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America becomes urban: the development of U.S. cities and towns, 1780–1980
361
REVIEWS
The focus on New York, Boston and other most highly ethnic cities was efficient, but again a little misleading as, from at least 1875, the big cities were also the destinations for a large displaced rural white “native” population, many of whom remained poor, and who lived in a sometimes uneasy relation with immigrant, more ethnic populations. How did they fit into the changing conception of slums, and how did they affect the perception of the identity of recent migrant ethnicity and poverty? Neglected, too, is much of the fascinating history of the rise of progressive city governance, at least in its ability to forestall a class or even an ethnic basis for political-economic action, through elitist, technocratic reforms. In short, the notes and references are many and superb, but the reader cannot but see gaps. American social science in general, and social work, planning and geography in particular, do not emerge from this history as having had much capacity even to understand the essence of poverty or ethnicity, but rather seem to reflect the cycles of national mentality, with social work emerging as a legitimized form of charitable improvement of the individual, and planning (and by implication geography, which is not treated as a body of thought) succumbs to the temptation of believing that clearing slums, or improving accessibility might be sufficient to end poverty. The discussion of the rationalist social science of the late nineteenth century, and of the supposed efficacy of decentralized planning and zoning in the early twentieth century, is especially sobering, as is the demonstration that social scientists swayed with the cyclical national conceptions of ethnicity, and the waxing and waning of ethnic assimilation or pluralism as good or bad. Ward’s history thus implies that there has been little consensus or consistency in the very meaning of the concepts of slum, ghetto, poverty or ethnicity, let alone on the processes that create or sustain poverty or ethnic identity. Some hints of understanding American social structure and of the integration of the book’s twin themes of poverty and ethnicity do appear-for example, that the historic national obsession with ethnic or racial conflict and assimilation perhaps transformed the energies and hostilities which would otherwise have brought a greater class consciousness and conflict and more honest understanding of poverty. University of Washington
RICHARD
MORRILL
America Becomes Urban: the Development of U.S. Cities and Towns, 1780-1980 (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988. Pp. xvi + 332. $29.95) ERIC H. MONKKONEN.
In Monkkonen’s view, the new urban historians of over a decade ago, dug beneath the aggregate statistics which trace the development of larger urban structures and developments, to analyse whether people in American cities in the nineteenth century were socially or geographically mobile. Their initial efforts to connect individuals with their social context and the character of the wider city in which they lived, still clearly excite Monkkonen. But the use of quantitative methods became bogged down in endless technical questions about definitions, assumptions, and comparability and, thus unable to make the connection between the individual and the larger urban structure. By ignoring the larger city, urban historians turned each city, into an “arbitary container of some socioeconomic activity, a social “process” in which “the nature of the container, the city, merits no more attention than the theatre design would in a play’s script”. Fragmented, isolated, methodologically divided, urban historians, in the author’s view, drifted into asking diverse questions, few of them connected. It is the ambitious intellectual goal of this book to try to put some of the pieces back together again, by offering some thematic signposts to steer urban historians back to the essentially valid inquiry into the interactions of individuals and groups with the processes of urbanization and the urban structures in which urbanites actively worked to direct and create the urban world in which they lived and worked. Monkkonen seeks to explain how and why American cities got the way they are. The unintentional roots of the shape and character of American cities lie in the colonial era.
362
REVIEWS
Beyond the direct influence of a powerful state or city, provincial colonial cities were free to acquire political power beyond the extent of their economic power. But the lack of a need for defence made walls, the traditional means of concentrating such power, unnecessary. On one hand, this weakened political power by allowing people to escape the power of cities and towns while still enjoying their economic benefits, making it nearly impossible for the city government to control the private economic and residential decisions of its citizens. On the other hand, the lack of walls concentrated economic activity more intensely at the centre, and propelled the city’s economic force beyond its defined boundaries, expanding the influence of the city through its hinterland. In time, under the pressure of free-trade ideology, city governments were forced to give up their charters, but were left able to tax and to municipally incorporate, both of which became the source of new economic power. Rather than responding to or trying to control economic activity, city governments, after 1830, created formal bureaucracies to actively shape urban environments conducive to successful economic activity. Population growth and territorial expansion, translated into urban power through settlement and trade, unleashed this economic competitive power in new towns and old. In such an open competitive environment, no primary metropolis could dominate, and power in the American urban system became much more dispersed. centring on numerous larger and middle-sized cities. As the stakes increased, cities took the initiative as limited liability corporations and became active entrepreneurial forces seeking to maximize their economic status. Monkkonen notes that the expansion of the railroad system can be understood in this light. The contribution of individual businessmen and citizens through investments and by means of property taxes to the city connected the actions of the individual booster to the broader public ethos of boosterism. In this context, all the traditional evils of American urbanism become (sometimes perhaps too easily) reflections of the evolution of a positive, intentional effort to transform the regulatory city into the service city. The new police, fire and health departments, and a professionalized service bureaucracy replaced personal cognitive and regulatory actions with a formal organized environment which enabled diverse groups without commonality to coexist, which safeguarded property and encouraged investment and ownership, which, in turn, created both a safer environment for its citizens and encouraged business. Hence, although the individual citizen and entrepreneur volunteers of an earlier age were replaced by professional planners, officials, and bureaucrats, the goals of these bureaucracies, to underwrite and promote development, still reflected the desires of the citizens. Thus to Monkkonen, urbanization is an active process in which human action and selfdetermination creatively adapted to traditional or new forces to make cities that American urbanites really wanted. Though occasionally one senses that Monkkonen, in his analysis, stretches interpretations to accentuate the positive and to remain assertively upbeat (there is, after all, much to be critical about in American cities), his essential point, that urbanization is not an impenetrable process which people in cities passively respond to, but rather that cities result from the interplay between larger forces or given traditions and human action, is sound. Such a perspective will breathe life into both American local and regional history, and reinvigorate urban history, reminding us what the intense excitement of long ago was all about. In seeking to “organize the details”, to make the present intelligible in the context of the past, to guide and stimulate the reader’s imagination, and to “suggest those aspects of cities about which we should wonder”, this monograph and textbook lecture and sermon, succeeds on several levels. University
of Nebraska,
Lincoln
TIMOTHY R. MAHONEY
REVIEWS
The focus on New York, Boston and other most highly ethnic cities was efficient, but again a little misleading as, from at least 1875, the big cities were also the destinations for a large displaced rural white “native” population, many of whom remained poor, and who lived in a sometimes uneasy relation with immigrant, more ethnic populations. How did they fit into the changing conception of slums, and how did they affect the perception of the identity of recent migrant ethnicity and poverty? Neglected, too, is much of the fascinating history of the rise of progressive city governance, at least in its ability to forestall a class or even an ethnic basis for political-economic action, through elitist, technocratic reforms. In short, the notes and references are many and superb, but the reader cannot but see gaps. American social science in general, and social work, planning and geography in particular, do not emerge from this history as having had much capacity even to understand the essence of poverty or ethnicity, but rather seem to reflect the cycles of national mentality, with social work emerging as a legitimized form of charitable improvement of the individual, and planning (and by implication geography, which is not treated as a body of thought) succumbs to the temptation of believing that clearing slums, or improving accessibility might be sufficient to end poverty. The discussion of the rationalist social science of the late nineteenth century, and of the supposed efficacy of decentralized planning and zoning in the early twentieth century, is especially sobering, as is the demonstration that social scientists swayed with the cyclical national conceptions of ethnicity, and the waxing and waning of ethnic assimilation or pluralism as good or bad. Ward’s history thus implies that there has been little consensus or consistency in the very meaning of the concepts of slum, ghetto, poverty or ethnicity, let alone on the processes that create or sustain poverty or ethnic identity. Some hints of understanding American social structure and of the integration of the book’s twin themes of poverty and ethnicity do appear-for example, that the historic national obsession with ethnic or racial conflict and assimilation perhaps transformed the energies and hostilities which would otherwise have brought a greater class consciousness and conflict and more honest understanding of poverty. University of Washington
RICHARD
MORRILL
America Becomes Urban: the Development of U.S. Cities and Towns, 1780-1980 (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988. Pp. xvi + 332. $29.95) ERIC H. MONKKONEN.
In Monkkonen’s view, the new urban historians of over a decade ago, dug beneath the aggregate statistics which trace the development of larger urban structures and developments, to analyse whether people in American cities in the nineteenth century were socially or geographically mobile. Their initial efforts to connect individuals with their social context and the character of the wider city in which they lived, still clearly excite Monkkonen. But the use of quantitative methods became bogged down in endless technical questions about definitions, assumptions, and comparability and, thus unable to make the connection between the individual and the larger urban structure. By ignoring the larger city, urban historians turned each city, into an “arbitary container of some socioeconomic activity, a social “process” in which “the nature of the container, the city, merits no more attention than the theatre design would in a play’s script”. Fragmented, isolated, methodologically divided, urban historians, in the author’s view, drifted into asking diverse questions, few of them connected. It is the ambitious intellectual goal of this book to try to put some of the pieces back together again, by offering some thematic signposts to steer urban historians back to the essentially valid inquiry into the interactions of individuals and groups with the processes of urbanization and the urban structures in which urbanites actively worked to direct and create the urban world in which they lived and worked. Monkkonen seeks to explain how and why American cities got the way they are. The unintentional roots of the shape and character of American cities lie in the colonial era.
362
REVIEWS
Beyond the direct influence of a powerful state or city, provincial colonial cities were free to acquire political power beyond the extent of their economic power. But the lack of a need for defence made walls, the traditional means of concentrating such power, unnecessary. On one hand, this weakened political power by allowing people to escape the power of cities and towns while still enjoying their economic benefits, making it nearly impossible for the city government to control the private economic and residential decisions of its citizens. On the other hand, the lack of walls concentrated economic activity more intensely at the centre, and propelled the city’s economic force beyond its defined boundaries, expanding the influence of the city through its hinterland. In time, under the pressure of free-trade ideology, city governments were forced to give up their charters, but were left able to tax and to municipally incorporate, both of which became the source of new economic power. Rather than responding to or trying to control economic activity, city governments, after 1830, created formal bureaucracies to actively shape urban environments conducive to successful economic activity. Population growth and territorial expansion, translated into urban power through settlement and trade, unleashed this economic competitive power in new towns and old. In such an open competitive environment, no primary metropolis could dominate, and power in the American urban system became much more dispersed. centring on numerous larger and middle-sized cities. As the stakes increased, cities took the initiative as limited liability corporations and became active entrepreneurial forces seeking to maximize their economic status. Monkkonen notes that the expansion of the railroad system can be understood in this light. The contribution of individual businessmen and citizens through investments and by means of property taxes to the city connected the actions of the individual booster to the broader public ethos of boosterism. In this context, all the traditional evils of American urbanism become (sometimes perhaps too easily) reflections of the evolution of a positive, intentional effort to transform the regulatory city into the service city. The new police, fire and health departments, and a professionalized service bureaucracy replaced personal cognitive and regulatory actions with a formal organized environment which enabled diverse groups without commonality to coexist, which safeguarded property and encouraged investment and ownership, which, in turn, created both a safer environment for its citizens and encouraged business. Hence, although the individual citizen and entrepreneur volunteers of an earlier age were replaced by professional planners, officials, and bureaucrats, the goals of these bureaucracies, to underwrite and promote development, still reflected the desires of the citizens. Thus to Monkkonen, urbanization is an active process in which human action and selfdetermination creatively adapted to traditional or new forces to make cities that American urbanites really wanted. Though occasionally one senses that Monkkonen, in his analysis, stretches interpretations to accentuate the positive and to remain assertively upbeat (there is, after all, much to be critical about in American cities), his essential point, that urbanization is not an impenetrable process which people in cities passively respond to, but rather that cities result from the interplay between larger forces or given traditions and human action, is sound. Such a perspective will breathe life into both American local and regional history, and reinvigorate urban history, reminding us what the intense excitement of long ago was all about. In seeking to “organize the details”, to make the present intelligible in the context of the past, to guide and stimulate the reader’s imagination, and to “suggest those aspects of cities about which we should wonder”, this monograph and textbook lecture and sermon, succeeds on several levels. University
of Nebraska,
Lincoln
TIMOTHY R. MAHONEY