august philippic

I mentioned Adam Langer’s Crossing California in a previous post. One of the many interesting things about that book is that it’s central theme is a street – California Avenue in Chicago – that was a border for a Jewish neighborhood. It’s a familiar kind of border – anybody who has lived in a city (or in suburbs, or in rural areas) will recognize a variety of borders that have nothing to do with political boundaries. If you talk to people, they can usually point to a line (sometimes corresponding to a street, an overpass, or the clichéd railroad track) that separates rich from poor, or race from race, educated from non, safe from un. Part of the specialized knowledge of place is to understand the shifting nature of these borders (they may emerge only at night, for example. They may even be marked by, for example, gang symbols or neighborhood watch signs).

That much everybody knows. So why am I  blogging about it?
What do I have to add? Well, the way the borders change – they are contingent on collections of impressions, shifting landscapes of shops, schools, apartments, transportation. We recognize that the borders of daily life are impermanent, however meaningful they may be in any moment.

Is that part of the reason for the ever-recurring immigration debate in America? We all know that a border is a fake thing, and thus we pour money into policing, wall-building, legislation, caricatures of immigrants in order to make this fake thing seem real, urgent, permanent, safe. When really no border can be any of those things.

I know that the observation doesn’t solve the problem, or even address what most consider to be the issues, but over and over in the immigration debate my sense is that the actual lives of immigrants are totally marginal to the fears that people have about losing jobs, low wages, security, a breakdown of established rules. Like terrorism, immigration is a debate about our own neuroses. I just wish we once again had political elites willing to insist that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. Instead, we get “FEAR! FEAR! FEAR!” Which in turn makes me rather afraid, just not about immigration or terrorism.

Tags: cities, philippic by august
4 Comments »

I’ve just read a short essay by Riccardo Petrella titled “A Global Agora vs. Gated City-Regions.” The title refers to two visions of the future. The first is a world (”Global Agora”) in which things like information technology have made it possible for the voices of people around the world to be heard, and where therefore a new sense of ethics, justice, and equality takes hold. Petrella believes that utopian view lies in the distant future. In the meantime, we are stuck with gated city-regions, a network of about 30 urban conglomerations where wealth, technology, management skills, and political power is centered. Petrella’s list includes New York, LA, Miami in the U.S., Tokyo, Osaka, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Jakarta in east/southeast Asia. Odd (to me) that Mumbai and Abu Dhabi didn’t make the list, but that’s neither here nor there.

Here’s what I’m thinking. Imagine there is a world of a limited number of wealthy cities, and a vast hinterland of poor areas squeezed out by the imbalance of capital. Imagine, therefore, people immigrating to cities to try to gain a portion of the wealth. How do you think the rich mercantile powerbrokers would react? Perhaps their response would have something to do with police? And perhaps this structure of the world might have come into existence in the late nineteenth century?

That’s what Frederick Wakeman’s Policing Shanghai made me think. He describes the French and British both competing and colluding with the Chinese public security forces in Shanghai in the 1920’s and 30’s. The city was very corrupt, with various forces trying to control the opium trade, and the imperialist powers having a deep interest in helping Chiang Kaishek defeat the Communists (who, the British and French worried, might spur revolts in Indochina and India). Seems like this scenario supports Petrella’s hypothesis.

Occurs to me that this basic regime has only shifted its centers of gravity, not its fundamental logic.  How depressing..

Tags: cities by august
2 Comments »

That’s the way most city conversations sound to me — that famous background distortion. Lord knows what these people are saying. On the subway I often need several stops to figure out whether a couple is speaking English or not. I wonder if gurgling babies aren’t, in their bubbles, simply repeating what they mostly hear. This isn’t language; it’s aural glare.

Tags: cities by august
6 Comments »

(Part III in the Urban Voices series)

Taipei emits a constant roar of petty commerce — hawkers peddling, firecrackers declaring the birth of a new hair salon, police cracking down on illegal shops, loudspeakers encouraging the purchase of knives or noodles, trucks delivering such wares as they may hold. Penetrating this din — shouting, shouting, and more shouting: the abusive husband in the back aparment, the gamblers celbrating their winnings, the schoolchildren announcing to one another that later they will be studying in the McDonald’s, the bus drivers exchanging greatings and traffic info. Along the fountains and covered walkways of Chiang Kaishek Memorial Park in the nineties, even late into the night one could find veterans shouting to one another about the war years.

Urban conversations are high-decible affairs. In the nineteenth century, such shouting bothered Chinese officials, who thought that noise could usher affrays, mobs, riots, rebellions. Shouting is necessary (try getting a train ticket in China without raising your voice — no chance), but it seems to bespeak extremes of emotion, and thus unruliness.

For there is much in shouting that is unnecessary and nonsensical. The man screaming “Hallelujah…Hallelujah…Hallelujah” at regular intervals signals something closer to mental illness than religious devotion. The woman on a Brooklyn streetcorner who told me that the book I was reading was “Really, really great” spared nothing of her larynx to convey her enthusiasms. Even my yoga class, mostly silent in its unfolding, spills out into the dressing room in a sizzle of overdone voices.

Why is there so much shouting? It’s more than the creep of trying to rise above your neighbor. It’s a declaration of cosmopolitan worth. Within each shout stir professions of belonging: “I am here. I deserve to be here. I can afford to call attention to my presence. I shout.”

It is this self-confidence that makes shouting threatening to urban planners, who tend to wish to rearrange and beautify city populations, and to officials who hope for docile burghers. Shouting is the city’s choral retort: “We shall not be moved.”

Tags: cities by august
No Comments »

Ira Glass, the host of This American Life on public radio, in total darkness, began his — well, his what? His talk? His multimedia presentation? His spiel? Whatever — it was an homage to voices and their intimate power. Part of his point was that an enormous amount of prejudice is based on visual rather than aural cues. Because radio deprives us of first impressions, we allow its voices to engage us. Ira Glass played a clip of two boys in a housing project, complaining about how hard it is to get dates. Apparently the girls either avoid boys altogether or hook up with the sort of guy you would definitely not wish to piss off by hitting on his girlfriend, or on anybody he might want to be his girlfriend.

The presentation was taking place in Seattle, and it was clear that radio was allowing the white, middle class audience to focus on their common yearning — the desire for a partner. Taking that aspect of radio a step further, WNYC’s “radio rookies” project takes recording equipment to different neighborhoods and helps young people tell their own stories in a medium that encourages listening.

Radio may seem like a one-way transmission of station to those who tune in, but in Chinese cities it is clear that listeners are far from passive. The taxi drivers in Taipei listen constantly to talk radio, and frequently call in to local stations. They are a formidable political block — mobile, engaged, and capable of jamming thoroughfares in short order. When taxi driver’s protest, the city cannot operate. And one can spend hours listening to high schoolers and college students working through their emotional insecurities on the airwaves. Older folks, too. If you’ve ever encountered Delilah on a U.S. dial, you can picture the most common genres of Chinese radio just by pretending that Delilah let the callers talk a bit longer.

In cities, radio can foster a sense of community akin to a public park or an internet message board. I think Charlie Warner over at Media Curmudgeon is on to something when he emphasizes radio’s localism. Radio gives you accents, announcements, debates that can be as grand in scale as global warming or as small as the road work on a particular block.

I’m obviously not claiming that radio’s effects are restrained to cities, but urban areas do offer more venues for listening and for collective response. I like to listen to radio while working, but I hear it nearly everywhere — the cab, the barber shop, the grocery store, or (my favorite) the Met game blasting in the Mustang parked in front of the local bodega. A couple of years ago, during the big blackout, the same Mustang informed me that the problem was a surge, not a terrorist attack.

Of course, much of the conversation is inane, and the ever-increasing number of channels can mean that radio fosters segregation instead of transcending it. But the issue is voice — where do you hear people speaking in cities? You could do worse than to start with the radio.

Tags: cities, China by august
2 Comments »

According to legend (and the testimony of his hostess), in 1912 Rainer Maria Rilke was walking along the cliffs at Duino Castle when he was struck with the inspiration for a series of poems — the Duino Elegies, a collection I tend to keep near to hand the way the English Patient clasped his Herodotus. Thinking about Rilke’s epiphany today (an uncharacteristically overcast, cold August day in New York), I realized that for all the solitude and windswept loneliness of the work, it is an urban poem. If you can imagine the Delphic Oracle walking through the streets of Paris, hearing the music of violins, the arguments, the footsteps, that is close to Rilke’s writing. He is a poet of overheard voices. Life, he says, is spent speaking:

What if we are here just for saying: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, jug, tree, window, –
or at most column, tower… but for saying, understand,
oh for such saying as the things themselves
never hoped so intensely to be.

It confirms my impression of New York — that nobody can stop talking. Consider also: Italo Calvino’s Melania:

…every time you enter the square, you find yourself caught in the dialogue: the braggart soldier and the parasite coming from a door meet the young wastrel and the prostitute; or else the miserly father from his threshold utters his final warnings to the amorous daughter and is interrupted by the foolish servant who is taking a note to the procuress. You return to Melania after years and you find the same dialogue still going on; in the meanwhile the parasite has died, and so have the procuress and the miserly father; but the braggart soldier, the amorous daughter, the foolish servant have taken their places, being replaced in their turn by the hypocrite, the confidante, the astrologer.

In this “invisible city,” what is lasting is the conversation, which survives longer than the participants or the buildings.

A third example: martial arts novels. Paize Keulemans has shown that popular martial arts novels in late nineteenth-century China were products of urban culture. They were filled with sound — writers devised techniques to portray such details as a knife cutting through a melon, a foot striking an opponents head, and of course the swish of sword in the air. These cliches are still recognizable in the conventions of Kung Fu movies.

Urban life is cacophonous. The brakes of New York subway cars, for example, are destroying my hearing. But within the din lurk conversations that shape urban life. I’m going to spend a few posts highlighting these city voices.

——
Excerpt from Rilke’s Tenth Duino Elegy from Edward Snow, trans., Duino Elegies (New York, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2000), p. 59. Melania appears in Italo Calvino’s classic Invisible Cities, translated by William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 80. Paize Keulmann’s 2005 Ph.D. dissertation is from the University of Chicago. If I ever find the title, I’ll let you know.

Tags: cities, China by august
3 Comments »

This (from Seattle PI) makes me very sad.

When I worked in the archives, there was a secret path to get a cup of coffee. Let me tell you, nothing makes Qing documents sing like a dopio espresso. I understand why the Chinese would not want it there — indeed, it’s exactly the sort of non-place I complain about below. But this one did not displace local residents, and, dammit, the argument for moving it is about political symbolism, not about making Beijing nicer.

Still, I’m glad to hear the news anchors enjoy a good cup of coffee.

UPDATE 8/20: Mickey Kaus makes a useful proposal:

If we pay Starbucks a surcharge–say $1 on a grande latte–will they stop playing Paul McCartney?

Tags: cities, China by august
3 Comments »

I was walking around Central Park this morning, watching neighborhood teams play softball. Actually, I imagine that many teams have a pretty good subway ride to get there. It got me thinking about public spaces — or really, a more simple question: what do people do in parks, and why does it matter?

There is, of course, the famous “Bowling Alone” argument that civic activity fosters voting. If you are one of the folks playing softball, the story goes, you are more likely to vote, more likely to join a political party, more likely to join the PTA or one of the many political clubs in New York city.

Although Chinese authorities punish any formal association, informal gatherings of people are evident in all Chinese cities. There are old women giving each other back rubs. There are kids playing soccer (that seems to be the country’s most popular outdoor sport). Some folks practice calligraphy, others Tai Chi, sword dancing, or other martial arts. Dancing and singing are extremely common — if there are any anthropologists reading, please write an article about this.

Also, there are inevitably groups of old men, airing their songbirds.

My favorite spontaneous association was English Club, an enormous gathering in Nanjing, where people simply show up and start speaking English to one another. If you looked like a native English speaker (which in Nanjing basically meant that you were caucasion), you’d be surrounded by people happy to chat about issues of the day. It was a good way to meet people, and people definitely expressed honest opinions regarding issues of the day.

Political Engagement?

There are two ways of looking at these activities in light of the Bowling Alone argument. One is that they show the argument does not work for China — that groupings of people do not make them politically active. Another way of looking at things is that these neighborhood associations are signs of nascent engagement in government — that the middle class will grow more engaged and more difficult for the current regime to accomodate.

I tend to favor the first argument. I imagine it’s true that in certain scandals, information spreads among folks hanging out in public parks — but cell phones seem to be the more common form of communication when people want to scream about Japanese textbooks or U.S. spy planes. The argument for real activism is often based on the example of East Germany, where church groups were indeed active in bringing down the KPD (German Communist Party).

But the current rulers of China are all too aware of the East German precedent, and they while they tolerate a fairly high level of discussion, they don’t allow any hint of organized activity. It’s a perhaps an open question whether they can maintain such a level of surveillance — but urbanization tends to help the government, making it possible to deploy a very large amount of force in a very short time.

If democratization comes to China, I imagine the more likely path will be splits within the Communist party — between factions, between geographical areas. Party leaders may adapt voting as an anti-corruption measure. I see a splintering of the state, not a splitting of state and society.

Tags: cities, China by august
No Comments »

There are various ways to classify cities in China.  A lot of folks go by population, which correlates roughly with   administrative status.  Certain cities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and now Chongqing) are themselves provinces — if you imagine that Chicago, L.A., and New York were the 51-53 states in the U.S., you get the idea.  Other cities are capitals of provinces, of counties, etc.

Another way to group cities is to classify them according to economic activity.  There are various measures for this, but one of the most enduring models has been that of G. William Skinner, who made use of central place theory and fieldwork on marketing networks in Sichuan to classify cities according to a hierarchy of nodes.  The idea is, you need a relatively small population to support a market, a larger population to support, say, a hospital, and by the time you get to an arthouse movie theater or a specialty store for imported haggus, you are likely to be in a very large city that supports a large, perhaps even national or international clientele.

I’ve been thinking about zones of relatively uniform climate and physical geography, and the ways such zones affect urbanization.   Vast swaths of northernmost China are steppes — through much of the history of the area they supported pastoral nomads herding (usually) sheep and goats.  Typically, they would wander in set circles of pasture, but there were times when great nomadic confederations (think Ghenghis Khan) could form and support massive armies on horseback.  This climate did not particularly favor urbanization.  I have to confess I know nothing of, for example, Ulan Bataar.

In the Gobi Desert, an oasis economy developed.  Near the oasis, it was possible to irrigate some farmland, and farther out one might support small herds.  Much of the nomadic activity, however, was trade in goods from China and into (what is now) Pakistan, Central Asia, and Russia.  This is the famed Silk Road.  One of it’s consequences was cities — Kashgar and Urumqi, large markets, each near an oasis, that supported both a local economy and what we might now call international trade.

Those cities and trade routes were at the center of Chinese strategic thinking for thousands of years.   Secure trade routes and peaceful relations with the Turkic peoples of the area could help support campaigns against the Mongol tribes.  After 1644, emperors of China were Manchu, and particularly aggressive in their efforts at frontier expansion.  More recently, the policy has been one of settlement of Han Chinese in order to swamp the local Muslim population (itself the locus of much “war on terror”-esque anxiety among ruling elites).

When I teach, I’m hoping to incorporate these cities of the desert more fully into existing narratives of urban change.  They are today the loci of geopolitical strategies of governance in the region, but also centers of perhaps the most dangerous challenges to the current regime.   It’s a tension I see throughout China, and indeed in all cities, but the nomadic zone means that these tactics find different appearances in urban form.   My goal: to identify and account for such physical differences.

Tags: cities, China by august
4 Comments »

I was just reading an article about Atlanta, a city I hate.  My hatred is born from sad experience, for Atlanta is the worst major city in the world. It is too boring to be Hell. It is a city of nonplaces, a noncity.

You’ve been to nonplaces: airports, shopping malls, Jiffy-Lube muffler shops. Some place called “Chipotle Mexican Grill” recently opened in my neigborhood, and mrs. august, the instant upon seeing it, made me promise never to go there. The nonplace invites ennui because it’s impossible to figure out where you really are. If I were to pass out and awake in a McDonald’s, how long would it take to figure out, from visual cues, the city I was in. Picture Atlanta as a gigantic fast-food restaurant.

Is there an agency of non-ness more celebrated than the Olympics?  Friends tell me that Barcelona is a shining exception, but elsewhere the progress of the games has been followed by a swath of architectural urban drabness.  In Beijing, the city is being bulldozed and dug up and rearranged and made — what?  Made into a sports stadium.

In China the transformation has been going on for some time.    I used to live in an apartment building that was near a sprawling market — a cacophony of vendors, huts, newspaper sellers, fabrics.  IIf you walked down the street, it was impossible to be lost – there could be no other place like that one.  And now, it is gone, flattened, all in the hopes of making Nanjing more — what?  More clean.  More wealthy.  More accessible.  More like Atlanta.

If I told you the name of the article you would be convinced it was the sort of boring anthropological jargon that made you hate half your college courses.  It even has a colon (”Making Place in the Nonplace Urban Realm: Notes on the Revitalization of Downtown Atlanta”), and an impressively credentialed author (Charles Rutheiser).  You might think that Ruthheiser is recycling a complain that you’ve heard over and over again.  But his point isn’t merely that Atlanta is boring — he shows the motivations of urban planners in creating such uniform dizzying drabness. 

The planners of Nanjing, Beijing, and Atlanta will say they are trying to benefit the greatest number, trying to revitalize, trying to root out decay and poverty.  And yet, the victims of such “renewal” iare inevitably the poor, who are shunted to slums or to the far reaches of the suburbs.  The effort to make the city “accessible” in fact only makes it available to a thin, managerial class, the sorts of foks (like me, on occasion) who bunk at the Hilton. 

The effect is to destroy ourselves.  Our cities lose their markets and public spaces.  It loses its individual culture, traded for flourescent indoor weatherproof people-moving corridors.  And the people pushing such measures argue that they seek the greatest good for the greatest number.  

One of the reasons for paying attention to aesthetics: to recognize the ways we make ourselves unfree.

Tags: cities by august
2 Comments »

China is changing, China is changing, China is changing.  Every time you round a corner in New York,, or anywhere really, somebody will scream at you that China is changing.  It’s becoming more market driven, more threatening, more advanced, more stylish, more wealthy, more, more, more.

Urbanization is a key aspect of that change, and it underlies more fundamental transformation.  China’s population growth is leveling off, and the reasons have much more to do with people moving to cities than with the one child policy.  Those who believe China will become more democratic point to the rising power of the urban middle class.  Chinese movies, Chinese markets, and a great deal fo its trade with the rest of the world are products of events taking place in China’s cities.  Indeed, there has been massive migration of people Eastward and into cities — colonies of workers inhabit the fringes of every metropolis in the country.

 I’m trying to design a course that will put these changes in historical perspective, and I want to focus on one “debate” in urban studies — freedom vs. surveillance.  I put the word “debate” in quotation marks because it is not yet clear to me whether anybody has argued the issue in these terms.   But it is clear that there is a long tradition of thinking of the city as a center of freedom.    There’s the idea (probably overstated)  that privileges granted to cities in the middle ages were the basis of what were to become legal rights.  There’s the notion of the city as a place of opportunity, where people go to sample new identities, where people are faced with an abundance of choice — things to consume, trades to master, art to stimulate. 

Then there is the view of the city as a place where the forces of the state and (recently) of capitalism conspire to exert a phenomenal level of power on ordinary individuals.  Although Michel Foucault’s work is not primarily concerned with urbanism, his notion of power and of discipline deepens our understanding of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century urban planners.  In the case of China, colonialism heightened these effects.  Foreigners established bastions in Chinese cities, “Treaty Ports” that were not subject to Chinese sovereignty, and that developed their own police forces and tactics of urban order.  Soon the Chinese were copying these models, resulting in governmental ambitions that sought to observe and order the lives of even the most ordinary people.

I’m suggesting that this debate will help understand present-day politics.  As China becomes more urbanized, the problem of freedom and surveillance will play out in ways that are difficult to predict.  Still, we’ll be in a better position to register these changes if we have a sense of what has happened in Chinese cities, the ways they have served as playgrounds and workplaces, entrepots and symbols, stages for nationalist rallies and centers for colonial exploitation.  It’s with these thoughts in mind that I’m designing my class.  Stay tuned for more notes.

Tags: cities, China by august
No Comments »