The City in Cultural Context

John Agnew, John Mercer, David Sopher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135667153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Routledge Library Editions: The City reprints some of the most important works in urban studies published in the last century.

For further information on this collection please email [email protected].

1 Introduction

JOHN A. AGNEW, JOHN MERCER and DAVID E. SOPHER

The study of the city in cultural context implies two things. First, networks of practices and ideas exist that are drawn from the shared experiences and histories of social groups. Secondly, these practices and ideas can be invoked to account for specific patterns of urban growth and urban form. Such a study does not imply acceptance of a questionable and now largely discredited concept of ‘urban culture’ (Benet 1963). That concept would have a universal rural-urban continuum (defined by population density) provide the essential kernal of explanation for all urban phenomena. Instead, consideration of the city in cultural context implies an emphasis on the practices and ideas that arise from collective and individual experiences, and that are constitutive of urban life and form. The practices and ideas are not themselves uniquely urban but derive from the social, economic, and political situations that have shaped group and individual existence. In turn, the practices and ideas – in short, ‘culture,’ – have shaped urban worlds.

An enduring Western conceit in urban studies has been that all contemporary cities can be explained by reference to a ‘rational’ economic calculus of profit and loss for the individual or group. This explanation itself comes out of a contemporary Western cultural context (Poggi 1972, p. 116). Applied to other places and times, it improperly projects recent Western experiences on to other contexts, accounting in an invalid, a priori fashion for urbanization and urban life.

The basic premise of this book is that culture counts. The concept of culture is, however, notoriously difficult to grasp (Bauman 1973, Williams 1977, 1982). There is some agreement that culture refers to the ‘ways of life’ and the ‘systems of meaning’ established by groups of people who form communicating networks, or did so at one time. How culture comes to be constituted and how stable it is are more controversial matters (Duncan 1980). For many (like Sahlins 1976), culture is largely equated with ‘tradition,’ and contemporary populations are seen only as its carriers. For others, including most of the contributors to this volume, culture is created by thought and actions of both historical and living populations. Culture can change because it refers to material and symbolic contexts or limiting conditions for individual behavior; it does not comprise an entity that governs what every human being thinks and does (Williams 1958, 1977, Geertz 1973, Beeman 1977). Nor is the idea of continuity in culture without problems. The assumption of inertia that underlies much culture theory plays down the need for culture to be created anew in each generation. As Moore (1966, p. 486) puts it:

To speak of cultural inertia is to overlook the concrete interests and privileges that are served by indoctrination, education, and the entire complicated process of transmitting culture from one generation to another.

Culture is the ‘glue’ of society, but it cannot exist independent of human action.

To study the city in cultural context therefore requires us to use a concept of culture that is sensitive to the causes of both cultural continuity and change. It also requires us to insist on the importance of the collective experience of national, ethnic, and social groups. It is thus set apart from other contemporary approaches to the study of cities and urbanization, such as those outlined by Saunders (1981). The emphasis on culture helps to resolve four fundamental problems that occur in other approaches: (a) the structure–action problem; (b) the problem of ‘Eurocentric evolutionism;’ (c) the ‘base–superstructure’ problem; and (d) the problem of student ‘self–consciousness.’

First, much conventional reasoning in urban studies deduces the causes and features of urbanization and urbanism in specific contexts from ‘structures,’ either empirical or abstract, that are held to operate in or through human agents. The early urban sociology of Manuel Castells (1977) and the environmental psychology based on behavioristic postulates are examples. For other writers, ‘action’ is primary: for them, ‘individuals’ are ‘free’ to behave ‘as they please,’ or according to rules ‘freely’ negotiated with others. Much work in urban economics and in the sociology that focuses on ‘urban life’ is of this kind. We discuss this literature in more detail later.

The structure–action problem refers to the difficulty of finding a way to avoid these extremes while recognizing the significance of both human agency and structural constraint (Abrams 1980, Manicas 1980). One solution is to focus on ‘cultural contexts’ as we have defined them, to recognize human action as both motivated and intended, and at the same time both mediated by social structure and generative of it. This is not an easy task. There is a strong tendency to slip toward an emphasis on either structure or action. The cultural–context approach holds out at least the possibility of resolving this venerable and stubbornly persisting dilemma.

Secondly, a conspicuous feature of Western social science that deals with cities and other phenomena has been a ‘Eurocentric evolutionism.’ In much modernization theory and in Leninist interpretations of Marx, the world is divided into regions at different ‘stages of development’ (Gusfield 1967, Tipps 1973, Pletsch 1981). Although ‘the West’ (or by some ‘the East‘) is defined as the most ‘advanced’ or ‘modern,’ the populations of other world regions need not despair. They will advance inevitably as they follow the Western experience. Cities will follow suit, moving from the traditional end of the continuum to the modern one and losing their individual characters along the way. Apart from its Eurocentric view of world history, this line of thinking involves a denial of human agency. However, when urban growth and urban form in a particular region are seen in cultural context, the basis for understanding their patterns is provided by the region's historical experience, including the changing character of the region's ties to an increasingly integrated world political economy. Calcutta, then, need not ‘evolve’ in the same way as Chicago, nor need Tokyo come to be like Los Angeles.

A third advantage of the cultural–context approach to urbanization and urbanism lies in its potential for resolving the ‘base–superstructure problem’ that has bedeviled most of the other approaches. The problem has been articulated most clearly in discussions among Marxists on certain questions: ‘economic determinism,’ the ‘relative autonomy of the state,’ and the role of thought in social change (Brenner 1977, Williams 1980, Wood 1981). The problem is not merely one of Marxist exegesis (‘what Marx really meant’). Many Marxists as well as others used to see cultural phenomena – ways of life and systems of meaning – as mere ‘reflections’ of the economic base, serving the function of ‘reproduction’ for its survival. The resolution that seems to be emerging would collapse the base-superstructure metaphor into a concept of productive activity, or ‘praxis.’

The concept of cultural context that we have outlined then becomes crucial. Williams (1980, p. 38) writes:

… In any society, in any particular period, there is a central system of practices, meanings, and values, which we can properly call dominant and effective … which are organized and lived … It is a set of meanings and values which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society.

Thus, the practical nature of everyday life, rather than the abstracted nature of economic organization or superorganic culture, becomes an alternate focus for social explanation. Not only does this point to resolution of the base–superstructure problem, but it directs attention to what we are calling cultural context.

Finally, openness to the possibility of a world marked by cultural variety has an important methodological implication for the student of cities. It helps to unveil the attitudes and assumptions brought by the student to the research. This need not lead to cultural relativism, although there is always that danger. What it will do is to encourage development of a critical self-consciousness in selecting and applying concepts, and watching for those that may be bound to a particular context of time and place. Encounters with unfamiliar cultural contexts can also deepen understanding of what we think we know. In a challenge to ‘common-sense’ views of knowledge, the familiar may prove to be less familiar than was previously thought (Grew 1980). The cultural-context approach thus opens up the possibility of exploring the ‘taken-for-granted’ in cultural contexts that we all think we know ‘from the inside.’ We may find that truth in Fuentes’ words (1982, p. 69): ‘To discover the other is to discover our forgotten self.’

While an examination of the city in cultural context moves toward resolutions of the problems in contemporary urban studies that we have outlined, the approach is certainly in need of additional elaboration and criticism. We try to provide these in the next part of this chapter (and again in the concluding chapter). Next, we identify some of the chief themes and objects of analysis in the urban literature and, at the same time, outline the particular concerns of different disciplines involved in the study of urban questions.

The city in cultural context

We have made some bold claims for studying the city in cultural context, and their validity will have to be measured by the individual contributions to this book. Here we want to lay out some of the problematic issues that face a study of this kind. In the closing Commentary we deal with some of the problems as they have arisen in individual chapters. Taken together, then, Introduction and Commentary are our attempt to provide a critical perspective on the theme of the book and on the chapters themselves.

First of all, the concept of the city itself is problematic. In recent years, the separation of ‘the urban’ as an object of study has often been questioned. The city, it is said, cannot be a significant unit of study in its own right. It should be seen as an ‘ideal type’ that cannot have much use in the development of sociological theory (Saunders 1981). But this criticism confuses two different questions. One is whether cities in their various aspects can be the objects of analysis. The other is whether explanations of ‘urban phenomena’ can themselves be restricted to the level of the urban.

A negative answer to the second question does not, as some critics seem to think, require a negative answer to the first. For the geographer, the historian, and the political economist, (if not for the sociologist as well – Saunders 1981), the city is not merely a research milieu or a population concentration – it is also a place. Its study has usually involved concepts that presuppose the insufficiency of explanation at the level of the urban itself. One can therefore reject the idea of ‘urban explanation’ while accepting the urban object of analysis.

For the sociologist, however, the significance of distinguishing the urban is clearly problematic. Although the city can be a significant condition for the development of social forces, as it was for the division of labor in medieval Europe, the concept of the urban is typically not equatable with the physical object of the city. In societies dominated by urbanization and urban ways, the division between city and country is not of much significance. Saunders (1981, p. 13) concludes that in ‘advanced capitalist countries,’ and perhaps in others:

the city … is no longer the basis for human association (Weber), the locus for the division of labor (Durkheim), or the expression of a specific mode of production (Marx), in which case it is neither fruitful nor appropriate (for the sociologist) to study it in its own right.

But even such critics acknowledge that this is a recent condition in a few parts of the world. It is dangerous to project it to other times and places.

The second problem in our approach is with the basis for the concept of culture. Our analysis here owes a special debt to the writing of Raymond Williams. Cultural anthropologists and cultural geographers in the United States have tended to view culture in transcendental–idealist terms. It is a superorganic entity, the ‘informing spirit’ through which a social order was reproduced (Duncan 1980). Some anthropologists and sociologists now prefer to see culture as a ‘realized signifying system’ (Williams 1982, pp. 207–9), embedded in everyday life through ‘activities, relations, and institutions.’ For some, such as Geertz (1973), this system seems to be largely symbolic in nature and mental in origin. For others (such as Williams 1980, 1982), culture is practical in origin if also symbolic in nature. For Williams (1982, pp. 207–8):

a signifying system is intrinsic to any economic system, any political system, any generational (kinship and family) system, and, most generally, to any social system.

Emphasis on the practical, the grounding of culture in everyday life, is a position that has been criticized (Sahlins 1976, Cosgrove 1982). However, much of Sahlins’ argument rests on a conflation of the terms ‘practical’ and ‘utilitarian.’ The practical is reduced to ‘the economic,’ as reference to everyday life is taken to represent the workings of an ‘...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Preface
• Contents
• Tables
• Figures
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Reflections on the cultural geography of the European city*
• 3 Culture and the urban order
• 4 Culture and economy in the shaping of urban life: general issues and Latin American examples
• 5 Culture, ‘modes of production,' and the changing nature of cities in the Arab World
• 6 The urban culture and the suburban culture: a new look at an old paper
• 7 The Soviet city: continuity and change in privilege and place
• 8 Japanese urban society and its cultural context
• 9 City as a mirror of society: China, tradition and transformation
• 10 Autonomous and directed cultural change: South African urbanization
• 11 The built environment andcultural symbolism in post-colonial Madras
• 12 A cultural analysis of urban residential landscapes in North America: the case of the anglophile élite
• 13 Commentary
• Contributors
• Index