Metropolis - Center and Symbol of Our Times

 Today, more than any other period in history, people are living in metropolitan areas far removed from life on the farm or the life of nomadic herdsmen.  In Metropolis - Center and Symbol of our Times, Philip Kasinitz, has artfully assembled twenty five essays on five major themes of the modern metropolis; 1) Modernity and the Urban Ethos; 2) Rationality and its Discontents: the Making of the Metropolis of New York City; 3) Community Rediscovered, Community Reassessed: Social Bonds in the Modern City; 4) Social Relations and Public Faces; and 5) The Future of the City: Space, Race, Class and Politics.  

While Kasinitz has done a masterful job of identifying the dangers and the vital functions of urban civilization, this collection would have benefited by a counterpoint discussion of how modern cities have absorbed the culture of rural America into its fold. Cities indeed are the Center and symbol of our times and Kasinitz got that right. The point that Arthur Vidich might make is that not only is the modern city the central institution of modern American life its influences extend far into the rural hinterlands. Centralization, logistics management, and real-time connectivity have so dramatically transformed America that the borders between urban and rural life have become meaningless - from a business, cultural and governmental standpoint.  Yet some of the essays in this edited work rely on geo-spatial realities that are no longer meaningful in the age of the Internet.

Although published in 1995, before the age of Facebook, Linked-In and other social media technologies, the essays on urban communities continue to be extremely relevant as cities remain the melting pots of our nation. Despite the current generation's obsession with technological connectivity, an essay by Joseph Bensman and Arthur Vidich contends that trans-spatial communities continue to thrive in large metropolitan areas reflecting the unique social fabric of each individual based on their race, ethnicity, education and organizational affiliations. Rather than viewing a metropolis as a collection of urban neighborhoods of common race or ethnicity, Bensman and Vidich point to city life as the ideal milleu for freeing individuals from the geographic constraints of the rural community where peer influence squashed individuality. Richard Sennett takes up a similar theme in his provocative essay "Community Life Becomes Uncivilized" where he argues that the anomie of large cities actually propels urbanites to seek out "...close, open relations face to face with other people in the same territory." Paradoxically, these close relationships, in his view, lead to a breakdown of urban life as ethnic neighborhoods act as warring tribes against the incursions of outsiders. In contrast to Bensman and Vidich who see tremendous opportunities for trans-spatial social networks in the midst of a vast metropolis of unconnected people, Sennett sees the dangers of geo-spatial networks where diversity is absent and group thinking leads to uncivilized behavior.  Enclaves of like minded persons, in Sennett's analysis is not a good thing and reflects bad urban planning. While it might be easy to blame urban planners for the ills of modern urban life, Sennett could have pointed out that segregated neighborhoods also bear testimony to broader economic, social and political forces that influence the housing choices of urban Americans.

The six essays on social relations and public places rely heavily on some of the insights of Jane Jacobs groundbreaking analysis of certain urban neighborhoods which became vital places to live and work.  In the first essay in this section, Jeff Weintraub explores the wide range of meanings of public space emphasizing that in the pre-industrial era when the family was the central unit of society (i.e., work and living activities encompassed the same space), the term public space had an entirely different meaning than today. The breakdown of the traditional family and the dispersion of work, recreation and living activities in different locations within a city, corresponds to the division of life into a public and private sector. Weintraub views the misplaced search for intimacy within the public sphere as a result of our search for family values that were lost during the past century. The need for sociability rather than intimacy is what he calls the real desire of urban dwellers in modern cities following the lead of Mediterranean cities - not those in America. As Weintraub sees it, life was lived in public in Mediterranean cities and there was no need for "...intense privatization of the family and intimate relations, with their sharp separation from an impersonal public realm..." In essence, Weintraub's point is that we must reframe our expectations of urban life if we wish to appreciate its wide range of pleasures and opportunities.

In contrast to Weintraub's focus on sociability as an urban virtue, Michael Walzer bemoans the breakdown of urban public spaces in his essay "Pleasures and Costs of Urbanity."  Pointing to the loss of the multi-purpose public square, he notes that we have increasingly transformed cities from places to be sociable and enjoy life to places of destination or transit. He brilliantly distinguishes between single-minded spaces and open-minded spaces within the modern city and explains that this distinction is central to why modern cities no longer appeal to many people. Zoned business and residential areas are single-minded spaces whereas neighborhoods "with its own stores and shops and small factories constitute open-minded space." While he implies that open-minded spaces are the panacea for the ills of urban life, Walzer also recognizes such a single minded approach would devastate the vast technological and logistical improvements associated with modern transit systems, computers and the Internet most of which create single-minded space (note; one exception would be trains where more intimate and multi-dimensional relations occur than can be found in a single occupancy automobile). Yet the need for open-minded spaces continues to drive human behavior as Walzer contends since "people will continue to want to rub shoulders even if they are leery of actual encounters."

Moving from the myopic concerns of public spaces (as set forth in Part 4 - Social Relations and Public Places) to the future of the city (the final section of the book), Robert Fishman lays out his vision of where the Metropolis of the 21st century may be headed. In his essay, "Megalopolis Unbound" he points to the unravelling of the traditional central city as a result of the revolutions in logistics, transportation and commerce that have marginalized the cost of communication across the nation. Rather than a series of hub and spoke cities with big cities at the hub and little cities at the end of each spoke, in other words, a city defined by space, Fishman notes that the new city is "based on time rather than space." Rather than a central city, the city of the future is one that is formed based on the particular needs of a family or an individual based on their unique shopping, working and recreational habits.  This freedom from the constraints of space - largely attributable to the modern automobile and the interstate highway system - has created the edge city or linear city. The edge city depends on three networks - household patterns of travel; consumption patterns of travel and production or work patterns of travel. To the extent that these driving forces encourage households to recede from the urban center, American cities are fated to decline at the expense of urban sprawl focused along the interstate highway system. Fishman's critique is a damning assessment of the lack of urban or national land planning.  Market forces, rather than protection of the central city and the protection of its surrounding natural environment have devastated modern cities as well as as millions of acres of forest and farmland that were once intimately associated with the urban fringe.

Kasinitz's edited collection also includes excellent essays on urban life by Lewis Mumford, one of the great urbanists of the 20th century, and George Simmel, one of the founders of sociology, and an advocate on the virtues of city living and its benefits for the intellectual life.  Yet none of these essays is more powerful than that of Fishman's assessment of the modern city.  Fishman has identified the key variables that will either support or destroy the modern city.  His vision, if anything, has been reinforced by the rapid adoption of social media technologies, the cell phone and other "virtual realities" that marginalize traditional conceptions of urban versus rural space. This book is a "must read" for anyone interested in the history and fate of the modern city.