Urban Emotions and the Making of the City

Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Katie Barclay, Jade Riddle, Katie Barclay, Jade Riddle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000371970
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book brings together a vibrant interdisciplinary mix of scholars – from anthropology, architecture, art history, film studies, fine art, history, literature, linguistics and urban studies – to explore the role of emotions in the making and remaking of the city. By asking how urban boundaries are produced through and with emotion; how emotional communities form and define themselves through urban space; and how the emotional imaginings of urban spaces impact on histories, identities and communities, the volume advances our understanding of 'urban emotions' into discussions of materiality, power and embodiment across time and space.

1 Urban Emotions and the Making of the City

Katie Barclay and Jade Riddle

This introduction was meant to begin with a story from Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1768.¹ Two riotous teens rollicked through the city centre, tripping up maids, assaulting children, before finally pulling a man on a horse – William Michie rushing to fetch a midwife for his labouring wife – to the ground, cracking his head and severely injuring him. The young men scarpered but a crowd formed around the injured Michie, supporting him home, along with the midwife. He was to die on the same night that his child was born. As told to the legal agent, this was a tale full of urban emotions. An otherwise ordinary evening was unsettled by a young gentleman and his working-class companion, a combination that spoke to their carnivalesque behaviour, refusing as they did the class boundaries that should demarcate friendships and affection. Their evening’s antics disrupted and disturbed, leaving a trail of angry victims and witnesses, before the crowd, brought together in mutual concern for the injured and dismay at the behaviour of these youth, produced its own affective dynamic in the city streets as they combined in aid and later retributive justice. Historic urban emotions that allowed us to develop a number of themes that emerged in this collection – of people and relationships, of emotions produced by cities, and which in turn enabled cities as collective organisms.

Yet, as we put the finishing touches to this volume, Sydney – a major world city not so far from our own – and Canberra, the nation’s capital, were covered in smoke, produced by massive fires on the eastern coast of Australia but underwritten by a lengthy drought and the culmination of the impacts of climate change. Apocalyptic, an emotional word. As we wrote, friends, colleagues and journalists spoke not only of the physical impacts on the body of inhaling smoke – impacts that were embodied and disturbing – but also of the accompanying anxiety and restlessness that were produced by living in this uncertain moment, of the foreboding possibilities of a future in the Anthropocene.² The drama of living through the promise of unresolved climate change was articulated through accounts of emotion – anxiety, dread, depression, futility, anger. Emotions that seemed hyperbolic in their insufficiency to deal with this situation and in that they were largely articulated not by those who had lost everything (whose homes and properties had burned, whose family members had died), but by a city for whom smoke was a portent, but not yet a disaster. Those who had attended to the news of the last few years could not help but make the comparison to other smoke-filled places – sites of war – that resulted in not only horrific injuries and death but also mass movements of people. What did smoke mean here – a lack of knowledge felt in tense necks and tight shoulders, in a lack of capacity to concentrate, in outpourings of an anxious grief. These too were urban emotions, manifested not just by individuals but as a collective response to a change of urban environment.

The claim at the centre of this volume is that emotions do significant ‘work’ in producing cities and that attending to emotions adds an important dimension to explaining the relationship between people and the urban condition. This is not a new claim, but one that is only beginning to be realized in a wider urban studies literature. To address it, this volume brings an interdisciplinary mix of scholars – from anthropology, architecture, art history, film studies, fine art, history, literature, linguistics and urban studies – using case studies across the globe and from the early modern to the present day, to explore the role of emotions in the making of the city. Embracing approaches from the history and sociology of emotions that have heightened the analytical capacities of emotion as a lens of interpretation, authors in this volume seek to further the understanding of how place, power and urban transformation are enabled. Three key themes that emerge, and which are used to structure this chapter, are cities as emotional communities; of emotions in the production of civic power relationships; and finally, the centrality of emotion to processes of urban change and regeneration. One remarkable feature of this volume is the extent to which attending to emotion has required embracing ‘humanities’ as an art, as well as a science – of opening our research to an acknowledgement of the creative, the ambiguous and the unstable.

A scholarship of urban emotions initially began as a consideration of the social dynamics of urban space, acknowledging the ways that bringing people together could be greater than the sum of its parts. As the Aberdeen case study above suggests, these placed attention on the crowd, or ‘the mob,’ as well as the fact that cities provided opportunities for encounters – sometimes friendships, love connections – between those otherwise separated by social conventions attached to class, race, gender and so forth. The urban was the site of emotional possibility, as well as constraint.³ This early body of scholarship provided a framework to understand how urban spaces could make us feel or impact on our identity, both individually and collectively. More recently, as ongoing events in Sydney suggest, ‘affective atmospheres’ have become of increasing interest – an approach that has attended not just to people but to place, of the ways that architecture, environment and so forth come to intersect with the human in the production of social relationships.⁴ Here the focus shifts from understanding the way urban space produces emotion to an understanding of how emotion and social interaction can influence, make and re-make the spaces we inhabit. Authors in this volume emerge from both these analytical traditions and seek to offer a range of methodological approaches to understanding the role of emotion in making the city.

Urban Emotions

Historic European cities had walls that acted not only as boundary markers but also as symbols of inclusion and belonging, of civilization and its discontents. Individuals who committed crime or anti-social behaviour could be banished beyond the walls, situated in the spaces between the urban. It was a practice that acted to define the city as the site of people, belonging, community and civilization, and conversely the rural as liminal, associated with danger, criminality, the supernatural and unknown.⁵ Later, especially as towns and cities rapidly expanded and walls symbolically and physically crumbled, urban spaces produced their own sets of fears, where the unknown neighbour posed a hidden threat, and the noise and pollutants associated with large populations undermined the quality of life associated with ‘civilization.’⁶ In contrast, the village with its known population and ‘tradition’ provided a nostalgic security for many, a security which was often as mythical as the anomie of the urban.⁷ Representations of the urban in art, literature, music and more, have drawn on these dichotomies to explore what it means to live in the city and to make sense of how increasingly large groups of people engage in a shared space. Moreover such representation has shaped human experience, as individuals identify and articulate their personal experience of the urban through such framings.⁸ In this, size has mattered with the town and especially the city, or so it has been argued, moving from a ‘community,’ where people knew each other and their place within it, to the looser ties and connections of a ‘society’ over the early modern to modern period.⁹

Emotions have been implicit in all these articulations of the urban. The degree to which people felt safe, connected, had a sense of ‘belonging’ and identity, or conversely were frightened, dislocated or disengaged, has underpinned representations of the city, in many respects imagined in terms of people and their relationships, as much as buildings, landscapes or urban planning.¹⁰ Engagements with people in cities have particularly sought to grapple with the collective and so collective feeling.¹¹ Histories of political protests, of crowds and their righteous anger, of moral panics, of claiming space through processions or similar performances, have often been placed in urban space, which offered both a critical mass of people and a convenient physical stage in which to enact claims about rights, identity, belonging and justice.¹² As this suggests, the physical environment of the city matters. As the location of sites of civic and governmental power – town halls, parliaments, churches, palaces – buildings and their uses have acted as focal points for disaffected populations, as well as key symbols of power for local authorities. Urban boundary markers – whether the walls of medieval cities, the invisible edges of neighbourhoods, or the fences of suburban homes – have provided convenient mobilization points for individuals and groups making claims about the ownership of private and public space or identity – claims often underpinned by the intangible and affective.¹³

The physical environment of cities comes to shape human feeling and its associated behaviours, from personal attachments to buildings and neighbourhoods that underpin a sense of ‘home’ or local identity, to the road rage experienced in the over-crowded town planned before the introduction of cars. Cities, as Henri Lefebvre suggested, can come to have their own emotional repertoires, reflecting their environments and physical makeup. Some cities are fast-paced, anxious, moving; others more sedate or orderly. Environment comes to shape the emotions and behaviours of users, often unthinkingly, such as in an uptake of faster pace of step.¹⁴ Urban planners and architects increasingly consider the emotions of the users of their outputs, recognizing that whether they are experienced as fit for purpose, useful, attractive is often underpinned by subtle emotional encounters with building materials, lighting, space, the movements of other people and so forth.¹⁵ Similarly, changes to urban environments produced by the influx of new groups – migrants or social classes – or by new technologies, from electricity to cars to concrete, can change both affective engagements with space and how such environments are interpreted. Gentrification opens up space to some groups, even as it closes it down for others – such processes are often marked by feeling, whether the anger of original populations at their displacement or an increasing sense of belonging for those whose space now feels more ‘of home.’¹⁶

Cities provide spaces for moments of engagement between disparate groups, something particularly marked in encounters within incomers – such as visitors and migrants – as well as longer-standing inhabitants. Cosmopolitanism has long been associated with urban life, where a greater flow of people through such locations has been thought to offer access to a broader range of ideas, values and feelings, expanding local identities into global mentalités.¹⁷ Yet, not only do the people who encounter each other in particular cities vary enormously across the globe, but also the impacts of such encounters have not led to a homogenous urban experience.¹⁸ If cities are often placed as the metropole to the periphery found in smaller towns and rural areas, taking a global perspective has also highlighted how certain cities – particularly those not in the global West – have become peripheries of other, more famous locations. This dynamic shapes knowledge production, not least foregrounding certain forms of urban experience – and certain cities – over others. Yet, as urban studies scholarship expands to incorporate a greater diversity of global cities, so too must it account for the diversity of emotion – an experience not only deeply informed by space but also historic and cultural context. A scholarship of global urban emotions is still in its infancy, but – as this collection hopes to contribute to – has the opportunity to enable a rethinking of the relationship between space, people and feeling, perhaps moving past histories of belonging and alienation, local attachments and their conflicts, to a more diverse and rich emotional urban life.

Such a scholarship might ask what is meant by emotion. Emotion ‘words’ – anger, fear, attachment, belonging – litter research that seeks to engage with how the human encounters the urban. Such terms, and especially those such as belonging, often become empty signifiers, designed to allow us to group culturally and historically specific feeling within a convenient acknowledgement of its social or political consequences. Whatever ‘belonging’ felt like, whatever emotions gave it composition, its significance was in how this feeling underpinned a range of loyalties, behaviours or engagements, and that such feeling thus had social, political and cultural consequences. This volume, loosely situated within the interdisciplinary field of the ‘history of emotions,’ builds on this insight, viewing emotion not just as a biological experience but a social, cultural and temporal phenomenon. In engaging with the concept of the ‘city,’ this volume attends particularly to how emotion was framed in spatial terms within urban environments.

That emotion is a central dimension of ‘space’ was an early part of Lefebvre’s framing, where space was not just a physical environment that humans acted upon, but the product of how the latter combined with people, their behaviours, feelings and the meanings they attached to all of them in combination.¹⁹ Space was always ‘becoming,’ and human feeling played a central role in how people behaved and so produced space. For Lefebvre, much emotion was performed unthinkingly as part of particular spaces – so the anxiety felt when rushing down a busy street went unquestioned – but at times, in situations Lefebvre calls ‘moments,’ new emotions or old emotions recognized, caused people to encounter their environment in a new way, leading to transformation.²⁰ Emotion therefore was not only part of every space but also especially significant to processes of change or disruption.

Lefebvre’s insights underpin the general approach to space taken by authors in this volume, but they have also attended to a wider range of methodological and theoretical approaches emerging within a scholarship on emotion. Approaches arising from emotional geographies, that take seriously physical environment and landscape in relation to the experience of emotion, have offered important ways of analyzing both feeling and physical environments as affective.²¹ Ben Anderson’s concept of ‘affective atmospheres’ is similarly productive in seeking to acknowledge that some experiences of collective emotion are rarely labelled or sometimes even identified, but nonetheless shape the nature of space.²²

Many of the chapters in this volume eng...