing.
A second set of articles explores scholars' assumptions about
the meaning of urban spaces. Rather than directly studying how
urbanites understand their environment, Setha Low, Margaret Rodman,
Susan Greenbaum, and Donald Pitkin reflect on how scholars' own
experiences of space and inherited assumptions can lead to
idiosyncratic interpretations of what local spaces mean to their
residents. Low's article argues that scholars have mistakenly claimed
that the towns with gridplans and central plazas in Spanish North
America derived solely from European colonizers (p. 76). Her work,
however, suggests the influence of Aztec, Mayan, and Taino sources for
the development of the gridplan-plaza complex. She asks, "If the
central plaza and Great Temple of Tenochtitlan were the sacred spaces
of the Aztec world, then what is the meaning of the cultural
preservation that occurs when Cortes decides to build Mexico City on
the ruins of this space, thus perpetuating the ceremonial plaza and
Great Temple in its new Spanish-American plaza and cathedral form?" (p.
78) Although she does not provide evidence to answer such questions
definitively, Low's piece reminds the reader that an unexamined set of
assumptions can lead scholars to misread evidence subsequently
gathered.
Conversely, Donald Pitkin's article is a reflection on the
importance of ignorance. When Pitkin first visited Italy in 1948, he was
struck by the contrast between his own experiences of rather reserved
uses of public spaces and the freedom with which Italians seemed to
extend their homes into the streets (p. 98). Pitkin subtly emphasizes
his lack of knowledge by confessing not to know the origin of the
"bella figura," in which promenaders "burnish the image of self for the
consumption of others," speculating that the "origin is to be found in
ancient urban settings where a premium was placed on the appraisal of
others for which propinquity selected" (p. 98). [1] Pitkin eventually
learned enough for his doctoral thesis, but the
point of this article is that it was his ignorance--or perhaps, more
kindly, his openness--that allowed him to learn. He shows that for all
people--whether living as residents in or as students of urban
areas--"space is not given in nature but is socially constructed,
continuously contested, and known experientially" (p. 101).
In a more statistical vein, Susan Greenbaum's article, "Housing
Abandonment in Inner-City Black Neighborhoods," examines the creation
of a residential ghetto in Kansas City, Kansas, after World War II.
Greenbaum argues that the creation of black ghettos should be
understood not in terms of simple white flight from black invaders, but
in terms of the existence of two racially based housing markets within
a single region.
The final article that may be grouped in this set is Margaret
Rodman's study. Rodman argues that scholars who would derive their
understandings of space from architecture alone unnecessarily
limit their vision. To demonstrate this, Rodman discusses the
active attempts to maintain a sense of community among residents of
cooperative housing in Toronto. Although the physical layouts of
cooperative buildings do not show much common space, meetings for
making decisions about the community are one of the most important ways
of maintaining its coherence. And, in fact, the shortage of common
meeting space is one of the chief points of conflict over the shape of
such cooperatives (p. 136). Thus, Rodman makes an argument for "a
synthesis of experience-based approaches to understanding place with
those that treat space as socially constructed and contested" (p. 137).
The remainder of the articles model a variety of ways of
discovering interpretations of urban space in specific temporal and
geographical contexts. Two of the articles--"We Have Always Lived
under the Castle: Historical Symbols and the Maintenance of Meaning"
by John Mock and Theodore C. Bestor's "Rediscovering
Shitamachi"--examine the workings of historical memory of specific
sites in Japanese culture. Mock's article explores how public spaces
in the city of Hikone have retained cultural significance over time,
even as the specific interpretations of those sites have changed. He
nicely demonstrates how one can look for cultural continuities even
across periods of substantial social and economic change. Bestor's
article, mentioned earlier, takes two regions of Edo/Tokyo and shows
how the local valuations of these areas have intertwined and contrasted
with one another.
Another pair of articles, on waterfront space in North America,
explores how changing attitudes toward the border between land and water
reflect transformations in the organization of citywide space. In
Toronto, Matthew Cooper shows, as the waterfront was transformed from a
space useful for transportation into the controversial commercial
Harbourfront project, not only did the space itself change, but the
meaning of access to the waterfront changed as well. In an approach
that resembles Gary McDonogh's argument for looking to "empty" sites as
"zones of conflict," Cooper argues that visual access to the waterfront
became as compelling a source for planning as physical access.
Similarly, R. Timothy Sieber explores the images of water in Boston in
the 1970 and 1980s. He argues that the developing importance of visual
access to water--reflected in higher prices assigned to properties from
which people can see water and in advertisements for condominiums
showing water scenes rather than the available property--reflects the
latest manifestation of urbanites' historical search for nature in the
city.
Charles Rutheiser, in "Mapping Contested Terrains: Schoolrooms
and Streetcorners in Urban Belize," takes a different angle. Rather
than showing how a single site or type of site has changed in meaning
over time, Rutheiser shows how at a given moment, different sites in a
city can take on different meanings for young people. Thus, particular
schools and streets have come to function differently for youth of
different economic and social backgrounds in Belize City. As gangs
modeled on those in the United States arose in the late 1980s, the
meaning of local neighborhoods changed from isolated "bases" to spaces
seen within a regional geographic hierarchy.
Urban historians have not done a great deal to study the
subject that makes up the core of this book: the cultural meaning of
urban space. When historians talk about the spatial characteristics of
human habitation, they usually are referring either to
demographics--that is, how people divide themselves and others into
distinctive neighborhoods [2]--or architecture [3]. A few historians
have begun to study how people use the spaces in cities. For example,
Earl Lewis explores the public use of Norfolk's streets by
African-Americans and Thomas Jablonsky's _Pride in the Jungle_ explicitly
traces the development of a sense of bounded neighborhood on the South Side
of Chicago [4]. But what those spaces have meant to people in
the past, and what those meanings can tell us about history, remain
largely unexamined. In 1974, geographer Yi-Fu Tuan argued that "The
life style of a people is the sum of their economic, social, and
ultramundane activities. These generate spatial patterns; they require
architectural forms and material settings which, upon completion, in
turn influence the patterning of activities." [5]
Some of the approaches taken by the anthropologist contributors to
this book may not prove particularly useful to historians--they are
embedded in debates internal to that discipline (for example, Deborah
Pellow's article on Chinese privacy). But some of the other approaches
do jibe quite nicely with historical projects. Historians may want to
attend to the meaning of urban spaces for a variety of reasons. To
offer one example, Mark Gelfand notes in _A Nation of Cities_ that
during the 1940s urban policy-makers paid particular attention to
physical blight as the urban problem [6]. Complementing this
observation with a cultural study of how residents of blighted areas
interpreted the significance of their physical surroundings, and
whether these views were consistent with those of local authorities,
might pay significant dividends in explaining white flight, urban
"unrest," and relationships between poor people and government
officials in the postwar era.
At the end of the book's introduction, Rotenberg writes, "the
cultural meaning of urban spaces, like all languages, has a standard
syntax, but also a local accent. The strength of these chapters is that
they together analyze the syntax, while training our ears to hear the
accent in the urbanite's valuation of space" (p. xix). Rotenberg is
correct to say that the book's contribution is to aid readers in tuning
in the specific meanings people use as they transform the spaces around
them into places. But he goes too far in claiming that the book
gathers a previously unknown language together in comprehensible form,
for even he does not attempt to articulate what the core of the "shared
metropolitan knowledge" might be.
Notes
[1] His speculation is most likely correct: in Book I of the _Ars
Amatoria_ (line 99), the Roman poet Ovid commented that wealthy ladies
attended public games to see the spectacle, and to be seen themselves
("spectatum veniunt, veniunt spectentur ut ipsae").
[2] See, for example, "Spatial Patterns of Rapid Growth," chapter 3 in
Sam Bass Warner, _The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of
Its Growth_ (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), or
Thomas Walter Hanchett, "Sorting out the New South City: Charlotte and
Its Neighborhoods" (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, 1993).
[3] Gwendolyn Wright, _Building the Dream: A Social History of
Housing in America_ (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981).
[4] Earl Lewis, _In Their Own Interests: Race, Class and Power in
Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia_ (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1991), p. 91, and Thomas J. Jablonsky, _Pride in the
Jungle: Community and Everyday Life in Back of the Yards Chicago_
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
[5] Yi-Fu Tuan, _Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception,
Attitudes, and Values_ (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974),
p. 173.
[6] Mark I. Gelfand, _A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and
Urban America, 1933-1965_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
Amanda Seligman
Northwestern University and the Newberry Library
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