Critique of urban theory, Pt. 2
lets wrap this up
Note: There’s a good amount of overlap in this post with Part 1, given that I write in a structureless haze. So deal. In this one I’m trying to talk about an “urban theory of action” viz. urban changes in history.
As Alan Harding and Talja Blokland note, the definition of what a ‘city’ or ‘urban’ actually is is itself fraught – an analytical problem which stretches back to 1903, when Georg Simmel’s now-canonical “The Metropolis and Mental Life” was published.1 Beyond the lack of a coherent city-object, which has not for a minute slowed the production of ruminations on the urban ‘condition’, the precise nature of the discipline is also up in the air. Whence urban studies? It is joined by urban theory, urban sociology, urban history, urban economics, urban politics, human geography; all of these can make equally contestable claims on generating ‘urban’ insights. But taken as a whole, all share a basic pseudo-methodological suite which has remained untouched even though the disciplines which share an urban focus have become “even more eclectic and fragmented” over time. In short, urban studies is a discipline, or many disciplines in disarray. At the same time, this shambolic academic machine has outsized effects on cities themselves. Not only are academic papers used as support in the policy realm, but more insidiously, the combined output of the urban disciplines assists in the constitution of a sociological definition of cities and in the making-default of the limits of change within them in the ‘arena of practice’.
This is the urban change I wish to speak of at this juncture: the seeming impossibility of conscious change consummate with the position of urban studies in general as a librarian of shifts, changes, epochs, schools, etc. The intellectual uncertainty of urban scholarship, of which the constitutional failure of urban thought to understand itself and its object is just one symptom, has installed harsh limitations on perspective and critique. Within this essay, I will discuss how the troubles of theory hamstrung by the inadequacy of method culminate a total dis-orientation for urban scholarship which forecloses on a conscious theory of change (to say nothing of a theory of intervention). This leaves us all on the back foot, left to interpret urban changes only as isolable shocks which appear as bolts from the blue. Often, urban scholarship is relegated to ambulance chasing, pinging from one crisis to another, doggedly pursuing the only task it has been left—as Simmel wrote, “not to complain or condone but only to understand”—and only occasionally capable of doing the latter.2
Taken as a whole, the consequences are damning. Urban scholarship’s initial and continuing fragmentation has the ultimate effect of allowing the aegis of capitalist exploitation, domination, and brutality to continue apace with only the feeblest, singular critical voices raised in isolated dissent. I argue that due to this fundamental quietism even the best intentions of progressive urban scholars can only ever come to ineffectual gestures – a bold claim, to be sure, but I’m hoping also an important corrective. To proceed, it is necessary to locate contemporary urban studies within a historical genealogy that corresponds with urban development in the Euro-American west over the last 120 years, give or take. I date the genesis of urban studies to Simmel’s already-noted “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, but seek to place it within a greater continuum of sociological inquiry as a “socio-historical study of capitalist social relations” with an “emphasis on the need for empirical research”.3 My decision to situate urban studies as a sociological subfield is made to get behind the fractured nature of the urban discipline(s) and highlight the fact that, as I will explain, there is a great similarity of basic tenets and method. More practically, many of the initial writings discussed below were published in The American Journal of Sociology, and the godfather of modern sociology, Max Weber, was influenced by Georg Simmel and very interested in urban issues. Taken together, I do not believe that it is much of a stretch to claim that sociology was the first discipline to attempt to engage seriously and scientifically with the appearance of the capitalist mode of urbanization in history. I will deal further with this linkage between urban studies and sociology in the next section.
I. Questions of theory
There is no more obvious evidence of the shared bloodline between even the supposedly non-sociological elements of urban studies and sociology writ broadly than method. The sociological discipline, as it arose in the 1860s and 1870s, was originally formulated by Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, and Gustav Schmoller’s Verein fur Sozialpolitik.4 It is these scholars that established the basic forms of theorization and argumentation that define early urban studies as it is taught today. The canonical essays in the field – Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, as I have already mentioned, but also Wirth’s “Urbanism as a Way of Life”, Park’s “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City Environment”, and, of course, Burgess’ “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project” – share much with these initial developments. In these pieces, we can see the authors attempt to grapple with the limitations of a sociological method they have received from decades of development. Their sociology was very much a ’new science’, but it wasn’t until Max Weber, writing early in the 20th century (though after Simmel and Park’s contributions) that the territory of sociology vs. that of economics was properly elaborated. The establishment of a legitimacy for sociology was critical and uncertain at this stage, dominated by Herbert Spencer (famous still for his ‘social Darwinism’ theory) and Ferdinand Tönnies’ 1887 Community and Civil Society. This disciplinary project also depends on a shared philosophical framework, as Gillian Rose notes in her Hegel: Contra Sociology:
“The classical origins of sociology are usually presented in terms of two competing paradigms associated with the writings of Durkheim and Weber and with a host of well-known dichotomies: Erklären/Verstehen, holism/individualism, naturalism/anti-naturalism. Yet, the thought of Durkheim and Weber, in spite of the divergences, rests on an identical framework: ‘the neo-Kantian paradigm’”.5
Suffice to say that digging into the perambulations of Kant through western philosophical thought is a bit beyond the scope of this essay – but nevertheless, Rose provides us with the antimonies that obsess sociology at its origins. These are critical to foreground, as they transpire to provide sociological inquiry, ‘urban’ or otherwise, with a theory dependent upon generative antagonisms, chief of which is the division between town and country. See Simmel’s “intellectualistic” vs. “emotional” life, with the former in the metropolis and the latter in the village;6 Park’s urban “institution” of “corporate human nature” vs. the individual;7 Burgess’ awe and disdain for the urban ecological unity;8 and Wirth’s even-then-classical dichotomy between mechanical, alienating industrial urbanization (which debases human relationships) and the prediluvian authentic life which existed prior to the city’s appearance in history.9 All the above pieces depend upon a simple manicheanism which holds that modern society is defined by a break between, on one hand, capitalist (or modern, or industrial) conditions which are ‘irreal’, alienated, and stunted; and on the other, community life, approached with a romantic anti-(or better, pre-)capitalist orientation, in which authentic existence was default within a complete lifeworld.10 That this antagonism is, at bottom, an aesthetic-psychological distinction, or that the harshness of this dichotomy has been complicated somewhat (leading to a much more complex theoretical landscape in which authenticity may be discovered within the city’s cracks and interstices) is irrelevant for our purposes at the moment but will be revisited in section II.
All four authors see themselves as the primogenitors of an “urban science” viz. a scientific approach to analysis of the new urbanization as a part of a general sociological project to construct “a universal science of society” with a “basis in natural science that would replace an economic basis”.11 In the pieces above, scientific inquiry proceeds by establishing contradictions and ideal types as a prolegomena to the real, empirical work to come: “the sociological approach to the city thus acquires an essential unity and coherence enabling the empirical investigator not merely to focus more distinctly upon the problems and processes that properly fall in his province but also to treat his subject matter in a more integrated and systematic fashion”.12 Producing a city-object which may be thought of as the totality in itself – a Ding an Sich in Kantian terms is the project of urban studies in its preliminary stages. Put another way, the discipline begins with an attempt to reproduce the contradictions of sociological analysis on a narrower field of specialization – as a “pure, detached branch of learning which barely touched on the major questions of the structure” and instead set about ratifying its own existence through a clarification of its object via the establishment of its limits.13 No longer is the ostensible object society as a whole, but a particular element of it is made to swell until insights gained in its analysis may be assumed to have societal import. This is especially fascinating given that, in these early documents, the ‘urban’ such as it is exists as a disfiguration on the face of society and culture, creating clockwork monsters of human beings and annihilating their relationships with machinic logic as only a great Moloch can. Nevertheless, the urban fetish comes to stand for the new society as a whole in what is often termed to this day as a ‘spatialization’ of sociology or its method. The grand antinomies of sociology fashion the city as an idealized model, standing in for modernity, industrial activity, capitalism, civilization, etc., and having established this transitive character, insist on its suitability as a “laboratory” for scientific inquiry. But here, the project is completed. No attempt to transcend the problems of the parent discipline was to follow.
Max Weber, heavily influenced by Simmel, worked to further codify urban science in his 1911-1913 Die Stadt, later appended as Chapter XVI of his 1923 masterwork Economy and Society. Curiously, his treatment barely undertakes a sociological analysis at all, instead contenting itself with providing a mythologized history of the city through the ages, largely derived from Fustel’s La Cité Ancien, ultimately reiterating the city-object as untouchable, transcendental reality. What does become sharply evident in Weber is a deft awareness of the coterminacy in fortunes between the bourgeois class and capitalism itself, and thus the history of capitalist origins is told as the origin of the city as the bastion of bourgeois power. At the same time, however, he presents the city as an eternal fixture of human societies (in order to validate it as a subject of socio-historical study). This results in a fitfully contradictory case for the strangeness of the bourgeois-capitalist city which urban studies and the new sociology have taken it upon themselves to investigate as both eternal and a relative historicological latecomer. Thus, his account is a self-reflective attempt on the part of the bourgeois-capitalist to come to terms with its own creation on terms established by natural history, in which the city is a fait accompli. As such, it may be modulated, the cruelest edges sanded off (provided enough political will) but never improved upon consciously, because doing so would be doomed by principle, tantamount to pissing into the wind. Urban changes appear like the weather – inexorable and remorseless, and it is the task of the urban scholar to pick up the pieces (in thought, at least) and compose them as an explanatory diorama.
II. Questions of method
As the preceding section’s focus was on the abstract questions present at urban studies’ birth, it does not say much about urban studies today. Over a century on, these founding texts have passed into prehistory, though as a the basic armature they remain intact. The creation of basic assumptions has now been completed.
Urban studies’ sociological birthright and further development has bequeathed it with a specialist, relativist, and above all empiricist (or empiriophilic?) attitude often expressed in pragmatic, rough-and-ready hermeneuticist enthnographies. Today, typical modes of research include the survey, the interview, case studies, and personal experience, bolstered by a smattering of relevant data obtained from development statistics approaches. This methodological armature is then applied to a city, group of cities, or city-type which express the validity of the findings. What prevails is a non-method method – analysis jettisoned in favor of comparisons intended to surfact particular issue, which has been granted universal importance, and then re-localized upon concrete ‘interpretation’ in a geographically bounded space. This non-method is so rote that elements of it can be intimated entirely without any damage to the whole. See the above-mentioned “Popular Urbanization” essay by Streule et al.:
Building on Lefebvre’s threedimensional theory of the production of space (Lefebvre, [1974] 1991), we developed a multidimensional understanding of urbanization that highlights how social space is produced through material interaction, territorial regulation and everyday experience. We cannot go into the details of our theoretical considerations here, but the most important aspect of this approach is to conceive these three dimensions as linked to each other through dialectical relationships [emphasis mine].”14
As noted in the section previous, any issues addressed in any given paper can only be treated as minor perversions upon the transhistorical face of the city. Change is curtailed as a concept by the non-method, because a theory of change would require a frontal assault on the city-object concept as received from sociological inquiry. Action is severely restricted by non-method’s quietude –without a theory of change, speculative utopianism becomes rote (“a city for [x]”). More pragmatic scholars may favor creating proposals for more equitable policies bundled as whitepaper-type suggestions – all toothless prayer.
Lukács notes that “this sociology of culture was bound to proclaim a complete abstention from social action” in favor of the prioritization of an intuitive understanding of the state of things.15 Driving this intuition is the “substantive affinity” between sociology and marginalist economics, with both sharing a “common liberal individualist starting point” that accepts “the economic institutions of capitalism as embodiments of economic rationality, as technical means adapted to the achievement of economic ends, and so as ‘facts’”.16 The crisis of a theory of change, which is in many conditions a theory of action, goes beyond urban disciplines. For sociology as a whole, changes for good or bad are aberrations of code in the rational functioning of capitalist institutions. The activity of those conditions thus becomes impossible to parse, even as at every moment of the non-method the omniscience of the individual researcher remains primary, their tools (survey, ethnography, observation, etc.) lauded for their potency despite all evidence.
The non-method begs for a disciplinary focus on the ‘concrete’ level of analysis, though the definition of concrete here employed is a bespoke one, which thereby negatively defines the ‘abstract’ is as a realm of useless theorizing and senescent contemplation. Given urban conditions are taken as a fait accompli, and the task of non-methodological analysis to merely describe short-run perturbations in those urbanity’s existence, a fetish for the local and individual comes to replace historically sensitive, that is, true concrete analysis. The actual difference between concrete and abstract, as well as their interdependence, under the auspices of non-method becomes a simple scalar definition. Marx, writing in the Grundrisse, points out the pitfalls of a pseudo-concrete analysis:
“It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed”.17
In the pseudo-concrete, actual historical conditions give way to either sober reportage or humanitarian pity for indiviual outcomes. Simon Clarke reminds us that “all that exist are concrete human beings, interacting in historically developed social relations, through which they define both their individuality and their sociability”.18 Without history, and without the primacy of social relations being continuously modified in history, there is little left to concrete analysis other than journalistic description.
This revanchism is built into the discipline, and cannot be truly laid at the feet of any one particular urban schola – it is, in some ways, endemic to academic work under the capitalist mode of social metabolism. As Guy Debord writes: “the abstract nature of all individual work, as of production in general, finds perfect expression in the spectacle, whose very manner of being concrete is, precisely, abstraction”.19 This is not a claim that there is a unity of method. In fact, Debord illustrates that the pseudo-concrete over-elaborates prima facie abstraction until it can masquerade as concrete; it does this by idealizing of the achievable state of things until the analytical field is shriven to a managable size, and then enforcing this new division as sacrosanct. “The spectacle divides the world into two parts, one of which is held up as a self-representation to the world, and is superior to the world [emphasis mine]”. A theory of change cannot possibly arise from such a blinded standpoint, because it is not dealing with historical reality at all.
Harding, Alan, and Talja Blokland. Urban Theory: A Critical Introduction to Power, Cities and Urbanism in the 21st Century. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2014.
Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Dresden, 1903.
Clarke, Simon. Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology: From Adam Smith to Max Weber. Springer, 2016, p. 176-178.
The split itself is a fascinating story: as political economy developed, both its left and right adherents, engaged in the development and promulgation of the labor theory of value (LTV) closed in on the realization that if the labor theory of value were true, than the rents commanded by the landlords as well as the profits enjoyed by capitalists were in effect an “unearned increment” stolen from workers’ wages. The appearance of sociology as a discipline was preceded by the “marginalist revolution” in economics, which set as its singular goal the erasure of LTV in favor of marginal, utilitarian sources of value, and finally the abandonment of value altogether in favor of price. As economics became an increasingly ‘apolitical’ and ‘asocial’ discipline, at least by virtue of the questions it was interested in answering, sociology came into being to pick up the remainder.
Rose, Gillian. Hegel: Contra Sociology. A&C Black, 2000.
Simmel, “Metropolis”.
Park, Robert E. “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City Environment.” American Journal of Sociology 20, no. 5 (1915): 577–612. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2763406.
Burgess, Ernest. “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project.” In Publications of the American Sociological Society, 18:71–78, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-73412-5_5.
Wirth, Louis. “Urbanism as a Way of Life.” American Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (1938): 1–24. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2768119.
Tönnies, Ferdinand. Community and Civil Society. Edited by Jose Harris. Translated by Margaret Hollis. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511816260.
Lukacs, Georg. The Destruction of Reason. Verso Books, 2021, p 538.
Wirth. “Urbanism as a Way of Life".”
Lukacs. The Destruction of Reason, p 587.
Streule, Monika, Ozan Karaman, Lindsay Sawyer, and Christian Schmid. “Popular Urbanization: Conceptualizing Urbanization Processes Beyond Informality.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 44, no. 4 (2020): 652–72. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12872, p 3.
Lukacs. The Destruction of Reason, p 637.
Clarke. Marx, Marginalism, and Modern Sociology, p 655-656.
Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. Revised ed. edition. London: Penguin Classics, 1993, p 142.
Clarke. Marx, Marginalism, and Modern Sociology, p 54.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994, p 22.