Cities Beyond Borders

Comparative and Transnational Approaches to Urban History

Nicolas Kenny, Rebecca Madgin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317165996
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on a body of research covering primarily Europe and the Americas, but stretching also to Asia and Africa, from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, this book explores the methodological and heuristic implications of studying cities in relation to one another. Moving fluidly between comparative and transnational methods, as well as across regional and national lines, the contributors to this volume demonstrate the necessity of this broader view in assessing not just the fundamentals of urban life, the way cities are occupied and organised on a daily basis, but also the urban mindscape, the way cities are imagined and represented. In doing so the volume provides valuable insights into the advantages and limitations of using multiple cities to form historical inquiries.

PART I

Chapter 2
The Seven Cs: Reflections on Writing a Global History of Urban Segregation

Carl H. Nightingale

Books like this one, packed with diverse and stimulating chapters, make it indisputable: urban history has embraced its ‘transnational turn’. Celebrations are certainly in order and so are the ongoing critical conversations that are essential to any innovative academic departure. Moreover, as transnational urban history transforms from a theoretical call to a real and burgeoning practice, we also need to continuously reflect back on how it is we do this kind of history. In that spirit I offer these thoughts on my experience writing a book called Segregation: a Global History of Divided Cities.¹ These are retrospective musings, and they describe the techniques I used to research the book and develop its argument far more systematically than they ever appeared to me while I was actually writing the book. The overall drift is this: when we embrace the ‘transnational’ we must not conceive of it so much a radical departure, but the beginnings of potent dialectical interchanges between many newer and more traditional forms of thought and practice about urban history. There are seven elements to the practice that I used in the book, and it happens that all seven can be introduced using words beginning with the letter C: case studies, chronology, causality, commonalities, contrasts, connections and contingencies. In actual practice, I did not ‘sail’ upon these seven Cs so smoothly, and their confluence as a set of practices actually came to me largely by means of another important activity beginning with C: casting about in the dark! That last C is perhaps just as important – for I now realize that not always knowing the direction I was sailing or where I was casting my lines actually allowed fruitful dialectical dynamics to develop between the seven other Cs.

That dialectical dynamic – that ‘tavern of the seven Cs’, we might call it – is worth preserving. It is in that interchange that we can discover the true potential of the transnational turn in urban history – the realization that approaches often deemed opposed to each other – not only the ‘transnational’ and ‘traditional’ or the macro and the micro, but also comparative history and global history – in fact offer potent benefits to each other. Moreover, this dialectical urban history, while certainly set in motion by the transnational turn, may also ultimately transcend the strict sense of ‘transnational’ itself and become something even more valuable.

Case Studies

What we know about the history of urban segregation – and specifically what we know about urban residential segregation by race, the central focus of my book – mostly came into being because of case studies of individual cities. For the prospect of writing a larger-scale history of urban segregation, local case studies have some weaknesses, but they must also be treated as essential assets. Case studies alone, obviously, only allow historians to speculate about larger historical patterns – that is, after all, largely why we have called so loudly for more transnational urban histories. But over the past 100 years or so the collectivity of urban historians has written so many case studies that we have created in effect a massive secondary archive – filled with rich analytical insight as well as basic information. Without it, let us be clear, it would be inconceivable to write larger-scale stories. This indispensability, in fact, creates a lovely paradox: urban historians’ efforts to go global must start with a deep plunge into the rich and pulsing sea of local studies.

There are several risks to this plunge. One is the overwhelming amount of information – how to keep track of it all? Another is the risk that instead of a transnational history, we surface from our dive with a product that looks suspiciously like another collection of chapters that only recapitulate the case studies on which each is based. Another potential outcome, also in my mind falling short of a transnational history, would be a kind of typological study, one that subjects a specific urban topic, such as urban segregation, to a system of pigeonholes that derives from a historian’s own a priori categorical imperatives rather than from within the large-scale historical experiences of those cities themselves.

My own plunge into the secondary archive was, as I have suggested, less organized and less efficient than it should have been. What ultimately gave it structure, I now realize in retrospect, is that I focussed on finding and cataloguing evidence that helped me solve problems relating to the other ‘C’ questions: What chronological sequence can we build between these cases? How is this case similar or different from other places? Is there evidence of connection in this case, or are there contingencies operating in these cases that might have limited or deflected connections in some way or another?

Meanwhile, the weaknesses and assets of case studies for transnational history themselves operated in a productive dialectical fashion as I went about my work. The secondary archive as a generality did not provide full answers for all the larger-scale urban historical questions I faced. Accordingly, my only solution in many instances was to embark on my own case studies. That, in turn, brought up another productive question: which cities should I chose as cases? (Obviously, I could not conduct primary research on every segregated city in world history.) Once again, it was only by navigating the secondary archive with the particular focus provided by the other ‘Cs’ that I was able to identify likely candidates, in my case cities where significant changes occurred in the larger-scale chronological narrative of segregation or cities that operated as significant nodes of the larger-scale connections that helped to direct the broader flow of segregationist practice.

The result was the basic methodological structure of the book, what I sometimes call the ‘synthetic reading with post-holes’: a broad narrative constructed through a synthetic reading of the published literature, punctuated by in-depth, and in some cases, chapter-length original research studies on five individual cities that were crucial to the larger chronological, causal, comparative, connective and contingent patterns of my developing transnational story. These five cities were Madras, Calcutta, London, Chicago and Johannesburg. As the narrative came into further focus, I found it necessary to delve into less-exhaustive primary work on a few incidents that occurred in other cities as well, in the ‘cantonments’ of British India, Hong Kong, Paris, Algiers and Baltimore. All of these case studies also allowed me to bring the richness of human-scale urban experience into a narrative that often had swept across much larger scales.²

The last and perhaps most important strength of case studies’ local perspective, ironically, turned out to be a rather abstract and sweeping insight – one that derives not so much from the geographical scope of the inquiry but from the disciplinary style urban historians bring to questions such as the nature of segregation and the ways it operates historically. As useful as sociologists’ approaches are to this subject, their focus on the quantification of ‘dissimilarity’ or on modelling such dynamics as ‘invasion and succession’ did not provide the empirically verifiable connective tissue I needed for a larger-scale narratives based around the other Cs. Where urban historians excel, it is in recreating the messiness of the politics of urban space – the unceasing and uncertain contests over dividing lines, the jagged stories in which people mobilize other people, ideas, money, practices and institutional power to make those boundaries stick despite near-constant resistance. To write the worldwide spread of segregation, I would have to trace the spread of the constitutive elements of this politics, hopefully as evocatively as urban historians have rendered them in individual cities, and in so doing also measure the extent that segregationists were able to adapt and recreate these elements in many, extremely diverse, local places.³

Figure 2.1 The five surges of racial segregation in the modern era. This map shows the global geography of the spread of racial segregationist politics and practices, starting in South Asia (1), then travelling to East Asia and the Pacific (2), then becoming a worldwide phenomenon because of turn-of-the-twentieth-century public health panics that fuelled ‘segregation mania’ (3), and also because of the city-splitting imagination of globe-trotting professional urban planners (4) and finally culminating in the European-inspired ‘archsegregationist’ politics of the United States and South Africa (5)

Source: Carl Nightingale, ‘Urban Segregation: A ‘Diascopic’ World Atlas’, a forthcoming on-line reference tool.

Chronology

When did segregation begin? Where did it appear next? When did it spread and peak? What happened after that? These problems were among the most important and fundamental I could solve as someone engaged in larger-scale urban history. Chronology would allow me to create a story-line, after all, and most clearly distinguish my history from a collection of essays or a typological study.

As for the book as a whole, my search for chronological answers started in the oceans of the secondary archive. To establish, for example, that Madras was the first place where officials used the terms White Town and Black Town to designate separate zones of a colonial city, I had to read dozens of works on early modern colonial cities stretching from Mexico City to Moçambique to Macao, where possible confirming important points in the original sources.⁴ From there, the chronological imperative provided a crucial organizing principle for the vast amounts of information from the secondary archive. The timeline I developed of incidents of segregationist practice and politics began to reveal striking patterns not only across time but also across hemispheric, continental and ocean-sized swaths of space. Race itself may have been originally an Atlantic phenomenon, but urban segregation by colour and race began in the Indian Ocean and spread far eastward and then jumped the Pacific long before it swung towards the West.

Five overlapping periods – or ‘surges of segregation’ as I ultimately called them – emerged, determined both by their geographical extent and some of the central themes of segregationist politics and practice involved in each. First, a series of segregationist practices – which represented modified versions of those that occurred in the colonial cities of Madras, Calcutta and Bombay – spread across the Indian subcontinent in tune with the British conquest.⁵ Then, new innovations of these practices spread eastward in step with the West’s forced ‘opening’ of China and the subsequent migration of Chinese people across the Pacific. This second surge helped explain, for example, why campaigns for segregation ordinances in the USA first arose in San Francisco in the 1870s, and only came to the country’s east coast and heartland after 1910.⁶ It also clarified the climax of my story, the third and largest surge, dating from 1894 to 1920, that I call ‘segregation mania’. The mania began with the outbreak of plague in Hong Kong and the first official uses of ‘segregation’ to describe practices of dividing urban space for public health reasons there and in Bombay. From Asia, this form of segregationism spread, once again, across the Pacific (occasioning a second segregation ordinance in San Francisco in 1900, for example), and at the same time also westward across much of the rest of Asia, Africa and ultimately to the eastern shores of the Americas. The conceptual scope of public health-related segregation measures widened as well, to cover diseases like malaria in West Africa and tuberculosis in Baltimore.⁷

Amidst this mania for segregation, a fourth parallel surge crested as well. It was tied to the expansion of the urban planning movement, and particularly to the work of planners influenced by French traditions of monumental urbanism. They endorsed segregation in far loftier terms, as a means to distinguish the dynamic West from the stagnant if noble East. Their work is best exemplified by particularly ambitious plans of urban racial division as those at Rabat, Morocco and at the new capital of British India at New Delhi.⁸ Those examples marked the outer chronological limits of segregationist colonial urbanism, for specifically racialized plans for divided cities in the colonies largely disappeared once nationalist movements dissolved the structures of formal European empires during the mid-twentieth century. In only two societies did race segregation expand during this period: South Afri...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I
• PART II
• REFLECTIONS
• Bibliography
• Index