City, Street and Citizen

The Measure of the Ordinary

Suzanne Hall

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136310614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

How can we learn from a multicultural society if we don't know how to recognise it? The contemporary city is more than ever a space for the intense convergence of diverse individuals who shift in and out of its urban terrains. The city street is perhaps the most prosaic of the city's public parts, allowing us a view of the very ordinary practices of life and livelihoods. By attending to the expressions of conviviality and contestation, 'City, Street and Citizen' offers an alternative notion of 'multiculturalism' away from the ideological frame of nation, and away from the moral imperative of community. This book offers to the reader an account of the lived realities of allegiance, participation and belonging from the base of a multi-ethnic street in south London.

'City, Street and Citizen' focuses on the question of whether local life is significant for how individuals develop skills to live with urban change and cultural and ethnic diversity. To animate this question, Hall has turned to a city street and its dimensions of regularity and propinquity to explore interactions in the small shop spaces along the Walworth Road. The city street constitutes exchange, and as such it provides us with a useful space to consider the broader social and political significance of contact in the day-to-day life of multicultural cities.

Grounded in an ethnographic approach, this book will be of interest to academics and students in the fields of sociology, global urbanisation, migration and ethnicity as well as being relevant to politicians, policy makers, urban designers and architects involved in cultural diversity, public space and street based economies.

1 Making practice visible

Is the language of power quantitative? And if so, how do we reveal a qualitative understanding of urban multiculture not only for those who operate in the echelons of power, but in ways that have theoretical and pragmatic pertinence to the wider debates about immigration, citizenship and multiculturalism? The aggregation and classification of individuals by way of ethnicity, income and religion through survey techniques is a primary official mode – one scientifically validated, politically authorised and readily accessible – of representing the variety of individuals who live in the city. But the tools of the survey short-circuit our understanding of how diverse individuals and groups establish meeting points and assert divisions in a context of accelerated urban change. The challenge for fine-grained research is how to reveal individual experiences alongside the histories of migration, racism and class that are saturated in London’s local landscapes. The task extends to how urban ethnography might contribute to the contemporary debates and policy formations about social, cultural and economic forms of belonging. What ideas and representational forms could ethnography develop to speak to popular culture, to theory and to power?

I know of no better description of the fine-grained observation of social life than Les Back’s (1996) articulation of ‘serious true fiction’. What Back and other skilled ethnographers point us to is an analysis of how people do things or say things in ways that ring true as opposed to objective or factual renderings of ‘a’ or ‘the’ truth. Ethnography offers us explicitly subjective accounts of reality, and it is precisely because it reveals the variable, fallible and ingenious dimensions of human life that it has validity. However, while ethnography’s pertinence depends on conveying meanings that capture relationships between people and their circumstances, its content is not fully achieved in the form of a story. The skilled contemporary writers of ‘serious true fiction’ show us that the intellectual and imaginative task of validating ethnographic findings – of connecting individual experiences of local worlds with how urban societies are shaped – is paramount.

Simultaneity, ambiguity and contradiction

The achievement of ethnography is to compel and to claim through writing ‘how culture lives in practice’ (Calhoun and Sennett 2007: 2). When Hobbs for example, writes in Doing the Business (1988) about the cultural proximities between thieving and policing in London he reveals the making of East London through the mutually reinforcing practices of power and those of contravention. Hobbs’ art is the interplay of involved and invested research together with a Mailer-like prose in which the writer is ever present, yielding for the reader not simply a work of criminology, but an acute account of the subaltern city revealed through the intricacies of cultural and institutional underworlds. But it is precisely because Hobbs’ work is not limited to the subaltern that it has broader significance. Hobbs’ ethnography subverts and so reveals the visible or apparent city as Suketu Mehta’s journalism does in Maximum City (2004): the distortions of rule and order are charged through human voices and actions, and it is in the untidy overlaps between regulation and life, that we as reader could in no way anticipate, that the ethnographic fieldwork and writing is vitalised.

This chapter explores the role of ethnography in articulating the relationship between human experience and the parallel shapes of global urbanisation. It focuses on the question: To what extent is local life significant to cosmopolitan formations? The question poses for contemporary urban ethnography a very different consideration of what is ‘local’ through a rethinking of how to link C. Wright Mills’ ‘biographies and histories’ to the velocity of global change. Burawoy et al.’s (2002) exploration of a ‘global ethnography’ recognises the fluidity of cultures (Hannerz 1997) shaped by the perpetual shifting of ideas, goods and people across the planet, and the multi-sited relationships (Marcus 1995) that constitute social, cultural and economic expressions. The local is conceived not only as a space in a state of flux, but as one of a number of interconnected sub-worlds.

But there is another underlying research capacity from which ethnography has yielded its critical substance and which I argue is key to understanding how ethnic and cultural differences are negotiated in ever-changing local worlds. Acute urban ethnography is the process of revealing not only the global–local or dominant–subaltern relationships, but the unanticipated (and often inconsistent) expressions of human frailty and ingenuity, and how these intersect with the economic forces and political frameworks of our time. It is the qualitative dimensions of the unanticipated to which I now turn and in particular to the analytic value of simultaneity and ambiguity in understanding what Les Back (2009a) has highlighted as Britain’s ‘metropolitan paradox’, where both dialogue and racism are evoked within its diversifying cities.

Because this paradox of being open and closed to differences is concurrent not only in cities but also in individual lives, this chapter seeks to connect the practice of being local to two dispositions that are more entangled than a purer (but arguably more distanced) notion of tolerance: the cosmopolitan imagination and the provincial one. The peculiar practices of being open and adaptable to the unfamiliar alongside parochial ways of preserving what one is already accustomed to are therefore explored. I do this in response to fieldwork and the important inconsistencies that are central to ethnographic inquiry: ideas that are theoretically clear and distinct are often experienced in more variegated ways within the complex lives and spaces of the city. In chapters that follow for example, individuals reveal themselves as both spontaneously open to differences and simultaneously able to verbalise prejudiced views. Spaces are revealed as micro worlds of social improvisation and cultural innovation, and at the same time occupied in peculiarly insular ways. The contradictions that often surface in the different acts of saying and doing are of consequence for understanding the social ways of figuring out and mixing in the diverse city. How then do we deal conceptually and methodologically with these enigmatic simultaneities? In what way does the practice of ethnography and the ethnography of practice provide an empirical beginning and interpretive directions for revealing the significant paradoxes integral to the everyday dynamics of the city?

Back (2009a) proposes ‘a cosmopolitan method’ for exploring the complexities of contradiction in Britain’s diverse cities where multiple forms of communication and overlap are paralleled with avid expressions of racial and ethnic segregation. Back’s approach (2009a, 2009b) is vested explicitly in the methods of paying attention, and emphasises how sensory understandings drawn from sounds, tastes and smells might complement or even unsettle that which is said. It advocates, as does Johannes Fabian (1983) in his seminal anthropological text Time and the Other, a much closer methodological and substantive relationship between the subject and ‘object’ of ethnography. For ethnographers like Fabian and Back, fieldwork is practice, and the acquirement of understanding (as opposed to the excavation of ‘data’) is best developed though the processes of lived engagement. Fabian directs us to a greater interrogation of the acts of being (1983: 164) and away from prevalent taxonomies in sociology and anthropology that have ranked subjects by type and time (‘primitive’ for example is a temporal distancing and hierarchical categorisation of the Other): ‘As I see it now, the anthropologist and his interlocutors only “know” when they meet each other in one and the same contemporality’ (1983: 164).

Back’s ‘cosmopolitan method’ and Fabian’s ‘contemporality’ provoke a different notion of ‘the local’ for the fieldworker, where the field includes exposure to a highly subjective collection of lived territories evoked through talk, walk, touch and sight, in which the ethnographer has an explicit presence. And it is precisely within the local acts of being that individual, group and national identities are unsettled and reshaped by experience. In the remains of this chapter I’d like to pursue the idea that the local is a practised territory and that, by virtue of the diversity of its respective occupants and shapers, it has multiple boundaries, layers of time and accumulations of culture. But aside from the hardly unsurprising notion that the local is an aggregation of experiences or a palimpsest of pasts and presents, is the need to further explore the social significance of simultaneity.

Both the purposeful and unconscious practices of paradox and ambiguity are, I suggest, at the core of an ethnographic exploration of how individuals and groups belong with respect to one another. I’d like to start by placing the city at the foreground of the ethnographic exploration of City, Street and Citizen. In the integral relationships between the spaces, speeds and rhythms of the city, ethnography pursues the lived relationships between structure and agency or how individuals address circumstance. By observing how socially intimate and collective spaces are occupied across hours, days and years, ethnography reveals how accelerated urbanisation affects social contact and urban culture.

Pace and space

Speed is a quality of dramatic time, and exemplifies the thrust and shape of twenty-first century urbanisation evident in the radical growth of mega cities across the globe. Ananya Roy (2011) refers to our time and place as ‘a sudden century’, one where the human condition is increasingly integral to the urban one. Roy explores speed through the steroid-induced growth of Asian cities injected by the global pursuit of ‘world class’ status. While Shanghai is the default measure of Asian success, its pinnacle forms and securitised zones are perpetuated in the remaking of the everywhere and nowhere spaces of Dubai, Mumbai and Abu Dhabi. What is most compelling about Roy’s exploration is that it pursues the physical and cultural shapes and textures induced by speed, to ask what kind of urban politics is possible within a pace of change exaggerated by emerging economies. Roy’s method is to contrast: to set suicide rates amongst the 500,000 migrant workers in the world’s largest factory compound, Foxcon, side-by-side with the iPad and iPhone gadgets made by the Foxcon workers that proliferate affluent western lives. Roy sets urban spaces of production alongside global imperatives for consumption, and shows how ideas about the forms and objects of the ‘world-class’ city circulate, as does the exploitation of migrant labour to build these prolific urban landscapes.

The pervasive temporal and spatial language of urban extremes – ‘speed’, ‘mega’ – is undoubtedly useful for understanding the unprecedented global impacts on the eruption of cities. World maps of urbanisation acutely register Africa and Asia as zones of the urban extreme and urban studies have rightly focused on the radical inequalities produced in the stark contrasts between high-rise prestige and low-rise ‘squatter’ settlements. However, speed is a measure of time that propels forward, implying that the present is merely fleeting and that the past is a bygone place. Speed imposes a tabula rasa urban condition, one that omits how the ‘ordinary’ parts of cities are mutually transformed by history and by global urbanisation.

Sukhdev Sandhu (2004) evokes a far more jumbled sense of the emerging city by describing London as ‘this higgledy-piggledy commotion of a metropolis’ (2004: 259), and it follows that London’s space-time configurations of accelerated urban change have acquired different qualities. London is essentially an amalgam city that grew steadily until its unsurpassed growth in the nineteenth century, jointly heralded by industrialisation and the colonial expansion of the British Empire. Over its industrial century the city swelled from one million to eight million inhabitants and acquired a metropolitan status and size that remains today. However, while the city’s population growth appears as static, London’s population is in constant flux, and work, tertiary education and tourism enrol daily, weekly and annual migrations in significant numbers.

Understanding London’s pace and space today requires a mutual analysis of its emergence over time with its contemporary reshaping by global forces. The notion of London’s urban amalgamations opens up opportunities for exploring its space-time simultaneities: the overlaps of pasts and presents; the connections of its microcosms to the city and beyond; and the relationships between its floating and entrenched populations. These urban amalgamations are therefore crucial for understanding London’s waves of immigration and settlement: for analysing in social terms that ever-paradoxical description of the ‘second-generation immigrant’; and for exploring how ideas of belonging differ for the post-Second World War phase of immigration from the later phase of immigration from the 1990s onwards. This leads to questions of: what kinds of spaces provide meeting points for a far more variegated, dislocated public? and: how does social or cultural contact emerge within the space-time attuned to accelerated cities? Let’s start with the notion of small space and rooted time, and explore how the interconnected idea of physical proximity and social propinquity has evolved as one direction for thinking about cultural difference and social connection in the changing city.

The effect of heterogeneity defined by Louis Wirth (1938) in his seminal essay ‘Urbanism as a way of life’, is drawn out of the dramatic process of urbanisation at the turn of the twentieth century in American cities. Wirth pursued the social consequences of flux, and outlined a deep scepticism for the capacity of interaction as a footing for social harmony between the different groups migrating into American cities. Wirth’s urban analysis of the large-scale, dense concentration of different groups emphasised an aggregation of segmented parts and the negative prospects for human associations therein:

a motley of people and cultures, of highly differentiated modes of life between which there is only the faintest communication, the greatest indifference and the broadest tolerance, occasionally bitter strife, but always the sharpest contrast.

(1938: 20)

Wirth’s theory of urban heterogeneity was deeply vested in the spatial and social proximities afforded by rural societies where neighbourliness and kinship preempted forms of ‘folk solidarity’. Moreover the rooted notion of these vernacular solidarities – tied to place, gradually refined over time (and presumably ethnically homogenous) – stood in oppositional contrast to what he perceived as the transitory and therefore amorphous nature of urban societies.

For Wirth the growing scale of the city increased variation and weakened aggregation. But his analysis of the ‘cosmopolitan urbanite’ focused on lifestyle to which he attributed a footloose and detached urban predilection, mirroring Durkheim’s (1893) anomie and Simmel’s (1903) blasé flâneur. While Wirth privileged the small space and slow pace of rural locales as precursors to solidarity, he similarly predicted the impossibility of urban social intimacy across different groups. Seminal ethnographic studies of race and ethnicity in American cities over the twentieth century (Whyte 1943; Gans 1962; Liebow 1967; Suttles 1968; Duneier 1992; Anderson 1999) point to the practices of kinship and neighbourliness within urban local areas that Wirth’s theory had emphatically denied. However, these ethnographies also articulate the external ordering and containment of segments of the city and its respective inhabitants on the basis of income, race and ethnicity. Through human voices and experiences the stratifying effects of American urbanisation and industrialisation are revealed, as are the intensified dependencies on locality and kinship on the part of the urban poor.

The impact of profound urban segregation and its space-time qualities of detachment and stasis is rendered most acute when issues of work and mobility, rather than lifestyle, are introduced into the analytic frame. Liebow’s account of unemployed and itinerant workers waiting for piecework in Tally’s Corner:A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (1967) is an account of adult lives confined to limited and degrading work prospects. While social solidarity amongst these adults is evident, it is a cohesion that is in significant part formed out of a racialised and polarised urban condition. Four decades on, Newman’s (2006) ethnography of the contemporary low-wage labour market takes place in fast food franchises in Harlem and exposes the stunted trajectory of minimum wage work. But in Newman’s account, the pervasive economic condition of limited choice is no longer confined to particular urban neighbourhoods. Rather it is cyclically carried across the city in migrant and black bodies, moving from franchise to franchise, and from low-wage employment to unemployment. In Liebow’s contained urbanism there is solidarity but not participation whilst in Newman’s there is work but not inclusion: these are forms of conscription rather than citizenship and the sense of public space in which to engage, mix or mobilise is therefore radically curtailed.

Within the urban context of polarisation and racism in Britain, and particularly in response to the violent confrontations in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in 2001, Ash Amin (2002) offers us the idea of small and invested local spaces as alternative public terrains to prestigious tourist sites on the one hand, or publicly regulated social housing estates on the other. Amin pursues the value of repeated and regular time, hence his local emphasis. But Amin’s spatial expression of the ‘local’ is not invested in territorial belonging or residence as the basis of community; it extends to the idea of active participations in the form of shared projects that are integral to everyday life. Amin’s ‘micro-publics’ include workplaces, schools, youth clubs and community centres as the basis for engagement between ethnic and cultural groups. An important point here is not simply the value of these ‘local’ spaces themselves, but also how the accumulation of a number of micro-publics allow individuals to navigate within and across the territories of the city.

Because of the prevalence of urban boundaries circumscribed by class and ethnicity for example, as well as those habitually reinforced by comfort and familiarity, individuals need to socially acquire repertoires to traverse and participate in different spaces of the city. This is the real time social politics of overlap as opposed to the state regulation of assimilation, acutely articulated by Paul Gilroy’s notion of a convivial multiculture:

Conviviality is a social pattern in which different metropolitan groups dwell in close proximity, but where their racial, linguistic and religious particularities do not […] add up to discontinuities of experience or insurmountable problems of communication. In these conditions, a degree of differentiation can be combined with large amounts of overlapping.

(2006: 40)

Gilroy turns to the ordinary spaces and modes of everyday interactions that shape and express affinity: the Arsenal football ground during a game; the two-tone worlds of funk, reggae and ska; and perhaps most illustratively, to the National Health Service (NHS) where the administering of skill and care in the context of individual need and stress involves and indeed is sustained by Britain’s ‘heterocultural’ populace.

How can ethnography reveal and expand on the compelling but broad ideas of micro-publics and conviviality? Would we gain a different and possibly more multifarious sense of public meeting points or overlaps through a closer scrutiny of how public space is occupied in space and time? What representations would challenge the unintended proliferation of stereotypes sometimes advanced in fieldwork by a ‘liberal complacency’ (Armstrong 1998) or ‘romantic fascination’ (Burawoy et al. 2000) of the urban margins? The study of London’s urban margins is historically embedded in a rich but moral anthropologic-philanthropic tradition, exemplified for example, in the seminal nineteenth-century studies of Charles Booth and Henry Mayhew. And while it is a tradition that has yielded powerful and evocative portrayals of urban poverty, it has tended to segregate the urban poor from the context of its making.

Improvisation and duration

In Craig Calhoun’s (2003) exploration of ways of being cosmopolitan within a world that is as much about movement and change as it is about settlement and traditions, Calhoun highlights two directions for thinking about living with difference and change. He refers to Sennett’s tactile analysis of urban life and the public realm, where meeting grounds are sustained by the physical and sensory dimensions of interaction and secular ritual. Sennett himself (2008) aligns to the ‘performative’ or ‘dramaturgical’ school that includes Erving Goff...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Urban multiculture – an ordinary orientation
• 1. Making practice visible
• 2. The boundaries of belonging
• 3. The art of sitting
• 4. The art of attire
• 5. The politics of nearness
• 6. Street measures
• 7. Conclusions
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index