- Email: [email protected]
Animal Cities: Beastly Urban Histories
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 42 (2013) 215e227
model of these processes (along with Miroslav Hroch’s application of said model), as well as his effective use of vast historical material, undermines the binary opposition between nation and empire. All of this deserves careful attention but Seegel seems unaware that Roman Szporluk presented a similar analysis in the edited volume The State of the Nation (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Mapping Europe’s Borderlands also discusses the evolution of geography as a scientific endeavor. Thus geographic scholarship is comparable not only to the path taken by historiography in the nineteenth century, but also shares a place with sociology, anthropology, and other social sciences in organizing and ordering peoples and space hierarchically within a positivist paradigm. Here Seegel’s book invites comparison with Marina Mogilner’s Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia (University of Nebraska Press, 2013[2008]). Seegel’s monograph might also be read as an important chapter in a (geo)political history of east central Europe between the partitions of Poland and the period after World War I, as he considers how particular maps and the work of various geographers served particular political agendas and helped to realize territorial changes, especially during the crucial period of World War I and the 1919 peace conference. It is a paradox, then, that the author omits completely the most fundamental decision prepared with geographical and ethnographical data for east central Europe e namely the so called Curzon line and the role Lewis Namier (Ludwik Bernstein), Halford Mackinder’s pupil from Eastern Galicia, played in formulating this line in the December 1919 decision of the Supreme Council of the Allies concerning provisional eastern boundary of Poland e against all efforts of Roman Dmowski and Eugeniusz Romer. There are a few minor mistakes, such as the mention of Nowogródek as the place of birth of Adam Mickiewicza (p. 39) e the poet was born in Zaosie; or calling Adam Czartoryski ‘the proRussian rector’ (p. 189) of Imperial University in Vilnius e Czartoryski was curator not rector of this university, and by 1823 was no longer ‘pro-Russian’. The mistaken suggestion (several times repeated e pp. 59e60, 149, 166), that Joachim Lelewel was founder of the Polish Democratic Society and author of its 1836 manifesto seems especially worth correcting because it is connected with more serious misrepresentation of Lelewel’s views on nations within the former PolisheLithuanian Commonwealth territories. While the Polish Democratic Society and its 1836 manifesto clearly expressed centralizing and Polonizing intentions towards nonPolish inhabitants of that realm, Lelewel stood firmly against this position, stressing the multiethnic character of the commonwealth and its federalist structure. These critical remarks are, however, of secondary importance. The book is not only a real showpiece of the author‘s erudition and brilliant orientation in a vast multilingual literature of the subject, but it is first and foremost a critical contribution to our understanding of the ‘situated messiness’ of east central European borderlands and the place contested cartographies and constructed geographies have played in this region’s historical formation between 1772 and 1919. Andrzej Nowak Jagiellonian University, Poland http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2013.07.017
Peter Atkins (Ed), Animal Cities: Beastly Urban Histories. Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2012, xiv þ 279 pages, US$124.95 hardcover. Animal Cities provides a useful extension of geographical scholarship on animals in the urban context. This book is a welcome
223
addition to geography’s many branches, not only historical, animal, and urban, but also the geography of political economy and political ecology. As the book’s title indicates, these essays examine aspects of animals’ roles in the historical development of several cities, primarily nineteenth-century London and Paris, but also Edinburgh and the Australian cities of Perth and Melbourne, and with empirical reference to New York and Chicago. These contributions bring to the fore the ubiquitous yet largely unstudied and often unacknowledged parts that animals, living and dead, have played in urban trajectories, and it advances academic work that recognizes that ‘[t]he presence of animals was not, then, an accidental oversight of citizens who at some point would come to their senses and discover the true essence of urbanism . animals were constitutive of a certain stage of the urban’ (p. 35). In the essays the reader encounters several themes: the increasingly important tendencies of the middle class to modernize and impose spatial order; evolving ideas about nuisance, hygiene, and public health; the growth of regulatory frameworks related to sanitation and animal-keeping and slaughter; the rising role of science in public decision-making; and changing conceptions of nature and the city itself. In chapter one the editor introduces the reader to the volume’s overarching thesis: that the non-human world, in all its productive, nourishing, noxious, and worrisome materiality, is and has been a significant and inseparable part of urban development, processes, and geographies. Atkins proposes several reasons for animals’ exclusion from much of the urban historical literature, and then situates the book in relation to several vibrant, yet still largely emerging, literatures that engage with the wider domain of humaneanimal relations and interactions: urban environmental history, urban (political) ecology, animal(ity) studies, animal histories, animal geographies, and ‘post-humanities.’ The next three chapters, also by Atkins, delve into the elemental materiality of food-producing and transport animals, primarily in Victorian London. Atkins deals with the presence and difficult disposal of animal waste, smells arising from this waste and the processing of slaughtered animals, and real and perceived hazards to human health arising from these elements’ proximity to city centers. Atkins deftly connects humans and animals as natural, material, waste-producing urban beings and uses this connection to illustrate links between the push for urban sanitation, especially sanitary sewer systems, and the physical and conceptual removal of animals as part of the urban environment. In chapter four, the contribution of animal bodily materials to the industries, economies, and geographies of a modernizing London is explored. The breaking down and dispersing of animal bodies produced uneven industrial and commercial geographies that reflected the social status of the city’s numerous human inhabitants. Paul Laxton (chapter five) and Sabine Barles (chapter six) continue many of these themes. Laxton examines the contentious development of meat safety regulation in Edinburgh and Barles reviews animals’ decreasing presence from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries in Parisian urban spaces and planning thought. Takashi Ito (chapter seven) brings a change of focus from domesticated animals to those in the London Zoo and a study of the ways in which London’s changing animal spaces and the zoo’s identification as a scientific institution contributed to city residents’ perceptions of animals. Echoing the theme of the growing conceptualization of the urban as separate from nature, Andrea Gaynor (chapter eight) moves readers to the suburbs of twentieth-century Australia in an examination of the decline of small-scale poultry-keeping. Examining calls for regulations to muzzle dogs in Victorian and Edwardian London, and the subsequent growth of walking leashed dogs as an alternative, Phillip Howell (chapter nine) interrogates the largely taken-for-granted modern-day practice of dog-walking and its
224
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 42 (2013) 215e227
symbolic importance. He asserts that public health and safety fears, particularly about rabies, that incited attempts to require muzzles on all dogs in the city actually contributed to the acceptance of dogs (albeit on the other end of a leash from their owners) as participants in urban social life and to the recognition of the emerging category of pet animals. Animal Cities provides much useful and interesting empirical detail including a number of charts, tables, and illustrations. The editor states in the introduction that the book is not theoretically dense and, although this is true, theoretical engagement is far from absent and the preponderance of empirical detail over theoretical work makes the book more accessible. It could be used productively in an undergraduate class, yet is provocative enough for graduates and other academics as well. Although Atkins provides an excellent introduction that highlights themes in the essays, the book would have benefited from a short afterword that tied together some of the very engaging threads that ran throughout. For example, moving animals out of the city was a theme in all chapters except for Howell’s, which narrated the moving of domestic dogs in, and several chapters (e.g., two, five, and eight) connected to present-day issues such as sustainability, zoonotic diseases, and urban farming. Although somewhat limited in geographical scope, Animal Cities lays an excellent foundation for more scholarship in geography and other disciplines. The presentation of material in this volume makes the imbrication of the human and animal lives so clear that readers will be struck by the invisibility of these connections in many other popular and academic histories and be moved to ask how the growth and character of cities such as London or New York can be analysed without accounting for the labor and bodies of animals. Connie L. Johnston Clark University, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2013.07.018
Miles Orvell, The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2012, xiii þ 286 pages, US$39.95 hardcover. At a time when more than four of every five Americans live in one of the country’s 366 metropolitan statistical areas, a mainly historical treatise on small towns may at first glance seem passé, or at best perhaps a scholarly curio to be shelved alongside volumes about folk architecture, victory gardens, or interurban railways. Yet further reflection shows that small towns’ influence and relevance remains disproportionate to the modest and diminishing share of the national populace that calls them home. One need only witness the pervasive cultural resonance of (to take two recent examples) tragedies such as the tornado-wrought devastation of Joplin, Missouri, or the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, to recognize this. Natural disasters that strike major cities seem to elicit more sympathy than empathy, and everyday urban violence goes largely unremarked beyond the local crime blotter. Such misfortunes and misdeeds do not strike quite the same chord, nor so deeply, as when they afflict small-town America. In The Death and Life of Main Street Miles Orvell establishes as his first premise that ‘Main Street’ matters, profoundly and in ways that extend far beyond its undersized and seemingly humble physical manifestations. The small town is thoroughly intertwined symbolically and materially with our collective notions of place, identity, home, and community, and by extension with the complexities and contradictions inherent in these notions. Orvell
argues that longstanding tensions between such binaries as tradition and modernization, homogeneity and diversity, belonging and exclusion, individualism and community, and authenticity and artifice, may be explored and better understood in relation to small-town America. But in this analysis, Orvell’s protagonist serves as no mere foil; instead these tensions have been and continue to be woven, articulated, negotiated, and reworked through the American small town. The book unfolds somewhat chronologically as it examines Main Streets and their small-town settings from numerous angles and through a variety of lenses. Orvell begins in chapter one with mythical and symbolic expressions of the small town, ranging from nineteenth-century chromolithographic maps and the paintings of Norman Rockwell, to ‘living museums’ such as Greenfield Village and Colonial Williamsburg, to more fantastical incarnations such as Disneyland’s Main Street, USA, and Laurence Gieringer’s miniature village, Roadside America. Idealized romanticism then gives way to themes of obsolescence and disenchantment amidst a rapidly urbanizing nation. Chapter two considers the rise of chain stores and shopping malls, along with efforts in Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill district to weather such threats to small-town commercial viability through historic preservation. In the chapter that follows, Orvell explicates the social and cultural tensions embedded in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and other comparable literary works of an era that marked the country’s transition to a predominantly urban populace. By the 1930s and 1940s Main Street was already shrouded in nostalgia, which Orvell explores in chapter four through Farm Security Administration photographs, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. In stark contrast chapter five examines the darker sides of a small-town America marked by profound but largely unacknowledged racial and economic divides. The next two chapters address the place of Main Street in evolving twentieth century urban (and increasingly suburban) planning paradigms. Orvell journeys from Ebenezer Howard’s garden city concept to Olmsted, Jr.’s Forest Hills Gardens and Stein and Wright’s Radburn, NJ, and then through the greenbelt cities of the New Deal era and Rouse’s Columbia, before (all but inevitably) arriving at a pair of New Urbanist exemplars, Kentlands, MD and Celebration, FL. The book’s final two chapters examine contemporary evocations of small-town America within inner-city neighborhoods and central business districts. Chapter eight focuses on the transformation of public housing projects into neotraditional communities through the federal HOPE VI program, while the concluding chapter briefly considers the influence of the Main Street idea on new downtown retail districts. As the preceding summary suggests, The Death and Life of Main Street is a decidedly wide-ranging work that blends together literary and film criticism with planning history, and leavens the mixture with a dash of critical theory. The result is an interesting cross-fertilization of scholarly genres that invites the reader to traverse disciplinary boundaries. Subject matter that receives expression in so many different arenas of American life certainly lends itself to the interdisciplinary approach taken by Orvell. However, his approach also renders the book’s narrative somewhat disjointed, especially as it wends its way from the literary tenor of its earlier chapters to the planning and policy concerns that dominate later ones. It is also evident that Orvell is less comfortable navigating the latter; amidst descriptive details of postwar suburban development or public housing policy, Orvell has a tendency to lose sight of the book’s overarching theme and purpose. And the conclusion, which consists of a much too brief discussion of New Urbanism’s reinterpretation of Main Street, followed by barely two pages of concluding thoughts, is a missed opportunity to more deliberately tie together the many threads that compose the work.
model of these processes (along with Miroslav Hroch’s application of said model), as well as his effective use of vast historical material, undermines the binary opposition between nation and empire. All of this deserves careful attention but Seegel seems unaware that Roman Szporluk presented a similar analysis in the edited volume The State of the Nation (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Mapping Europe’s Borderlands also discusses the evolution of geography as a scientific endeavor. Thus geographic scholarship is comparable not only to the path taken by historiography in the nineteenth century, but also shares a place with sociology, anthropology, and other social sciences in organizing and ordering peoples and space hierarchically within a positivist paradigm. Here Seegel’s book invites comparison with Marina Mogilner’s Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia (University of Nebraska Press, 2013[2008]). Seegel’s monograph might also be read as an important chapter in a (geo)political history of east central Europe between the partitions of Poland and the period after World War I, as he considers how particular maps and the work of various geographers served particular political agendas and helped to realize territorial changes, especially during the crucial period of World War I and the 1919 peace conference. It is a paradox, then, that the author omits completely the most fundamental decision prepared with geographical and ethnographical data for east central Europe e namely the so called Curzon line and the role Lewis Namier (Ludwik Bernstein), Halford Mackinder’s pupil from Eastern Galicia, played in formulating this line in the December 1919 decision of the Supreme Council of the Allies concerning provisional eastern boundary of Poland e against all efforts of Roman Dmowski and Eugeniusz Romer. There are a few minor mistakes, such as the mention of Nowogródek as the place of birth of Adam Mickiewicza (p. 39) e the poet was born in Zaosie; or calling Adam Czartoryski ‘the proRussian rector’ (p. 189) of Imperial University in Vilnius e Czartoryski was curator not rector of this university, and by 1823 was no longer ‘pro-Russian’. The mistaken suggestion (several times repeated e pp. 59e60, 149, 166), that Joachim Lelewel was founder of the Polish Democratic Society and author of its 1836 manifesto seems especially worth correcting because it is connected with more serious misrepresentation of Lelewel’s views on nations within the former PolisheLithuanian Commonwealth territories. While the Polish Democratic Society and its 1836 manifesto clearly expressed centralizing and Polonizing intentions towards nonPolish inhabitants of that realm, Lelewel stood firmly against this position, stressing the multiethnic character of the commonwealth and its federalist structure. These critical remarks are, however, of secondary importance. The book is not only a real showpiece of the author‘s erudition and brilliant orientation in a vast multilingual literature of the subject, but it is first and foremost a critical contribution to our understanding of the ‘situated messiness’ of east central European borderlands and the place contested cartographies and constructed geographies have played in this region’s historical formation between 1772 and 1919. Andrzej Nowak Jagiellonian University, Poland http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2013.07.017
Peter Atkins (Ed), Animal Cities: Beastly Urban Histories. Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2012, xiv þ 279 pages, US$124.95 hardcover. Animal Cities provides a useful extension of geographical scholarship on animals in the urban context. This book is a welcome
223
addition to geography’s many branches, not only historical, animal, and urban, but also the geography of political economy and political ecology. As the book’s title indicates, these essays examine aspects of animals’ roles in the historical development of several cities, primarily nineteenth-century London and Paris, but also Edinburgh and the Australian cities of Perth and Melbourne, and with empirical reference to New York and Chicago. These contributions bring to the fore the ubiquitous yet largely unstudied and often unacknowledged parts that animals, living and dead, have played in urban trajectories, and it advances academic work that recognizes that ‘[t]he presence of animals was not, then, an accidental oversight of citizens who at some point would come to their senses and discover the true essence of urbanism . animals were constitutive of a certain stage of the urban’ (p. 35). In the essays the reader encounters several themes: the increasingly important tendencies of the middle class to modernize and impose spatial order; evolving ideas about nuisance, hygiene, and public health; the growth of regulatory frameworks related to sanitation and animal-keeping and slaughter; the rising role of science in public decision-making; and changing conceptions of nature and the city itself. In chapter one the editor introduces the reader to the volume’s overarching thesis: that the non-human world, in all its productive, nourishing, noxious, and worrisome materiality, is and has been a significant and inseparable part of urban development, processes, and geographies. Atkins proposes several reasons for animals’ exclusion from much of the urban historical literature, and then situates the book in relation to several vibrant, yet still largely emerging, literatures that engage with the wider domain of humaneanimal relations and interactions: urban environmental history, urban (political) ecology, animal(ity) studies, animal histories, animal geographies, and ‘post-humanities.’ The next three chapters, also by Atkins, delve into the elemental materiality of food-producing and transport animals, primarily in Victorian London. Atkins deals with the presence and difficult disposal of animal waste, smells arising from this waste and the processing of slaughtered animals, and real and perceived hazards to human health arising from these elements’ proximity to city centers. Atkins deftly connects humans and animals as natural, material, waste-producing urban beings and uses this connection to illustrate links between the push for urban sanitation, especially sanitary sewer systems, and the physical and conceptual removal of animals as part of the urban environment. In chapter four, the contribution of animal bodily materials to the industries, economies, and geographies of a modernizing London is explored. The breaking down and dispersing of animal bodies produced uneven industrial and commercial geographies that reflected the social status of the city’s numerous human inhabitants. Paul Laxton (chapter five) and Sabine Barles (chapter six) continue many of these themes. Laxton examines the contentious development of meat safety regulation in Edinburgh and Barles reviews animals’ decreasing presence from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries in Parisian urban spaces and planning thought. Takashi Ito (chapter seven) brings a change of focus from domesticated animals to those in the London Zoo and a study of the ways in which London’s changing animal spaces and the zoo’s identification as a scientific institution contributed to city residents’ perceptions of animals. Echoing the theme of the growing conceptualization of the urban as separate from nature, Andrea Gaynor (chapter eight) moves readers to the suburbs of twentieth-century Australia in an examination of the decline of small-scale poultry-keeping. Examining calls for regulations to muzzle dogs in Victorian and Edwardian London, and the subsequent growth of walking leashed dogs as an alternative, Phillip Howell (chapter nine) interrogates the largely taken-for-granted modern-day practice of dog-walking and its
224
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 42 (2013) 215e227
symbolic importance. He asserts that public health and safety fears, particularly about rabies, that incited attempts to require muzzles on all dogs in the city actually contributed to the acceptance of dogs (albeit on the other end of a leash from their owners) as participants in urban social life and to the recognition of the emerging category of pet animals. Animal Cities provides much useful and interesting empirical detail including a number of charts, tables, and illustrations. The editor states in the introduction that the book is not theoretically dense and, although this is true, theoretical engagement is far from absent and the preponderance of empirical detail over theoretical work makes the book more accessible. It could be used productively in an undergraduate class, yet is provocative enough for graduates and other academics as well. Although Atkins provides an excellent introduction that highlights themes in the essays, the book would have benefited from a short afterword that tied together some of the very engaging threads that ran throughout. For example, moving animals out of the city was a theme in all chapters except for Howell’s, which narrated the moving of domestic dogs in, and several chapters (e.g., two, five, and eight) connected to present-day issues such as sustainability, zoonotic diseases, and urban farming. Although somewhat limited in geographical scope, Animal Cities lays an excellent foundation for more scholarship in geography and other disciplines. The presentation of material in this volume makes the imbrication of the human and animal lives so clear that readers will be struck by the invisibility of these connections in many other popular and academic histories and be moved to ask how the growth and character of cities such as London or New York can be analysed without accounting for the labor and bodies of animals. Connie L. Johnston Clark University, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2013.07.018
Miles Orvell, The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2012, xiii þ 286 pages, US$39.95 hardcover. At a time when more than four of every five Americans live in one of the country’s 366 metropolitan statistical areas, a mainly historical treatise on small towns may at first glance seem passé, or at best perhaps a scholarly curio to be shelved alongside volumes about folk architecture, victory gardens, or interurban railways. Yet further reflection shows that small towns’ influence and relevance remains disproportionate to the modest and diminishing share of the national populace that calls them home. One need only witness the pervasive cultural resonance of (to take two recent examples) tragedies such as the tornado-wrought devastation of Joplin, Missouri, or the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, to recognize this. Natural disasters that strike major cities seem to elicit more sympathy than empathy, and everyday urban violence goes largely unremarked beyond the local crime blotter. Such misfortunes and misdeeds do not strike quite the same chord, nor so deeply, as when they afflict small-town America. In The Death and Life of Main Street Miles Orvell establishes as his first premise that ‘Main Street’ matters, profoundly and in ways that extend far beyond its undersized and seemingly humble physical manifestations. The small town is thoroughly intertwined symbolically and materially with our collective notions of place, identity, home, and community, and by extension with the complexities and contradictions inherent in these notions. Orvell
argues that longstanding tensions between such binaries as tradition and modernization, homogeneity and diversity, belonging and exclusion, individualism and community, and authenticity and artifice, may be explored and better understood in relation to small-town America. But in this analysis, Orvell’s protagonist serves as no mere foil; instead these tensions have been and continue to be woven, articulated, negotiated, and reworked through the American small town. The book unfolds somewhat chronologically as it examines Main Streets and their small-town settings from numerous angles and through a variety of lenses. Orvell begins in chapter one with mythical and symbolic expressions of the small town, ranging from nineteenth-century chromolithographic maps and the paintings of Norman Rockwell, to ‘living museums’ such as Greenfield Village and Colonial Williamsburg, to more fantastical incarnations such as Disneyland’s Main Street, USA, and Laurence Gieringer’s miniature village, Roadside America. Idealized romanticism then gives way to themes of obsolescence and disenchantment amidst a rapidly urbanizing nation. Chapter two considers the rise of chain stores and shopping malls, along with efforts in Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill district to weather such threats to small-town commercial viability through historic preservation. In the chapter that follows, Orvell explicates the social and cultural tensions embedded in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and other comparable literary works of an era that marked the country’s transition to a predominantly urban populace. By the 1930s and 1940s Main Street was already shrouded in nostalgia, which Orvell explores in chapter four through Farm Security Administration photographs, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. In stark contrast chapter five examines the darker sides of a small-town America marked by profound but largely unacknowledged racial and economic divides. The next two chapters address the place of Main Street in evolving twentieth century urban (and increasingly suburban) planning paradigms. Orvell journeys from Ebenezer Howard’s garden city concept to Olmsted, Jr.’s Forest Hills Gardens and Stein and Wright’s Radburn, NJ, and then through the greenbelt cities of the New Deal era and Rouse’s Columbia, before (all but inevitably) arriving at a pair of New Urbanist exemplars, Kentlands, MD and Celebration, FL. The book’s final two chapters examine contemporary evocations of small-town America within inner-city neighborhoods and central business districts. Chapter eight focuses on the transformation of public housing projects into neotraditional communities through the federal HOPE VI program, while the concluding chapter briefly considers the influence of the Main Street idea on new downtown retail districts. As the preceding summary suggests, The Death and Life of Main Street is a decidedly wide-ranging work that blends together literary and film criticism with planning history, and leavens the mixture with a dash of critical theory. The result is an interesting cross-fertilization of scholarly genres that invites the reader to traverse disciplinary boundaries. Subject matter that receives expression in so many different arenas of American life certainly lends itself to the interdisciplinary approach taken by Orvell. However, his approach also renders the book’s narrative somewhat disjointed, especially as it wends its way from the literary tenor of its earlier chapters to the planning and policy concerns that dominate later ones. It is also evident that Orvell is less comfortable navigating the latter; amidst descriptive details of postwar suburban development or public housing policy, Orvell has a tendency to lose sight of the book’s overarching theme and purpose. And the conclusion, which consists of a much too brief discussion of New Urbanism’s reinterpretation of Main Street, followed by barely two pages of concluding thoughts, is a missed opportunity to more deliberately tie together the many threads that compose the work.