Abstract
The ‘metropolis’ is a problematic concept for urban studies. Symptomatically, its most famous scholarly use in English – in Georg Simmel’s (1903 [1971]) The Metropolis and Mental Life – is simply a translator’s liberty: the original German word Simmel used was Großstadt – literally, ‘big city’. The term hasn’t become any less muddy since then. Nowadays, it is possible to distinguish at least four major theoretical clusters revolving around ‘metropolis’: first, the European analysis of polycentric urban areas; second, the American analysis of city–suburban relations; third, the historical analysis of early-modern primate cities and their social life in the Global North; and finally, the international–political–economy analysis of colonial relations between core and periphery. And these four clusters do not even encompass the various political, administrative, and city-branding uses to which ‘metropolitan’ is often put outside of the academy.
How can one word sensibly span this conceptual terrain? The collection of essays in Thick Space: Approaches to Metropolitanism suggests the limits of the word even as it provides a series of thought-provoking reflections on the concepts which have adhered to it. The book is the product of an ongoing transatlantic graduate research group on twentieth century urban history and culture, based at the Center for Metropolitan Studies in Berlin, with a geographical focus on Berlin and New York. The topics and approaches of the 16 essays in Thick Space mostly reflect that provenance. And, like the concept of metropolis itself, Thick Space might be somewhat less than the sum of its parts, but the parts are frequently rewarding.
The book is divided into three sections, the first of which contains a series of theoretical and epistemological (and even etymological) reflections on the concepts of metropolis and metropolitanism. Compared with the more concrete studies that follow, these are written at a high level of abstraction, and collectively amount to a solid critical overview of metropolitan studies from a European perspective. The standout is Ignacio Farías and Susanne Stemmler’s deconstruction of ‘metropolis’, which places the development of the recent scholarly discourse around metropolitanism in the context both of historical processes of urbanisation and contemporary place-marketing strategies of entrepreneurial urban governance.
The second part of the book examines human–environment interactions in a variety of different historical metropolitan contexts. While these essays do not use the language of urban political ecology, they rely on a similar set of theoretical perspectives and empirical contexts. A pair of the essays in this section – Thomas Bender’s historical reflections on the concept of metropolis and Stefan Höhne’s analysis of urban infrastructure – are also early contributions to the increasingly prominent ‘assemblage turn’ in urban studies. Happily, these pieces display more of the typical strengths (open and promiscuous analytical perspectives) and fewer of the typical weaknesses (flat ontology and atheoretical descriptivism) of actor-network theory and assemblage urbanism. Höhne’s essay in particular stands as perhaps the book’s most plausible model for how the titular notion of ‘thick space’ could inform concrete urban research in metropolitan contexts.
The third and final section of Thick Space moves from nature to culture, comprising a series of symbolic analyses of urban space and urban culture. These essays are the most historical and the most empirically detailed in the book, but also the most disparate with respect to subject matter.
In quick succession we get a discussion of turn-of-the-century photography in Berlin, an analysis of contemporary African American street literature, and an ethnography of houka bars.
As this brief overview should make clear, Thick Space contains a diversity of disciplinary and theoretical approaches. And it must be said that, in spite of this diversity, the book’s contributions are remarkably cohesive. (In fact they are cohesive even sometimes to the point of repetition: each of the first three essays, for example, stages its own Georg Simmel versus Robert Park comparison.) The common thread that runs through most of the book’s contributions is an analysis of metropolitanism as a phenomenon of modernity, and the metropolis as a practical laboratory for modernity. Hence a concern with systems thinking and its material referents, and with a juxtaposition of fin-de-siècle reflections from the ends of the 19th and 20th centuries. Both these themes help unite an otherwise disparate set of essays.
But even so, the book has a difficult time finding its intended audience. A plurality of the chapters discuss Berlin, but it is not a book for Berlin specialists. Similarly, a plurality of the chapters are historical studies, but there is not enough engagement with urban historiography for the book to rest comfortably in that disciplinary context. What this leaves, and what the editors no doubt intend, is the concept of metropolitanism itself as the unifying principle. The problem is that metropolitanism is being asked to shoulder too heavy a burden. It is effectively a chaotic conception: a combination of only loosely connected referents without any strong inner logic. As I indicated above, there are at least four major scholarly currents associated with metropolitanism, and at most they share a rough concern for centre–periphery relations within urban systems at various spatial scales. The editors are aware of this tension, and some of the authors engage it explicitly and productively, but the book does not manage to transcend it.
A related issue is that the metaphor of ‘thick space’, while suggestive, does not quite rise above suggestiveness. Thick space is meant in the first instance to be an analogy to Clifford Geertz’s famous ethnographic method of ‘thick description’. But, beyond that, thick space seeks to capture the complexity and multidimensionality of metropolitanism. The way the editors describe it: Metropolitanism as ‘thick space’ encompasses the frenetic yet rhythmic temporalities and the palimpsestic spatial consistencies as well as the ‘actual embodied encounters’ that make up the actuality of everyday life in the metropolis. (p. 17)
Evocative stuff, but the handful of chapters (mainly in the final, cultural-studies section of the book) which address the idea of thick space generally don’t do much more than just name-check it, or perhaps dip into a bit of Geertz-style thick description, as in the case of Despina Stratigakos’ discussion of gender and architecture in imperial Berlin. The editors’ introductory remarks, which connect the idea of thick space to material and symbolic surpluses in the production of urban space, offer an interesting launching point for analysis, but not the analysis itself.
The book begins with the observation that ‘it is hard these days to ignore the growing buzz about metropoles’ (p. 9). Is that true? Is the buzz growing? A careful reading of the last decade of urban studies would suggest instead that it is a new set of polycentric and unruly urban forms – megalopolises, mega-cities, megaregions, city-regions, mega-city regions and the like – which are ascendant, and which indeed are actively transforming yesterday’s metropolises into something new and not yet properly understood. Hegel famously observed that the owl of Minerva only spreads its wings at dusk. Thick Space may be the metropolitan owl of Minerva, shedding retrospective clarity onto an urban phenomenon even as the latter evolves beyond recognition.
In the end, it is hard not to agree with Margit Mayer’s conclusion, from her comparison of metropolitan discourses in the United States and Germany: More urgently necessary than rehashing the traditional concept of the ‘metropolis’ is furthering metropolitan research that seeks to aid the analysis of contemporary fragmentation and disintegration problems with their concomitant issues of inclusion and exclusion. (p. 122)
Thick Space, with its historical and concept-oriented studies of 20th-century metropolises, can’t be said to take up Mayer’s charge. Important contemporary themes in urban studies which deal directly with the fragmentation and perhaps supercession of the metropolis, such as metropolitan governance and functional relations within polycentric urban areas, are not taken up by the book. And yet Thick Space – the metropolitan owl of Minerva – provides a set of compelling reflections on the metropolis which was: the city of high modernity.