From Urban as Site to Urban as Place

In the United States, the modern field of urban history may be said to date from November 1968. The occasion was the Yale conference on the new urban history organized by Stephan Thernstrom and Richard Sennett with support from the Ford Foundation. The conference brought together leading senior scholars with young academics. By and large, the junior historians did not know about each others’ work despite parallels in the way they approached urban and social history. The conference resulted in enduring friendships and networks of collaboration as well as in the 1969 volume Nineteenth-Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History, which became a classic, read and used for decades. ¹ I was privileged to be invited and to participate in the volume; it is where I met Lynn Lees, Ted Hershberg, Michael Frisch, Larry Glasco, Joan Scott, Stuart Blumin, Clyde Griffen, Charles Tilly, Sam Bass Warner, Leo Schnore, Herb Gutman, and other established and ascendant urbanists.

In retrospect, Nineteenth-Century Cities, the conference book, exemplified the main thrust of urban history at the time, namely the use of the city, in Hershberg’s phrase, as site. ² Historians used cities as sites for the study of social processes and institutions. High among these was social mobility, but the list also included immigration, family structure, craft work, and schools among other topics. Lots of exceptions existed, of course (notably from writers outside the established disciplines, many of whom were affiliated with city planning). ³ But this emphasis on city as site was the main focus of the work.

This little overview argues that the emphasis on the city as site has given way to a focus on the emergence, characteristics, and transformation of urban form—that is, on urban as place. This concern with the construction of urban space became the implicit theme of Urban Studies as a field as well as of urban history, if, indeed, a line can be drawn between the two. How to account for this concern with urban space and the consequent problematization of “city” and “urban” is my question. The influence of the “cultural turn” on urban history represents a third shift, but one on which I am not well equipped to comment other than, at the end of this discussion, to offer a couple of brief suggestions.

This is not a review of the literature. Rather, my concern is with ideas. I use examples of books to illustrate major points, but in no sense should these references be taken as comprehensive. It will not escape the reader that a number of the books have links to the history department at the University of Pennsylvania. While this reflects books that come easily to mind, it also highlights the centrality of Penn to the history of the field. (Penn has supplied three of the twenty-three presidents of the Urban History Association.)

The focus on urban as site reflected the dominant a-spatial trend in American social science. Indeed, historians took their lead from the questions and methods of social scientists, filling in the back story, marking the origins of trends, and correcting a-historical generalizations. In this, urban and social history reflected the a-spatial character of American social science and education. Unlike in Canada or Great Britain, geography dropped out of school and college curricula. Among social scientists, case studies lost legitimacy. The gold standard became the deployment of national samples to identify and analyze processes independent of spatial context. ⁴

Social mobility dominated the early concerns of historical social science. Was America becoming more or less open to talent? Was Horatio Alger alive and well, indeed, had he ever existed? The availability of digital computing, then in its early, exciting days, provided the key tool; the manuscript census was the ur-source. Historians, of course, could not draw on national samples, but they could forefront social processes and downplay context. I would put my own first Canadian-city book, The People of Hamilton, Canada West: Family and Class in a Nineteenth-Century City, squarely within this tradition. ⁵ It focuses on how social structure, geographic mobility, family organization, the life course, and entrepreneurial behavior played out on the canvas of the city in its age of commercial capitalism. But it did not try to show how the creation of the city as a place—its spatial politics, demographic growth, and economic transformation—channeled, interacted with, and shaped the patterns on which it concentrates. The book’s geographical appendix, influenced by my geographer research colleague, did point to an awareness of the importance of spatial considerations, but its separateness from the body of the text stands as testimony to my inability to integrate them into the book’s argument.

A-spatiality had not always marked American social science. American urban sociology, after all, emerged from the spatially based methods and interpretations of the Chicago School. The loss of this early spatial focus underlies the story told by Sarah E. Igo in her magnificent, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public. ⁶ Igo focuses on three major studies through which social science surveys came to define the “normal” for Americans. The first, the Middletown books by the Lynds in the 1920s and 1930s, arrived at generalizations about America through the close, deeply contextualized analysis of trends in one city. The two later studies—the Gallup poll and the Kinsey report—presented themselves as national, devoid of contextual influence.

“Space” re-entered urban history for three main reasons: (1) the “urban crisis; (2) a general shift in social science accelerated by the development of GIS techniques; and (3) the consequences of suburbanization and globalization for the meaning of “city.” The Creative Destruction of Manhattan by Max Page; Cities of Knowledge by Margaret O’Mara; Downtown by Alison Isenberg; Christopher Klemek’s The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal; and Engineering Philadelphia by Domenic Vitiello exemplify this renewed emphasis on the city as place, in Page’s book with the repeated reconstruction of Manhattan under the imperatives of politics, commerce, economics, and historic preservation; in O’Mara’s, the design and construction of urban forms with wholly new purposes; in Isenberg’s story the literal creation and subsequent transformation of “downtown” as both idea and form; in Klemek’s the intersection of the politics of place with the rise and fall of an urban renewal regime; and in Vitiello’s, the shaping of Philadelphia’s economy, urban fabric, and institutions over more than two centuries by one remarkable family and its allies and opponents. ⁷ The emphasis on the social and economic construction of place—the understanding of urban history as a continual process of transformation—implicitly highlights the crucial point that we cannot understand cities without grasping their histories.

No one has looked closely at the relative timing of the spatial turn in history and other social sciences. It may well turn out that history threw off the a-spatial shackles earlier than sociology. Sociologists after all remained for decades stuck partially in the debate over neighborhood effects—to put it crudely, whether growing up in a bad neighborhood proves harmful for young people. ⁸ With luck that debate has been put to rest by Robert Sampson’s recent masterwork, Great American City, which returns sociology to its spatial roots in the work of the Chicago school—a turn of direction initiated in William J. Wilson’s 1990 book The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. ⁹ In urban studies, too, the construction and implications of space emerged as the theme that most unified the field. Major examples are Peter Dreier, Todd Swanstrom, and John H. Mollenkopf, Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-first Century and exciting work by geographers and a generation of gifted urban ethnographers. ¹⁰

The first influence pushing urban history away from “urban as site” was the “urban crisis.” Historians joined other social scientists in trying to sort out the influences behind the catastrophic economic decline, demographic transformation, appalling violence, and widespread despair that scarred American cities beginning in the 1960s. Of necessity, these concerns focused attention on cities as places, that is, as bounded entities whose features emerged from the 1960s and 1970s reconfigured into new patterns. The work that best exemplifies this historiographic trend is, of course, Thomas J. Sugrue’s masterpiece, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. ¹¹ Sugrue traced the many faces of Detroit’s urban crisis through histories of the underlying transformations of the city itself. For the purposes of this overview, I want to stress that Sugrue’s book combines the older emphasis on city as site with the newer focus on city as place. At heart, Sugrue is concerned with the emergence, spread, and consequences of deep poverty. But he only can tell the story of poverty through the larger narrative of urban transformation. This blending of topical with spatial foci has emerged as the hallmark of the most exciting work in urban history. Another fine example is Timothy Gilfoyle’s City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920, which tells a powerful story of changing sexual practice through the economic and geographic transformations of Manhattan. ¹²

In the spatial turn in urban history, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) plays a role roughly analogous to digital computing in the 1960s and 1970s. It provides a shiny, up-to-date tool that draws on new sources and methods to illuminate important patterns and trends. I have found fascinating how GIS does not meet the hostility from history students that statistical methods encounter. Although sometimes resistant to numbers, many history graduate students love making maps, and under inspired teaching—such as offered by Amy Hillier in Penn’s Department of City and Regional Planning—have become excited about the possibilities of map-based spatial analysis. Thus far, historical GIS has been used primarily to illustrate trends derived from other forms of analysis. It displays results with a new clarity and legibility, and it looks just great. The gold standard of this phase of GIS certainly must be Colin Gordon’s Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City. ¹³ Gordon combines maps with many other sources to narrate the decline of a major American city through the influences of deindustrialization, demographic change, and urban renewal. His spectacular multicolored maps provide a spine for his narrative. But there is something Gordon’s book does not do, and that is ask fundamentally new questions. GIS enables Gordon to illustrate major trends in urban history and urban studies without reconceptualization or breaking new interpretive ground. This is not a criticism. It is where the state of the art with GIS for the most part now rests.

I am waiting for the exciting moment when GIS becomes an analytic tool as well as a form of advanced mapping. The leap from illustration to analysis will require the use of spatial statistics, a difficult area into which I suspect historians will venture only with trepidation. The potential uses of spatial statistics, however, is evident in other disciplines, such as medicine and public health where they have permitted researchers to push beyond the limits of high level description, for example, in understanding the patterned geographical distribution of infectious disease that does not appear until brought to light by the application of powerful spatial statistics. In Penn’s history department, the lead has been taken by Merlin Chowkwanyun, now a faculty member at Columbia University, who combined his PhD in history with a master’s degree in public health, a demanding program that required him to find training in spatial statistics, an area in which Penn’s offerings are strong. His book on the history of community health will pioneer, pointing to a new frontier in historical GIS. (One implication of this spatial turn with its methodological demands is the need to rethink the graduate training of historians.) An example from another discipline is Sampson’s Great American City, mentioned earlier. Sampson invented clever spatial analytic techniques whose application results in novel questions and hypotheses about how cities develop. Sampson’s driving thesis that enduring geographic patterns of what he terms “collective efficacy” shaped resilient and enduring patterns of inequality would not have been possible with a strictly descriptive statistical approach to city geography. For all his ingenuity, however, Sampson does not show how these patterns of collective efficacy took shape; here is a crucial question wide open for historians.

The third influence on the transition to city as place—the redefinition of “city” and “suburb”—is rooted in metropolitics and globalization. For decades, urban public policy scholars—notably Bruce Katz, Myron Orfield, and David Rusk—have emphasized that conventional boundaries between cities and suburbs erect barriers that allow mini-governments to function in splendid isolation, hoarding their resources while massive increases in economic inequality, education, amenities, and crime drive deeper wedges between central cities and the municipalities surrounding them, although recent trends point to the collapse of the distinctions between old, inner ring suburbs and central cities and the astonishing growth of suburban poverty. ¹⁴ At the same time, the idea of the suburb as bedroom community for two-parent families with children has collapsed under the weight of demographic change and economic differentiation—a story Mark J. Stern and I told in One Nation Divisible. ¹⁵

Outside the Rust Belt, moreover, wholly new city forms, Phoenix and Los Angeles, for instance, strain conventional definitions of city beyond the break point. The story is a long one (and I have told it in various venues), but one result is clear: definitions of suburb and city are themselves up for grabs. ¹⁶ Nobody knows quite how to classify the new entities or what to identify as a city. One exciting and constructive response has been the emergence of a new suburban historiography represented in Kevin Kruse and Thomas Sugrue’s edited collection The New Suburban History. ¹⁷ Dan Amsterdam, Merlin Chowkwanyun, Mathew Creighton and I tried to make a modest contribution to the task of redefinition through our article “Immigration and the New Metropolitan Geography” in the Journal of Urban Affairs. ¹⁸

Work on global cities marks another variation on the “city definition” literature. Saskia Sassen, an economic sociologist, pioneered this field with her widely read and acclaimed books on cities and globalization. ¹⁹ She identified what she considers a new urban form—the global city—whose linkages join it to other global cities more than to the region in which it exists. At the same time, she has argued that, contrary to predictions, economic globalization has increased rather than diluted the importance and role of central cities. A growing literature on Third World urbanization takes the question of city definition in still other directions, focusing, among other topics, on housing, poverty, and inequalities. Carl H. Nightingale’s massive and breathtaking Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities, which ranges across urban history from ancient cities to contemporary Chicago today, stands as the most dramatic and impressive exemplar of this subfield, which will become ever more prominent as the world becomes increasingly urban. ²⁰

At the outset, I promised to comment briefly on the role of culture in the transformation of urban historiography. I am emphatically not a cultural historian and tred on this terrain with trepidation. But there are three things I should like to observe. First, the larger cultural turn in writing history has exerted a profound influence on urban history. In the Penn history department, we are fortunate to have one of the pioneers, Kathy Peiss, whose Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York remains an iconic work of urban cultural history. ²¹ Second, the cultural concerns that permeate urban sociology and urban politics need historicization. I think, for starters, of the hoary idea of the culture of poverty, the linguistic differentiation excavated by William Labov, and the anxiety over unmarried mothers that infects political discourse. Historians have tackled these subjects, often brilliantly, but there is ample room for them to be integrated more closely with wider patterns of intellectual history and urban transformation. Third, and most immediate, is the question of urban institutions. Here, historians of education have pioneered in linking institutions to broad trends in urban history. Consider the widely cited essay, Harvey Kantor and Barbara Brenzel, “Urban Education and the ‘Truly Disadvantaged: The Historical Roots of the Contemporary Crisis, 1945-1990,” and Kathryn Neckerman’s superb Schools Betrayed: Roots of Failure in Inner-City Education. ²² Beyond education, little work examines how networks of urban cultural institutions have been buffeted by and responded to urban transformation. This seems to me a wide-open field with much exciting potential. A fine example is Jessica Lautin’s Penn dissertation, “‘Let’s Clean Up the Ghetto’: Black Class and Cultural Institutions in Postwar Philadelphia.”

It is customary to conclude overviews with ringing exhortations to rescue fields from obsolescence and complacency. I have no such intent. As a field, urban history never has shimmered so vibrantly. My goals here have been more modest. One is to illustrate a major trend in historical writing about cities which may be heuristic for scholars in formulating their own work. A second is to emphasize that we cannot understand cities, however defined, without grasping their histories. Third, breakthroughs in urban historiography will emerge from work that crosses traditions or melds traditional foci: urban history needs to be at once about cities as sites and cities as places. Finally, a related point, historians should not be modest. Their role is not simply to follow-up the hypotheses of other social scientists, borrowing their tools and ideas. Rather, their charge is to deploy new methods and theories in the service of reformulating the questions themselves.