The Sociable City. Jamin Creed Rowan

      While worrying that the interwar city had erected an emotional barrier between parents and children by physically destabilizing the urban home, many city dwellers simultaneously expressed concern about the ability of the city’s informal organizations and formal institutions to continue to facilitate fellow-feelings among urbanites. Although many of the social structures that had supported patterns of affiliation and habits of interpersonal feeling among city dwellers persisted into the 1920s, the Great Depression crippled many of them. The churches, ethnic benefit societies, building and loan associations, and other neighborhood organizations on which working-class city dwellers had come to rely for material and emotional support were so weakened by the Depression that they had difficulty sustaining and facilitating the same degree of interpersonal connection that they had in previous years. The continued expansion of cities and metropolitan regions during the interwar period only added to the concerns of urban intellectuals that the social structures that had arisen to bring city dwellers into face-to-face contact and personal relations with one another were failing to do their jobs.⁴

      Many urbanists responded to the crises of affect brought about by the transformation of the interwar city by pursuing and extending in their writing and city-making activities several strains of the urbanist discourse of sympathy that had been articulated by turn-of-the-century settlement intellectuals. Catherine Bauer, one of the period’s leading advocates for public housing, blamed the lack of affordable and attractive urban housing on society’s deeply felt desire to shelter and protect the “impregnable Family”—a desire that grew out of an almost irrational commitment to protect the “Rights of Man” and defend the “Freedom of the Individual” to “acquire, own, and dispose of property in any way which might benefit him.” Both in her writing and public engagements, Bauer lobbied government officials, architects, and city planners to consider the “community as a whole” as the “real unit” of society, rather than the single family or individual citizen. She advocated treating the urban home not as a “barrack” from which to engage in battle with one’s neighbors, but as a single “knot in a network” of other homes, shops, transportation lines, schools, and places of work. If “we want good cities,” she insisted, society needed to develop an infrastructure capable of harnessing the “forces which keep people together and not of those which separate and individualize.” Bauer argued for a philosophical and practical approach to urban housing that would facilitate the kind of public sympathy advocated by Progressive Era settlement residents rather than the emotional intimacies that held the “impregnable family” together.⁵

      Other interwar urban intellectuals promoted alternative means by which city dwellers might engage in the type of face-to-face interactions in public spaces that would nurture fellow-feelings among them. Lewis Mumford, one of the most influential urban intellectuals of the interwar period, contended in his monumental The Culture of Cities (1938) that many of the efforts to address the city’s problems through “housing and city planning” had been “handicapped because those who have undertaken the work have had no clear notion of the social functions of the city.” Mumford shared with Bauer and Progressive settlement workers similar views about the ideal nature of social life in the city. He understood the city to be the “physical form of the highest and most complex types of associative life”—a life that consisted of interactions and associations forged among individuals beyond the boundaries of “tribe or family.” Although Mumford shared Bauer’s concerns about the role that housing played in facilitating or hindering fellow-feelings among strangers in public, he was more worried about the threat that “overgrown cities” posed to the vitality of the associative life. When cities became too big—as he felt many had become during the interwar period—Mumford argued that they became less effective in providing city dwellers with the institutions and social rituals that enabled them to establish emotional connections with one another. In addition to providing urbanites with the buildings, halls, and other physical spaces in which they might actualize their “social relatedness,” city planners should, according to Mumford’s particular urbanist discourse of sympathy, attempt to limit the size of the city. Rather than accept the megalopolis as the inevitable outcome of urban growth, he and his regionalist colleagues advocated the development of what he called the “polynucleated city”: a cluster of cities “ranging in size from five thousand to fifty thousand” spread throughout a single region. These smaller cities would, he professed, provide residents the ideal setting in which to witness and participate in the “dramatization of communal life.”⁶

      Despite the efforts of Mumford, Bauer, and others to extend the particular urbanist discourse of sympathy that had been initiated by settlement intellectuals and that promoted the social and affective value of interactions among city dwellers in public and semi-public spaces, an increasingly large number of urbanists responded to the changing physical and social conditions of the interwar city by privileging the kind of intimate relationships most frequently experienced within the tribe and family. As the issue of affordable and adequate housing became the nation’s primary urban concern during the 1930s, social scientists, city planners, politicians, and even some settlement residents, such as those at Henry Street Settlement, increasingly stressed the need to provide spaces in which city dwellers could maintain the intimate fellow-feelings among themselves that this particular phase of urban development appeared to threaten. Those who saw the city’s dilapidated housing stock as its most pressing issue attempted to persuade the public to do something about it by depicting the city’s unsafe and unsanitary homes as a threat to family relationships. According to this group of housing reformers, tenements and other residential buildings like them made it nearly impossible for the urban poor to get the affection they so desperately needed from their fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, and neighbors. Tenements, they reasoned, turned families and communities into strangers. Many of these urban housing reformers hoped to help elected officials and citizens see more adequate and affordable housing as essential to the nation’s public health by dramatizing the urban housing crisis as a crisis of affect.