How Are We, as Human Beings, Related to One Another? | Reading Notes on the City, Part 1

This is a book column, so what follows recommends a number of books about cities and gentrification. The notes run long, and we are publishing them in three parts.

The city matters in our lives; much of the time it is our life. Everyone has something to say about the city — and in a sense what they say is what they think about living.

Treat these recommendations as an index. What we hope they pass on is not only the conclusions these earlier thinkers reached but, as always, something that pushes our own thinking further.

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Like Shaking Hands with God has little to do with cities. It is a book about literature — a few talks by the novelist Kurt Vonnegut. In one of them, two writers, Vonnegut and Lee Stringer, are out promoting their own novels together.

We know little about Lee Stringer: a Black man living in New York who felt he ought to set down his own life, and so wrote a novel called Grand Central Winter. Vonnegut said: "Your book ought to have political consequences, even though you never once ask for reform. In New York at least, this book (Grand Central Winter) deserves to be a bestseller. It shows us something most of us know nothing about: what the life of a homeless person is like. You have no wish to go begging on behalf of people who sleep outdoors. But everyone who reads this book is bound to say: Good God, something has to be done to change this."

Do what? Stringer asked.

Ban the whole thing? Drive these people away? Make them disappear from our sight? Fill every stomach? I don't know what can be done about it, except to work out what your relationship to it is. I think that is the only thing that can be done. It isn't about wiping out whatever offends our sense of things and of ourselves. It is only about finding your relationship to it. Simply this: when you pass someone on the street, what is your relationship to that person? I mean, how are we, as human beings, related to one another? Everything else is talk.

Kurt Vonnegut, Like Shaking Hands with God

"How are we, as human beings, related to one another." I think that question matters. In fact every question raised below, and every book recommended, should turn on it. It is the premise of all the thinking that follows.

"Everything else is talk."

Given that premise, most of what we take up here — above all the question of what ought to be done — is about cities in the global sense, not only our own city. Nor do we want to dodge our own city; looking further afield widens the view. And only after looking further afield do we begin to ask, in a country founded in the name of the poor, who the new poor are, why there are new poor at all, and why we choose not to see them and even try to push them out of sight — especially now that the country is rich, strong, and risen.

One thing we want to stress: the single premise for any discussion of what a city should be, of gentrification, of urban renewal, is respect for people.

On cities, gentrification, government, "them," the poor, the middle class, and "us"… whoever that "us" turns out to mean — the reader looking at this piece right now, the reader of Vonnegut's book, or the reader of Stringer's — our recommendations start here.

So What Is a City?

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In his book The City, the sociologist Robert E. Park strips away the idea of the city as a lifeless "artificial construct." The city "does not at first sight look like something grown naturally, free of human handiwork, and so it is hard to think of it as a living thing"; "people are easily fooled by the city's geometric shape into taking it for a purely artificial construct, one that can be pulled apart and put back together at will, like a house built of blocks." In fact the city begins in human nature.

Yet the city is in fact rooted in the habits and customs of its inhabitants. This means that while it has a physical mechanism, it also has a moral organism, and the two act on each other, shape each other, and change each other in particular ways. As a structure you can see, the city is huge in scale and complex in organization, and that is usually the first impression it leaves. Yet this structure grows out of human nature; it is one of the forms human nature takes. Conversely, though this vast objective mechanism came into being to meet the practical needs of its inhabitants, once formed it presses on them as an external fact of nature, and in turn shapes those inhabitants according to its own design and interests. The city's fabric and its traditions are only different faces of the same cultural complex, and only that complex can settle what makes the city different from the countryside, and city life different from life in the wild.

Robert E. Park, The City

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The architect and planner Henry Churchill explains, from inside his profession, what needs a city meets. "The colored lights, the crowds, the tense air of the open market, the oppressive sense of a life at once luxurious and sinful in the metropolis are only the surface of large city centers, not real city life" — and although chasing exactly those things is more or less where his profession's value and rewards lie, he still thinks they are the surface of the big city rather than its life. "Those things may pull people into big cities; they may leave the unworldly gaping, and then calling their cousins back in the small county town 'hicks'; they can draw tourists, or drifters. But they are absolutely not what a city lives on."

A city's real worth lies elsewhere:

Broadly speaking, planning a city's physical equipment and planning its economy mean nothing unless they are joined to the aims of social effort. The aim of social effort is, or ought to be, this: to make the city a place where children can be raised and educated into healthy, normal people; where people can find work enough to keep a family, with reasonable security; where convenience, company, recreation, and cultural life are all within reach. By any measure this is no utopian ideal; plenty of towns, then and now, have come close to it. In fact most people do not need much, nor do they imagine these standards to be very high. A clean home big enough for a family, with privacy of its own and a bit of ground for children to play on or a place for community activities; a good school; a steady job that pays for the family's food, housing, clothing, and doctors; a cinema, a bowling alley, a salon in the neighborhood; a library, a museum, a theater, or lesser versions of them. That is the substance of daily life in a city.

Henry Churchill, The City Is the People

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A passage by E. B. White on New York makes the same point about what city life is, in a different key.

But the wonderful thing about New York is that every large geographical unit is made up of countless small neighborhoods. Each one is self-sufficient. Usually it runs no more than two or three blocks long and a few blocks wide. Each is a city within a city within the city. So no matter where you live in New York, within a block or two you can find a grocery, a barber shop, a newsstand, a shoeshine stand, a basement place selling ice and coal (you can write your order on a pad by the door as you pass), a dry cleaner, a laundry, a delicatessen (beer and sandwiches delivered any hour), a florist, an undertaker, a movie house, a radio-repair shop, a stationer, a clothing store, a tailor, a drugstore, a parking lot, a tea shop, a bar, a hardware store, a shoe-repair shop. In most New York neighborhoods there is a little commercial street every block or two. A man leaves for work in the morning and, before he has walked two hundred yards, gets five or six things done: buys a paper; drops his shoes off to be resoled; buys a pack of cigarettes; orders a bottle of whiskey to be sent up after work; leaves a note for the invisible man at the coal shop; tells the dry cleaner there is a pair of trousers waiting. Eight hours later, on the way home, he buys a bunch of pussy willows and a Mazda bulb, has a drink and a shoeshine — all between the corner where he gets off and his own front door. These few blocks have everything, and a sense of belonging comes naturally; many New Yorkers spend a lifetime inside a patch no bigger than a village.

E. B. White, Here Is New York

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Here the first contradiction appears.

In White's account — if this is the New York of the 1940s he is describing — a great deal of that work would have been done by first- or second-generation immigrants: Eastern European Jews, Black people, Italians, Irish. If it were Shanghai, and if we still had neighborhoods like that, it would very likely be done by people from Anhui, Jiangxi, northern Jiangsu, Sichuan.

But city people dislike feeling unsafe. They are wary of newcomers, take them for spoilers of the city's good looks, and perhaps for criminals in waiting.

In Topophilia, Yi-Fu Tuan stresses this demand for "distinctiveness" and "purity." People draw boundaries around themselves and sort what is inside from what is outside into "us" and "them"; the wish to keep one's own side "pure" comes from a need for safety, and from attachment to a culture and a way of living.

A neighborhood with a character of its own has clear boundaries that mark it off from the mainstream of city life. Its distinctiveness rests on economic, social, and cultural factors. Several kinds of neighborhood can be picked out at a glance on the city's grid: the very rich, the very poor, the suburban enclaves and slums with little contact with the outside, the shantytowns made up of racial minorities or immigrants. But the people living in such places are not all equally aware that their neighborhood is distinct. The very rich care a great deal about the boundary of their turf — "we must keep it pure." The middle class in the suburbs goes further still. They too care greatly about the integrity of their turf, because their territory is easier than the rich man's for outsiders "who don't know the rules" to invade. People of color in shantytowns are forced into a wariness about home ground, because the moment they are away from it they can feel plain hostility. Whites living in slums — European immigrants clustered in certain blocks, for instance — hardly care whether they occupy an area with fixed boundaries and a particular character.

Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia

The very next paragraph of White's essay is already about that kind of safety.

…These few blocks have everything, and a sense of belonging comes naturally; many New Yorkers spend a lifetime inside a patch no bigger than a village. Let a man walk two blocks farther and he feels he has crossed into a foreign country, uneasy, and must come back. Shopkeepers are especially alive to the boundaries. A woman I know moved recently into another apartment three blocks away. The day after the move she turned up at the grocery she had gone to for years, and when the owner saw her he was so moved he nearly wept. "Now that you've gone," he said, "I thought I'd never see you again." To him, three blocks, or about seven hundred and fifty feet, was gone.

E. B. White, Here Is New York

The City's Waste…

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The problems and the contradictions look unavoidable, and there may well be no good answers. Fortunately Lee Stringer's question is always there: how are we, as human beings, related to one another? It keeps our thinking on what is probably the right axis — take away the idea of "people" and what is the point of thinking about any of this?

Cities, after all, are new. They have not been around long, and the big problems they run into — inner-city decay, community breakdown, gentrification — are, for most cities, happening for the first time. And, as Park says, the city is an organism made of human nature, while people are complicated and always changing; they act back on the city, and every step can throw up new problems of its own.

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Robert E. Park treats the city's making and unmaking as the building-up and breaking-down of an organism's metabolism. Individuals are absorbed into the city and become part of a social organism. "The natural way to have a culture is to be born into it. When a person is born into a family, that family has already adapted to a social environment — here, the modern city." Only then do ideas like community and neighborhood take on weight. And when the members of those communities run into economic trouble — unemployment, poverty — the city's growth keeps splitting them apart.

As time goes on, every district of the city takes on something bound up with the character and quality of the people who live in it. Every part of the city is inevitably tinted by the particular feelings of its inhabitants. What began as a geographical division with no content becomes a neighborhood: an area with sentiment, tradition, and a history of its own. Inside that neighborhood, history keeps its own continuity. The past shapes the present, and every neighborhood, driven by its own momentum, keeps unfolding a new life, more or less apart from the larger life outside it and the interests attached to that life.

Robert E. Park, The City

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I once heard William James say that "progress is a terrible thing." It is terrible mainly because it breaks the routines of life on which the existing social order rests, and so destroys the older cultural and economic values — thrift, respect for skill and hard work, and people's hopes, ambitions, and plans for their lives — which are the main things holding that order together. Anyone who has studied the great city will find that our great cities are full of waste, and that most of it is human: the men and women who, for one reason or another, fell behind in the headlong rush of industrialization and were discarded by the industrial organizations they once worked for.

Robert E. Park, The City

The terrible thing about progress — that is also what most people would rather not admit, or ignore, knowingly or not. If the city is an organism, it will keep producing garbage; and if what the city is made of and what it produces are both people, then that "garbage" will be people too.

The tragedy of the city more or less begins here.

Social division, urban renewal, gentrification, the dispossession of the inner-city poor, capital that is sometimes generous and more often ruthless, government policy that is by turns warm and cold — all of it turns on this.

One Principle: A Poor Population Is Not a Bad Thing

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Since this is about the makeup of a big city's population, let us stay with the United States a while longer.

In its attitude to outsiders, a city tilts toward wealthy, high-end arrivals — for the tax base, for jobs, for prosperity. When that preference comes from ordinary people it may not be politically correct, but it is understandable. It is an instinct about where you live: who does not want neighbors a little more like himself?

When it comes from the people running the city, that is another matter. Urban prosperity is not built on air, and knowing so is basic to governing.

A city's growth is decided by people.

High-end residents are not built on air either. Has New York drawn in high-end newcomers? Of course. But what has mattered most about New York is more than a century of taking immigrants in. The Irish, then the Italians, then the Jews, then freed Black people from the South, and now Puerto Ricans, Koreans, Vietnamese, and Chinese too.

The same goes for China's big cities. Shanghai's glory in the Far East in the hundred years before it opened as a treaty port was likewise the result of taking immigrants in.

In 2008, 36 percent of New Yorkers were born abroad, and 48 percent spoke two languages at home. For the United States as a whole the figures were 13 percent and 20 percent. Between 1891 and 2009, in all but 12 years, the New York Philharmonic relied on a foreign-born music director.

Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City

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Immigrants built New York's prosperity.

When large-scale immigration resumed in the late 1960s, people arrived from more parts of the world. By the 1980s they had begun to revive the city's local shopping streets. Years of migration to the suburbs, civil unrest, and the city's own fiscal crisis had left many of those streets starved of investment. In the early twenty-first century, nearly half of New York's small businesses were founded by people born abroad. On top of that, 90 percent of dry cleaners, 84 percent of grocery stores, 69 percent of restaurants, and 63 percent of clothing shops had immigrant owners.

Sharon Zukin, Philip Kasinitz, and Xiangming Chen, Global Cities, Local Streets

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A poor population is not a bad thing for a city.

Cities are full of poor people, but cities do not make people poorer; they attract poor people with the prospect of a better standard of living. The poverty rate among those who have just arrived in a big city is higher than among long-term residents, which suggests that city dwellers' wealth may rise a great deal over time. The poor who come to the city from elsewhere are not fools, and they have made no mistake. They pour in because the city offers what they could not find where they came from. The serious problem with urban slums is not that there are too many people in the city, but that these residents are too cut off from the big city's economic center. A large poor population is a genuine challenge we have to face, but hoping that cities can absorb millions of the rural poor is far better than hoping those would-be migrants will live out their days on isolated farmland. An area should be judged not by the poverty in it but by what it achieves in helping poorer people raise their social and economic standing. If a city keeps drawing in poorer people, helping them succeed, seeing them on their way, and then drawing in new poor migrants, then by one of society's most important measures it is a success. If a place has become the default home of the permanently poor, it has failed.

Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City

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A note on usage: in this piece, community, neighborhood, and city are often interchangeable.

Much of what we discuss has more to do with the inner city than with the new towns thrown up by suburbanization. But note this: after one or more rounds of urban redevelopment, Chinese cities, especially first- and second-tier ones, have pushed large numbers of inner-city residents out. Shanghai's several "large residential compounds" beyond the Outer Ring Road and Beijing's several new towns beyond the Fifth Ring Road mostly took in inner-city populations. That is very different from suburbanization in developed countries; it is essentially the wholesale relocation of the inner city.

It bears no resemblance to the suburbanization Neil Smith describes in The New Urban Frontier, in which city dwellers push out their own boundaries and the city's, in a line running back to the settling of the American West. It is, in fact, harsher.

And China's suburbanization has thrown up something else: the "urban-rural fringe" — more precisely, the Chinese version of the slum problem found around Asian cities. For reasons built into the system, the people living there are in effect stripped of political rights. They can never become a voting bloc, and they have no chance of periodic relief through an election.

Back to the question itself. Every urban problem we face has a side that cannot be answered, but we cannot ignore the question Vonnegut raised about Stringer's book: Good God, something has to be done to change this.

Gentrification, argued over endlessly, appears against this background. It looks different from place to place: urban renewal, urban transformation, greater livability…

From Inner City to Suburb, and from Suburb Back to a Gentrified Inner City: Urban Development Keeps Correcting Itself

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Gentrification is part of how cities develop, and it shows up as inner-city revival, so people usually tie its rise to the inner city's decline and recovery. That decline and recovery came partly from social breakdown and partly from technology reshaping the city.

Start with this: the loss of inner-city population is a result of the technological revolution. Frank Lloyd Wright had already said as much in his Kahn Lectures at Princeton in 1930. After five lectures on architecture, technology, style, housing, and the skyscraper, his last was "The City." What he said astonished the audience. "I believe," he proposed, "that the city as we know it today is gone." He listed the technologies — the airplane, the automobile, the telephone, the radio — that were encouraging people to scatter.

Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis

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Decades later Robert Sampson argued that human beings had made a new world without place. That world came out of globalization, new communication technology, and urban diversity all working at once.

Everyone has heard the claim: because we can go anywhere, the condition of the place we belong to will not much affect the rest of our lives. As identity is "decentered," the neighborhood is written off as obsolete and replaced by interchangeable global networks. Economics, politics, and the state are also said to dissolve local context. Without meaning to, we follow Louis Wirth's argument, but with new figures of speech added: people cynically hold that individuals, like places, have been atomized and have lost the communities they grew up in. For a different reason, this view leaves no more room for neighborhood effects than the individual-choice view does. It treats top-down ("big") processes as an all-encompassing force that swamps individuals and neighborhoods alike.

Robert Sampson, Great American City

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In a sense this process of technological change is not over. The reporting we once ran in the "QDaily Anthropology" column on how people reorganize themselves around internet communities is a plain illustration of the "scattering" Frank Lloyd Wright described and the "decentering" Robert Sampson described.

Technology makes images of places easier to obtain, but it also strengthens the sense that local communities are leftovers from another age. Nineteenth-century railways and photographs made it easy to reach distant places, but they also robbed the local prospect of its immediacy and depth. Today even the smallest place can be joined to the rest through the synchronous exchange of electronic media — which destroys the social distance that made local experience distinctive. In short, as markets grow global, place declines.

Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World

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"Decentering," together with the "deindustrialization" discussed in pieces we have recommended before, remade the city. With the growth of the car industry, Wright's "encouraging people to scatter" came true to a degree. For a long stretch, suburbanization was the city's first choice.

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But in Calvino's account this new kind of city has little appeal; he even felt that super-industrialization had pushed humanity back toward the age of farming.

These days traveling around Cleveland and Detroit showed me far more of "America" than the two months I had spent in New York. To some extent it corrected the impression I had formed, that "America is not American enough." The first thing to change was my own idea of a "city." You come off the highway looking for the city — where is the city? You drive around for hours and never find anything you would imagine as a center. Yes, there is still a "downtown," a cluster of offices, but the residential quarter has vanished; houses are scattered here and there as they are in our countryside. The middle class generally lives in two-story houses set well apart along the streets of near-identical subdivisions. Here you can barely move without a car, and there is nowhere in particular to go. There are no corner shops or small restaurants in the old sense near the houses; perhaps at some intersection there is a shopping center, the place where people go to buy things. We might call this the result of highly concentrated urban commerce, but it has gone too far. The city has broken into fragments, and manners and habits of mind have changed with it. Super-industry has pushed the world back to the small family as its core, the whole household gathered around the little stove — now the television set — just as in the farming civilization of yesterday.

Italo Calvino, An Optimist in America

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The troubles with suburbanization do not stop there. In less than a generation the drawbacks were fully on show. Suburban Nation, by Jeff Speck and his co-authors, sets out several that may do damage for far longer.

Unfortunately this pattern of segregation keeps itself going. A child raised in such a uniform environment finds it hard to feel sympathy for people from another class, and hard to fit into a mixed society. "Other people" are outsiders to him, seen only on television shows he is told exaggerate. The more alike and the safer people's surroundings, the less they understand people and things unlike themselves, and the less they care about the world beyond the wall. The blade cuts both ways: the poor know little about the middle class, are convinced those people are not the same species, and are deaf to their troubles.

Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation

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In China, even without cities that are purely suburban, this beggar-thy-neighbor problem has already surfaced, and in a fiercer form. In Suburban Nation the authors call the new middle-class generation born in the suburbs "cul-de-sac kids."

We know them better by another name: "giant babies."

The broad, safe, green spaces of the suburbs are good for children to play in, and that is the upside. So what is bad for them? In the suburbs children lose the freedom to move on their own. Every place worth going to is separated from every other, and the distance between them is measured on a car's odometer. In such a setting a child's independent range never reaches past the edge of the subdivision; even the local ball field is often beyond what he can get to alone. The result is something new — the "cul-de-sac kid," children living like prisoners in surroundings that are perfectly safe and utterly unchallenging. Perhaps until the age of five this is acceptable, and some parents want exactly that. But what about the next ten or twelve years? Children go on depending on adults to drive them everywhere, so children and teenagers never get the practice that makes a person grow up. They cannot run out for a pail of milk; they cannot bike to the toy store to spend their own pocket money; they cannot turn up unannounced where their mother works; usually they cannot even walk to school. Even the pickup baseball games children used to throw together are history, because parents have to schedule each carpool pickup with military precision. Children stay at an infant's level of self-reliance, dependent on others for everything. They lose the ability to make a life of their own, and are denied the chance to judge and choose for themselves. Suburban parents often hand out an allowance to encourage independence. "Buy whatever you like!" they say. And the child answers: "Thanks, Mom. When can you drive me to the mall?"

Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation

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And then there is the car. It turned a sociable people into enemies each fighting alone — if you remember Tocqueville's warm praise of nineteenth-century Americans, the passage below will leave you in despair.

In the suburbs, the time people once spent in public is now spent in a space that is both private and potentially antisocial: the car. The moment an ordinary American sits down behind the wheel, he stops being a citizen and turns into a motorist. Which means you can no longer become a friend who knows his neighbor well, because what lies between you is mainly competition. You fight over road space. Hesitate for a second at the wheel, or make one wrong move, and your neighbor lets you know at once: leaning on the horn, taking your spot, cutting in ahead of you, and worse. When people excuse their own rudeness, roughness, and aggression, driving has become as worn-out an alibi as drink — "He cut into my lane, what was I supposed to do?" And so the social contract is torn up. Why this happens deserves more study. One thing is certain: two pedestrians passing each other almost never behave that way.

Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation

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The suburban middle class began to miss city life. The reckoning went on at every level.

"Civic life requires settings in which people meet one another as equals. From political bodies to parks and other informal gathering places, all urban public space is in decline, so that human contact has become almost as specialized a business as the production of knowledge." (Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.) Without walkable space — streets, squares, parks, the public realm — people of different ages, races, and beliefs rarely get the chance to meet and talk. Some argue that websites and chat rooms can stand in for public space, but they badly underrate the difference between a computer monitor and a living body.

Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation

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Even Disney has become a form of wealth: what it sells is the chance at social contact that ordinary life lacks. Go back once more to Tocqueville on the democratic temper and the sense of community in American society, and you get a measure of how badly what once seemed a matter of course has been warped by modern urban development.

Suburbanites in great numbers like to take their holidays there. A Disney architect has pointed out that visitors typically spend only 3 percent of their time on rides and shows; the great bulk of the rest goes to enjoying a commodity in short supply at home in the suburbs — pleasant, convenient walkable public space, and the social life such a setting produces. Social space has now become almost the private product of the Disney company and the developers of large shopping malls, whereas city builders in the past — Greek fishermen of antiquity, early American observers alike — took it as a matter of course. Only with the rise of modern city planning did the making of successful public places fall into decline. Among the reasons for that decline, one matters a great deal: the rules for building these places are far too simple.

Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation

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The conclusion is that gentrification cannot be escaped.

(To be continued)

Cover image: a still from the film New York, I Love You, via Douban.