[Discussion] book review - The Cultural Meaning of Urban Space

[sule tarakcioglu]

*Robert Rotenberg and Gary McDonogh, eds.* /The Cultural Meaning of 
Urban Space//. /Contemporary Urban Studies Series. Westport: Bergin & 
Garvey, 1993. xix + 226 pp. Illustrations, plans, bibliography, index. 
$62.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-89789-319-0; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 0-89789-320-4.

Reviewed by *Amanda Seligman*, Northwestern University and the Newberry 
Library.
Published by H-Urban <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Eurban> (January, 1996)


The Cultural Meaning of Urban Space originated as a symposium at the 
1990 meeting of the American Anthropological Association dedicated to 
exploring "what commonalities exist in the process of giving meaning to 
urban spaces in various cities" (p. xi). Editors Robert Rotenberg and 
Gary McDonogh assembled the presented papers and additional solicited 
articles into the three parts of the published volume. Rotenberg claims 
in his introduction that "all urbanites share life experiences through 
the commonalities or [sic] urban conditions and the shared metropolitan 
knowledge.... [C[ity dwellers share meanings regardless of the 
particular city they inhabit or the history that has shaped their 
particular culture" (p. xii). Although this book falls short of 
demonstrating Rotenberg's claim that one can find some universal urban 
meaning, the variety of approaches deployed by the authors does suggest 
that urban historians might venture more boldly into exploring the 
meanings of spaces.

Rotenberg's ahistoricism is apparent both in the volume's introduction 
and in his chapter "On the Salubrity of Sites." In this article 
Rotenberg juxtaposes the writings of the first-century Roman architect 
Vitruvius with the musings of his own late-twentieth-century Viennese 
informants. In De Architectura, Vitruvius gave directions for choosing 
healthy locations for cities in order (in Rotenberg's words) "to 
minimize the noxious influences of nature on the lives of the people" 
(p. 18). Although the writings of Vitrivius disappeared from most of 
Europe until the Renaissance, his ideas, writes Rotenberg, continued to 
influence interpretations of nature in Central Europe, particularly in 
Vienna (p. 19). In the twentieth century, wealthy residents of Vienna 
take great pleasure in their private gardens, hurrying home from work to 
enjoy the fresh air and exercise of gardening. From this dubious 
continuity, Rotenberg concludes that the "fundamental problem of urban 
life" is "that, at its heart, urban agglomeration is pestilential in 
character" (pp. 27-28). Anticipating his argument in the volume's 
introduction, Rotenberg writes, "there is magic in the feelings of 
wholesomeness and longevity that people attribute to their life in 
garden. It is a place we all know" (p. xv). Yet the other articles in 
this volume, rather than suggesting that urbanites seek and find a 
mystical place they all know, show that city dwellers discover in their 
surroundings a variety of pleasures and displeasures.

Scholars have come to call "urban" an area of human habitation 
characterized by concentration of population. Students of sociology, 
anthropology, history, and other social sciences have devoted much 
attention in the twentieth century to discerning the consequences of 
urbanism, including the important question of whether there is some 
common urban experience. Rotenberg takes this logic a step further, 
assuming not only that there is a common experience, but also that 
common experience gives rise to common meaning: thus both of the nouns 
in the book's title are singular, not plural. But most of the articles 
are quite sensitive to context, suggesting that meanings arise in 
particular times and places. In exploring how scholars can approach the 
search for meanings and demonstrating a variety of ways urban people 
have interpreted spaces, the rest of the volume provides readers with 
fruitful lessons.

The four articles in the first section of the book, "The Language of 
Place," approach the problem of urban space through particular concepts, 
examining what those concepts can reveal about cities. The most 
promising of these is offered by Gary McDonogh, the volume's co-editor, 
in "The Geography of Emptiness." Reasoning that if denseness is the 
defining characteristic of cities, then empty spaces within cities 
profoundly disturb their character (p. 7), McDonogh studies allegedly 
empty spaces as sites of conflict (p. 4). From such sites of conflict we 
can learn what matters to urban residents about their surroundings--from 
which we can begin to discover the cultural meanings of urban space. For 
example, McDonogh points to "the Rambles," Barcelona's downtown 
promenade, which he was warned away from because "no one" went there. 
Yet, the Rambles are full of activity carried out by people whose 
presence is a sore point for those who warned McDonogh to stay away (pp. 
9-10). From this and other similar episodes he concludes that by 
attending to the ways in which people talk about the "empty" spaces in 
cities, one can learn about "points of trace and conflict in history, 
across social divisions, in planning" (p. 13). In comparison to 
Rotenberg's insistence (also in this section of the book) that salubrity 
held a continuous value for European urbanites, McDonogh's article 
gently suggests how to seek out such meanings, yet is much more 
instructive.

Similarly, Deborah Pellow's article on "Chinese Privacy" traces across 
time how residents of the crowded city of Shanghai have responded to 
their shortage of living space while privacy has come to be valued as 
much for individuals as for families (p. 34). Theodore C. Bestor's piece 
"Rediscovering Shitamachi" investigates the transformations in local 
interpretations of two areas within Tokyo and how the spaces themselves 
have represented distinct ways of life. The lesson of these articles is 
that the interpretations of local spaces are not fixed, but are instead 
historically dynamic and, in that dynamism, revealing.

A second set of articles explores scholars' assumptions about the 
meaning of urban spaces. Rather than directly studying how urbanites 
understand their environment, Setha Low, Margaret Rodman, Susan 
Greenbaum, and Donald Pitkin reflect on how scholars' own experiences of 
space and inherited assumptions can lead to idiosyncratic 
interpretations of what local spaces mean to their residents. Low's 
article argues that scholars have mistakenly claimed that the towns with 
gridplans and central plazas in Spanish North America derived solely 
from European colonizers (p. 76). Her work, however, suggests the 
influence of Aztec, Mayan, and Taino sources for the development of the 
gridplan-plaza complex. She asks, "If the central plaza and Great Temple 
of Tenochtitlan were the sacred spaces of the Aztec world, then what is 
the meaning of the cultural preservation that occurs when Cortes decides 
to build Mexico City on the ruins of this space, thus perpetuating the 
ceremonial plaza and Great Temple in its new Spanish-American plaza and 
cathedral form?" (p. 78). Although she does not provide evidence to 
answer such questions definitively, Low's piece reminds the reader that 
an unexamined set of assumptions can lead scholars to misread evidence 
subsequently gathered.

Conversely, Donald Pitkin's article is a reflection on the importance of 
ignorance. When Pitkin first visited Italy in 1948, he was struck by the 
contrast between his own experiences of rather reserved uses of public 
spaces and the freedom with which Italians seemed to extend their homes 
into the streets (p. 98). Pitkin subtly emphasizes his lack of knowledge 
by confessing not to know the origin of the "bella figura," in which 
promenaders "burnish the image of self for the consumption of others," 
speculating that the "origin is to be found in ancient urban settings 
where a premium was placed on the appraisal of others for which 
propinquity selected" (p. 98).[1] Pitkin eventually learned enough for 
his doctoral thesis, but the point of this article is that it was his 
ignorance--or perhaps, more kindly, his openness--that allowed him to 
learn. He shows that for all people--whether living as residents in or 
as students of urban areas--"space is not given in nature but is 
socially constructed, continuously contested, and known experientially" 
(p. 101).

In a more statistical vein, Susan Greenbaum's article, "Housing 
Abandonment in Inner-City Black Neighborhoods," examines the creation of 
a residential ghetto in Kansas City, Kansas, after World War II. 
Greenbaum argues that the creation of black ghettos should be understood 
not in terms of simple white flight from black invaders, but in terms of 
the existence of two racially based housing markets within a single region.

The final article that may be grouped in this set is Margaret Rodman's 
study. Rodman argues that scholars who would derive their understandings 
of space from architecture alone unnecessarily limit their vision. To 
demonstrate this, Rodman discusses the active attempts to maintain a 
sense of community among residents of cooperative housing in Toronto. 
Although the physical layouts of cooperative buildings do not show much 
common space, meetings for making decisions about the community are one 
of the most important ways of maintaining its coherence. And, in fact, 
the shortage of common meeting space is one of the chief points of 
conflict over the shape of such cooperatives (p. 136). Thus, Rodman 
makes an argument for "a synthesis of experience-based approaches to 
understanding place with those that treat space as socially constructed 
and contested" (p. 137).

The remainder of the articles model a variety of ways of discovering 
interpretations of urban space in specific temporal and geographical 
contexts. Two of the articles--"We Have Always Lived under the Castle: 
Historical Symbols and the Maintenance of Meaning" by John Mock and 
Theodore C. Bestor's "Rediscovering Shitamachi"--examine the workings of 
historical memory of specific sites in Japanese culture. Mock's article 
explores how public spaces in the city of Hikone have retained cultural 
significance over time, even as the specific interpretations of those 
sites have changed. He nicely demonstrates how one can look for cultural 
continuities even across periods of substantial social and economic 
change. Bestor's article, mentioned earlier, takes two regions of 
Edo/Tokyo and shows how the local valuations of these areas have 
intertwined and contrasted with one another.

Another pair of articles, on waterfront space in North America, explores 
how changing attitudes toward the border between land and water reflect 
transformations in the organization of citywide space. In Toronto, 
Matthew Cooper shows, as the waterfront was transformed from a space 
useful for transportation into the controversial commercial Harbourfront 
project, not only did the space itself change, but the meaning of access 
to the waterfront changed as well. In an approach that resembles Gary 
McDonogh's argument for looking to "empty" sites as "zones of conflict," 
Cooper argues that visual access to the waterfront became as compelling 
a source for planning as physical access. Similarly, R. Timothy Sieber 
explores the images of water in Boston in the 1970s and 1980s. He argues 
that the developing importance of visual access to water--reflected in 
higher prices assigned to properties from which people can see water and 
in advertisements for condominiums showing water scenes rather than the 
available property--reflects the latest manifestation of urbanites' 
historical search for nature in the city.

Charles Rutheiser, in "Mapping Contested Terrains: Schoolrooms and 
Streetcorners in Urban Belize," takes a different angle. Rather than 
showing how a single site or type of site has changed in meaning over 
time, Rutheiser shows how at a given moment, different sites in a city 
can take on different meanings for young people. Thus, particular 
schools and streets have come to function differently for youth of 
different economic and social backgrounds in Belize City. As gangs 
modeled on those in the United States arose in the late 1980s, the 
meaning of local neighborhoods changed from isolated "bases" to spaces 
seen within a regional geographic hierarchy.

Urban historians have not done a great deal to study the subject that 
makes up the core of this book: the cultural meaning of urban space. 
When historians talk about the spatial characteristics of human 
habitation, they usually are referring either to demographics--that is, 
how people divide themselves and others into distinctive 
neighborhoods[2]--or architecture.[3] A few historians have begun to 
study how people use the spaces in cities. For example, Earl Lewis 
explores the public use of Norfolk's streets by African-Americans and 
Thomas Jablonsky's Pride in the Jungle explicitly traces the development 
of a sense of bounded neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago.[4] But 
what those spaces have meant to people in the past, and what those 
meanings can tell us about history, remain largely unexamined. In 1974, 
geographer Yi-Fu Tuan argued that "[t]he life style of a people is the 
sum of their economic, social, and ultramundane activities. These 
generate spatial patterns; they require architectural forms and material 
settings which, upon completion, in turn influence the patterning of 
activities."[5]

Some of the approaches taken by the anthropologist contributors to this 
book may not prove particularly useful to historians--they are embedded 
in debates internal to that discipline (for example, Deborah Pellow's 
article on Chinese privacy). But some of the other approaches do jibe 
quite nicely with historical projects. Historians may want to attend to 
the meaning of urban spaces for a variety of reasons. To offer one 
example, Mark Gelfand notes in A Nation of Cities that during the 1940s 
urban policy-makers paid particular attention to physical blight as the 
urban problem.[6] Complementing this observation with a cultural study 
of how residents of blighted areas interpreted the significance of their 
physical surroundings, and whether these views were consistent with 
those of local authorities, might pay significant dividends in 
explaining white flight, urban "unrest," and relationships between poor 
people and government officials in the postwar era.

At the end of the book's introduction, Rotenberg writes, "the cultural 
meaning of urban spaces, like all languages, has a standard syntax, but 
also a local accent. The strength of these chapters is that they 
together analyze the syntax, while training our ears to hear the accent 
in the urbanite's valuation of space" (p. xix). Rotenberg is correct to 
say that the book's contribution is to aid readers in tuning in the 
specific meanings people use as they transform the spaces around them 
into places. But he goes too far in claiming that the book gathers a 
previously unknown language together in comprehensible form, for even he 
does not attempt to articulate what the core of the "shared metropolitan 
knowledge" might be.

Notes

[1]. His speculation is most likely correct: in Book I of the Ars 
Amatoria (line 99), the Roman poet Ovid commented that wealthy ladies 
attended public games to see the spectacle, and to be seen themselves 
("spectatum veniunt, veniunt spectentur ut ipsae").

[2]. See, for example, "Spatial Patterns of Rapid Growth," chap. 3 in 
Sam Bass Warner, The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its 
Growth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), or Thomas 
Walter Hanchett, "Sorting out the New South City: Charlotte and Its 
Neighborhoods" (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 
1993).

[3]. Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing 
in America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981).

[4]. Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in 
Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley: University of California 
Press, 1991), p. 91, and Thomas J. Jablonsky, Pride in the Jungle: 
Community and Everyday Life in Back of the Yards Chicago (Baltimore: 
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

[5]. Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, 
Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 173.

[6]. Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and 
Urban America, 1933-1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).

*Library of Congress call number:* GF125 .C85 1993
*Subjects:*

    * Urban geography.
    * Urban anthropology.

<http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showpdf.cgi?path=8081083211037> 	


*Citation:* Amanda Seligman. "Review of Robert Rotenberg and Gary 
McDonogh, eds, /The Cultural Meaning of Urban Space/," H-Urban, H-Net 
Reviews, January, 1996. URL: 
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=8081083211037.