What Is Missing From Our Understanding of Cities, and What Actually Drives Prosperity? | Urban Issues Reading Notes (Part 3)

This is a books column, and what follows recommends several books about cities and gentrification. The reading notes run long; this is the final installment.

Cities play a large part in our lives; much of the time they are our lives. Everyone has a view of the city — and in a sense that view is a view of life itself.

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

Previously:

How Are We, as Humans, Connected to One Another?

Where Does Gentrification Come From, Why Is It Inevitable, and How Does It Create Injustice?

In our understanding of cities, what is missing, and what stays vague? What, for instance, is society?

60

Scholars have been writing about what China lacks at the level of society since the 1980s. Transcending Boundaries, in which Xiang Biao takes Zhejiangcun as his subject, looks at society up close through fieldwork, and is well worth reading.

A revised edition came out in 2018, and the prefaces written for the various editions at various times are widely admired. In them Xiang Biao sets out further observations: after several decades, the problem of the missing society in China has not improved; as government power has expanded, social space has shrunk further and been reduced to "physical space"; the administrative system is deeply "territorialized"; the government's suspicion of society runs deep.

61

In a preface written in 2016, Xiang Biao notes that most of the "Zhejiangcun people" who stayed in Beijing bought mid- to high-end commercial housing, left behind the unskilled labor of garment production, and now live much like other city residents in Beijing — "urbanization and marketization do seem to have produced integration." But the reality is otherwise. What made the place vital and inventive is gone.

But Zhejiangcun's social autonomy — its capacity to organize and innovate from the bottom up — has also disappeared. The kind of spontaneous housing construction and mutual-aid groups seen before 1995 is unimaginable today. Although most Zhejiangcun people have now bought apartments and moved upstairs, they still have no Beijing household registration; their children must attend expensive private schools or pay heavy sponsorship fees to get into public ones. The integration we see is not the integration of "Zhejiangcun people" into urban society but their dealings with the urban market as owners of commercial housing and buyers of private education. Meanwhile the district and township governments have gained far more power to intervene and to extract resources, and "Zhejiangcun" has entirely lost its ability to force policy change from below. In the 1990s, press coverage of "Zhejiangcun" was often critical of the city government; from the mid-2000s on, it was almost uniformly an endorsement of the government's industrial upgrading and old-town redevelopment.

Xiang Biao, Transcending Boundaries: Zhejiangcun, the Story of a Migrant Village in Beijing

62

Set that against the judgment he made nearly 20 years earlier, in the late 1990s: "in certain domains, a division between state and society has appeared in China" — but a division that was "a name without the substance," present in name yet never given real substance in policy, in law, or in ordinary social understanding.

Twenty years on, the situation may look more like a name without the substance: as registered investors and homebuyers, "Zhejiangcun people" are nominally independent economic and legal actors, but they no longer amount to a real social force. The formalization Zhejiangcun went through is a general trend across mainland China. Since the 1990s, all manner of certifications and approvals have grown more transparent in procedure, yet administrative power has also grown larger and harder to get around. Government and state-owned enterprises are once again the first choice for university graduates. The imbalance in the social structure arrives alongside the formal orderliness of daily life, the tidiness of the streets, the ease of getting around — and is in fact achieved through them, which is also how its internal contradictions are hidden.

Xiang Biao, Transcending Boundaries: Zhejiangcun, the Story of a Migrant Village in Beijing

63

The upshot: social space becomes plain "physical space."

The formalization of "Zhejiangcun" reduced a budding "new social space" to a physical space. The subject of social space is people, and what makes it up is a tangle of relationships, inevitably messy. The subject of physical space is land, and what governs it is a single, uniform market plan set inside an administrative framework. Facing a social space, a government has to negotiate, compromise, learn to coexist. The tools for handling physical space are simple: demolish, relocate, sell.

Xiang Biao, Transcending Boundaries: Zhejiangcun, the Story of a Migrant Village in Beijing

64

Another result is a taste for segregation. It comes from the government's need for easy administration and for stability, and it also suits the middle class's not-in-my-backyard demands. Segregation takes different forms everywhere in the world, but seeing it stated so nakedly, with so little embarrassment, is still startling. The social tension set off by spontaneous migration is, in the end, produced by the overall design of the administrative system; household registration is only one small part of that system. China's administrative system divides rights and duties strictly along territorial lines, provincial ones above all. When the Beijing municipal government cleared out "Zhejiangcun" in 1995, for instance, it issued a special order forbidding any district or county in Beijing to take in "Zhejiangcun people," so as to push this floating population entirely outside the city's administrative boundary. Baffling as it is, the State Council signed off on the policy. Apparently not even the central government grasped that these migrants are Chinese citizens who will go on living in China, and that shoving them from one administrative district into another solves nothing!

Xiang Biao, Transcending Boundaries: Zhejiangcun, the Story of a Migrant Village in Beijing

65

Xiang Biao then names the crux of it.

Under a territorialized administration, territorial and spatial boundaries do not matter in themselves. Territory looks important because the system believes that confining people inside clearly drawn administrative borders is the most effective form of control. So what matters is not the relationship between one place and another but the relationship between state and society. As long as that stance holds, household-registration reform will not reduce the tension created by rising spontaneous migration. Take "Zhejiangcun." The dayuan — the compounds the migrants built for themselves, combining housing and workshops — were a peculiar kind of space that might have served as a broker between the government and the migrants and improved administration. The local Dahongmen police station saw that potential and hoped to use the compounds to rein in the neighborhood's criminal gangs. But the attempt to treat each compound as an independent unit of social management, working with its boss, never won approval from higher up. Not because it was a poor fit for territorial administration, but because the government worried that the compound bosses would gain power from it. Any measure that raises the level of social self-governance might lower the crime rate, but over the long run it might also change the structure of the relationship between state and society. Faced with a choice between putting down a flare-up and making a structural adjustment, the government always prefers the first. In other words, the real problem lies in the relationship between state and society.

Xiang Biao, Transcending Boundaries: Zhejiangcun, the Story of a Migrant Village in Beijing

66

In a public talk at the end of 2018, Xiang Biao went back over the new round of clearances that began in 2017 and offered a fresh argument: this round is in essence a repudiation of the previous one — of the logic, in place since 1995, of accumulating capital by clearing people out.

A survey he commissioned found that ordinary people, and even most of those cleared out, said they could rationally accept what the government had done. They shared its vocabulary: "the bigger picture," "upgrading," "elimination."

"Without eliminating the low end there's no high-end development. Eliminate who? Us, obviously." The people leaving did not welcome it, but they did not think it was wrong either.

This is a long way from gentrification. Judged by the most basic measures — social function, community formation — that conclusion is hard to dispute.

What Is Missing From Our Understanding of Cities, and What Drives Prosperity

67

China has had decades of prosperity, and in that time its cities have changed beyond recognition — in how they look, and in the economic landscape that boom years redrew.

In Shanghai, urban redevelopment largely reflects the strong and direct power of the municipal and district governments. Surprisingly, though, some commercial streets have been shaped by the government's selective inattention. Many owners of ground-floor apartments along those streets turned their street-facing rooms into shops, or set up stalls out on the pavement. Strictly speaking this was illegal, but local governments chose to look away for social reasons. These local shops gave many people work — laid-off workers, retirees and migrants above all. The rent the shopkeepers paid gave working-class landlords extra income on top of their pensions and unemployment benefits.

Sharon Zukin, Philip Kasinitz and Xiangming Chen, Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai

68

Shanghai's prosperity came from letting go. Because the period involved huge numbers of laid-off workers in the city, and social friction ran high, the government was relatively tolerant and backed their attempts at doing business. The commercial life of these organic neighborhoods then evolved much as it does in most cities: locals opened the shops first, then sublet them to outsiders who had come to Shanghai to run small businesses, while the laid-off locals turned from shopkeepers into landlords.

That is the market working normally.

But when the outsiders' lives start to "disturb" the locals' lives, the landlords' interests collide with everyone else's. And as the outsiders grow in number and influence, friction between them and long-time residents follows.

Tianzifang is the classic case.

In Global Cities, Local Streets, Tianzifang is one of two Shanghai neighborhoods examined at length, though the account largely stops several years back.

Still, for a city's development this kind of friction does little harm and changes nothing fundamental. As newcomers and old residents mix, prosperity itself is not damaged.

69

As with Xiang Biao's long observation of Beijing's "Zhejiangcun," the attitude toward migrants — whether it comes from a wish for manageability or from a wish to "protect" existing residents, whose position often lines up with officials' — means that Shanghai and Beijing alike, at the level of government, prefer to represent local interests. That blinds them to the real source of urban prosperity, and it violates the whole point of a government providing services fairly.

Native residents and governments in big cities have not grasped what migrants do. Among the world-class cities everyone likes to talk about, New York has the highest share of immigrants, as we quoted earlier.

By opening stalls and shops on local commercial streets, migrants can always find a foothold in a city's economy. What they do is not necessarily legal, so their relationship with local government is precarious. But at their best, the newcomers on a commercial street provide useful services both to long-settled residents and to newcomers like themselves, and in doing so they help knit society together. A local commercial street is a space not only for economic exchange but for cultural exchange, a place where people speaking different languages or different accents are accepted. In short, local commercial streets are made up of the varied social and cultural spaces of everyday life. Stitched together along one street — cultural diversity within a space and between spaces — they produce the cosmopolitan character of the global city.

Sharon Zukin, Philip Kasinitz and Xiangming Chen, Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai

70

Governments draw the wrong lesson. They conclude that prosperity is their doing, when much of it comes from governments doing less and leaving people alone.

Applied to gentrification, that wrong lesson has protected neither the tenants — who in the government's eyes largely do not count as "citizens" at all — the migrants in Yangpu, say, or the restaurant owners on Yongkang Road; nor the property owners. Many of those owners, as noted earlier, are government bodies and state institutions that may not care about rent at all, while ordinary private owners have simply lost their rental income in this pseudo-gentrification.

On Shanghai's local internet forums, residents frequently talk about attracting high-end talent to the city.

Discrimination by place of origin is not permitted in official administration either. Yet in practice, from officials to the general public, the attitude toward migrants is negative; to be precise, discriminatory speech is banned in the name of stability. And by comparison, the case for "what migrants contribute, and the right of the poor to live and work in a big city" has even less room to be made.

71

The single most important conclusion Sharon Zukin and her co-authors draw is this: "Although the six cities from New York to Shanghai, and their governments, represent starkly different systems of urban governance, they are strikingly alike in one respect — planners played a very limited role in all of them."

Even in China, where unified central leadership is comparatively conspicuous, its two streets benefited from the government selectively letting go at a few critical moments. Private apartment owners could create space for commerce, and migrant workers could open small shops in that space, none of it with official approval.

Sharon Zukin, Philip Kasinitz and Xiangming Chen, Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai

72

The authors, drawn from different regions, work through the problems of gentrification in six cities matter-of-factly, and on the whole they stay fairly optimistic — about prosperity, about what governments do to regulate rents and the wider business environment in a district, and about how to "protect" the elements of an older neighborhood. ("Is it the shops, the people in the shops, or the scale of the space? Which policies work best: planning, zoning, rent control, targeted recruitment of tenants, or barring certain kinds of shop?") Optimism is understandable: in all six cities, the forms of commerce, the people in the neighborhoods and the various market players showed plenty of variety and vitality.

Had the fieldwork run longer, of course, they might have seen changes that gave less cause for optimism.

Which also shows how far China still has to go in understanding its cities.

What Is Missing From Our Understanding of Cities: What Is Human Scale, and What Is Dignity

73

"The markets were full of the breath of life, while the great avenues, deliberately kept up, were serene. The middle of an avenue was for carts and horses; alongside ran footpaths, open drainage ditches and rows of fruit trees. Some avenues were more than 130 meters wide — four times the width of Fifth Avenue in New York. But there were no shops along them, and for a city of that size there was little traffic. The avenue was subtly unlike the avenue we imagine. Rather than a tie binding the residents of different districts together, it was a gulf keeping them apart. If by day it carried only light traffic, by night it had no purpose at all. Once the city gates shut in the evening, life withdrew behind the household curtains." The strange scene Yi-Fu Tuan sets out for us in Topophilia is Chang'an, the capital of Tang-dynasty China.

As a political city, Chang'an expressed the cultural conviction that imperial power stood above all. In the later Tang, as the middle stratum grew stronger and asked for more, that conviction faded, and control over society as a whole loosened somewhat. The market in the west of the city burst its boundaries and merged with the residential wards around it. At night, the gates were no longer closed... Under the Song, the drift toward a commodity economy did not stop; it picked up speed. Hangzhou, the Southern Song capital, had been a major commercial city long before it carried an imperial house. Chang'an and Hangzhou were both huge, populous cities, yet their ways of urban life were opposites: one buttoned-up, keeping its imperial bearing; the other loose, chasing fashion. The population densities tell the same story: 12,500 people per square kilometer in Chang'an, 45,500 in Hangzhou.

Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia

That Chang'an is long gone, but the political gene in the Chinese city does not seem to have died out entirely. Several of the policy preferences and administrative habits Xiang Biao describes in the section above are part of that inheritance.

74

In our own time, this political urban landscape also has to do with planning. Jan Gehl, author of Cities for People and a lifelong advocate of the human-scale city, used the famous twentieth-century plan for Brasília, Brazil's capital, to lay out the basic marks of the "inhuman" city.

By this I mean planning that attends only to the first two levels of scale and ignores the smallest, human one — an approach that has unfortunately been spread widely as a planning principle. The three levels are buildings, spaces and life. Seen from the air, Brasília has a clean outline, like a giant eagle: government buildings at the head, the wings sheltering housing and institutions. The government district has precise lines and tall buildings, broad green expanses around them, and the National Congress at the end. The view is impressive — from a suitable distance, that is. As a human-scale landscape, Brasília is a sorry failure. The spaces are far too big and thoroughly unfriendly to people; the roads are long, straight and dull; parked cars block pedestrians everywhere, and walking gives no pleasure at all.

Jan Gehl, Cities for People

75

Against Brasília, Gehl sets his own Copenhagen: "From an airplane, Copenhagen's terraced-housing districts look monotonous and dull. But at eye level these terraces have many virtues and work well, which is why most of the city's architects and their families live in them."

76

With the "inhuman" city, the problems are easiest to spot from a great height. With the human city, what matters is usually small — fine-grained design and concrete gestures. An interesting asymmetry.

77

A human-scale landscape means the settings in a city where people can walk, sit, listen, talk and watch. These basic activities are tied closely to our senses and our organs of movement. If they can happen under good conditions, then within a human-scale landscape they and the activities related to them will interweave and combine, and every possibility of development opens up. The core of it is small scale. ... Getting people to walk and cycle in urban space is only a start, nowhere near the finish. People must also be encouraged to sit down and stay a while. Staying is not only decisive for a lively city, it is just as decisive for a genuinely enjoyable one. People stay in a place because it is beautiful, interesting, agreeable. A good city has much in common with a good party: guests stay because they are enjoying themselves. ... A city fit for meeting is a city that offers good opportunities for three basic human activities: seeing, hearing and talking. ... One of the most important and most appealing things about a city is watching city life. Walking, standing or sitting, we keep up one very common activity: looking at other people. If benches and other seats offer a good view for people-watching, they will certainly be used.

Jan Gehl, Cities for People

78

At Christmas, 15 stalls, most of them selling popcorn, crowded into 40 feet of space in front of Rockefeller Plaza. This gave the city administration a headache. Any number of ordinances make outdoor trading illegal, licensed or not, however good the business in those spots. Shopkeepers generally back the police in enforcing them. ... Vendors deserve better. A street vendor is, by default, the person who feeds outdoor city life. They do well because conventional commercial facilities do not meet a social need. Plazas suit such stalls particularly well. When these plazas were built, hardly any of them left room for a small restaurant. Vendors filled the gap. Drive them off and the gap becomes glaring: much of the plaza's life leaves with the stalls. ... New York is not an especially rigid city about rules. Plenty of cities outlaw not only selling food outdoors but eating outdoors. Ask officials about it and they will describe the awful things that might follow if the restrictions were dropped — unsafe food, an appalling garbage problem, and so on. Over the past ten years, partly because of these rules, most plazas and large complexes have been built with no outdoor eating facilities at all. ... Food attracts the kind of people who attract more people.

William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

79

William H. Whyte was an editor at Fortune and a sociologist, best known for The Organization Man. The title of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces should be read as "small urban-spaces," not "spaces in small cities."

In this fine small book, Whyte works out what human scale means in all sorts of small spaces. Seat width, for one: a ledge deep enough for two backsides lets more people sit comfortably, and anything narrower does not — 0.76 meters will do, 0.91 meters is better. Or why sunken plazas are always dispiriting: down there, "there aren't many people to be found," and "if there are shops in a sunken plaza, the window displays easily disguise how empty the place actually is. Unless it leads to the subway, why build one at all?" "Once you are down in it, you feel you are at the bottom of a well. People can see you; you cannot see them."

He covers sightlines in pocket parks too, and iron railings — it is safe to say no one likes them.

He also takes up crowding.

To sum up: capacity regulates itself. The point bears repeating. Many planning departments worry about carrying capacity, afraid that more amenities and more seating will draw more people and clog the pavements. What they should worry about is the opposite. Underuse, not overuse, is the problem. The capacity of most urban spaces far exceeds the use they get, and the exceptions are encouraging. The places that hold the most people are the ones that use space most efficiently, and they are also the most enjoyable. People decide the level of crowding themselves, and they do it very well.

William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

80

Then there are the undesirables. This may be where our understandings of the city diverge most sharply — Lee Stringer's question at one end, Giuliani's confident promises at the other. What attitude, then, should someone who watches urban planning and argues for the human-scale city take?

The answer is simple.

A homeless man is a symbol, a reminder that any of us might end up homeless one day, and it is not a symbol made in grace. For retailers the list of undesirables is long: women who beg, people who behave oddly in public, hippies, teenagers, old people, street musicians and vendors of every sort. ... A place designed out of distrust gets exactly what it was looking for; the joke is that you really are quite likely to find a drunk there. You find drunks elsewhere too, of course — in the empty places they favor, and it is precisely in an empty place that a drunk stands out. Public spaces of this kind seem tailored for drunks, unwittingly handing them the deserted ground they prefer. ... The best way to handle the problem of undesirables is to make a place attractive to everyone.

William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

81

And the human-scale city itself is simple enough.

I am not proposing that plazas be the most beautiful places, or the arbiters of society. Having few rules is fine. What I am proposing, simply, is that these urban public places be made a little friendlier. We know how to do it. In the design and management of space there are many ways to make it easier for people to meet and talk in public. An idea that moves in that direction is always worth having. Some of the most agreeable spaces are leftover space, recessed space, scraps of space, the ends of spaces — spaces that exist purely by accident. At 57th Street and Madison Avenue there is a bank with two window ledges. Both are low enough to sit on, and because they are recessed they are out of the wind. The sun is on them all day, people hurry past, and around the corner of the building there is a stall selling fresh juice. It is a very fine urban place. There are others like it, most of them accidental. You can imagine what would happen if someone set out to plan such a space on purpose.

William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

82

Throughout the history of human settlement, residential districts have grown out of the paths and grounds people used often. Then came the traders' stalls, then buildings, and only later the more complicated structures of the city. Cities begin with life, and Cape Town's important urban spaces are no exception. The planning method there is to keep improving poor areas according to planning principles. Running a "Dignified Places" program in the districts where people most need dignity and somewhere to meet is certainly a good place to start. It is also a strategy worth copying. ... What matters is attention to people, to dignity, to zest for life and to the city as a meeting place. In these things, people's dreams and longings around the world differ very little. And the ways of addressing them are strikingly similar, because in the end the shared starting point is people. Everyone can walk and perceive; everyone has much the same motor skills and the same basic patterns of behavior. Future urban planning must start from people, far more than we imagine today.

Jan Gehl, Cities for People

Conclusion

83

What became of that Tompkins Square Park in New York?

Just as the rhetoric of "degentrification" quickly stripped gentrification of its violence, the 1990s talk of regentrification deepened the erasure. So when Tompkins Square Park reopened in 1992, it came, predictably, with the press naturalizing the square's history, geography and culture. The papers noted its 1930s resemblance to Central Park (translation: forget what happened between 1988 and 1991), and The New York Times duly pronounced the rebuilt Tompkins Square a "shining emerald." Through that year the beautification of the neighborhood in the press went at full tilt, with photographs of young white middle-class families enjoying the park again everywhere you looked.

Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City

84

In the end a city still has to grow and expand its way out of its problems.

"Good God, something has to be done about this."

Without sustained economic expansion, none of it is possible.

85

But beyond that, somewhere in this long account, I am sure something else remains. It belongs to Lee Stringer's question — how are we, as humans, connected to one another?

It is worth saying once more: that is the root of all of it.

86

A passage from E.B. White.

On this point I have no wish to defend New York. Many people settle here to escape reality rather than face it. Even so, it is a rare gift, and I think it has done the creativity of New Yorkers good — creation being, to some extent, no more than knowing how to give up temptations large and small. ... These millions of strangers represent every race, creed and nationality, and it is their collision and their mingling that make New York a standing exhibition of one world. New Yorkers' tolerance is not only temperament; it is necessity. The city must stay tolerant or it will blow up in a radioactive cloud of hatred, rancor and bigotry. Let people stray even a little from the path of calm and generosity and the city's temper will go higher than a kite. Every kind of racial problem smolders in New York, but the striking thing is not the problems; it is that people manage to live side by side. Harlem is a city in itself, a symbol of segregation, and yet black life in New York shows few obvious marks of separate treatment. ... A block or two west of this new City of Man in Turtle Bay stands a great willow, its branches covering the courtyard. It is a battered old tree, much put upon and much climbed, held together by wire so it will not come apart, and everyone who knows it is fond of it. In a way it stands for the city: surviving hardship, growing against the odds, drawing sap up through concrete, holding itself upright and reaching for the light. These days, whenever I see it and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: it must be saved, this one tree. If it were to go, everything would go with it — this city, this strange and marvelous example; look up and find it gone, and the heart would turn to ash.

E.B. White, Here Is New York

Cover image: from the film Begin Again, via Douban