This book, in fact, is primarily interested in the efforts of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century urbanists to call attention to and legitimize the fellow-feelings and relationships that city dwellers cultivated in the very streets from which Olmsted sought to remove them. Because their culture had emphasized the desirability of private, intimate relationships for so long, urbanists struggled to find ways to capture and validate the less intimate, more casual interactions and fellow-feelings that physically and emotionally connected urbanites to one another. “Intimacy,” Richard Sennett observes, has operated in our culture’s imagination as a type of “tyranny” in that it has created a “belief in one standard of truth to measure the complexities of social reality.”11 The urban intellectuals that appear in the pages that follow bumped up against and grappled with intimacy’s conceptual tyranny in their attempts to diversify the standards with which the public might assign value to the multiplicity of relational forms and affections that inevitably arise among urbanites within the city’s public spaces. As the U.S. city’s physical and social landscapes evolved over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, urban intellectuals developed new vocabularies, narratives, and representational forms through which they might acknowledge the social and emotional value of a wide variety of interactions among city dwellers.
Figure 1. “Design for Prospect Park in the City of Brooklyn, 1870.” When Olmsted addressed the American Social Science Association at Boston’s Lowell Institute in 1870, he and Calvert Vaux had recently designed Prospect Park. The park had opened to the public in 1867 and would remain under construction until 1873. Prospect Park contains many of the classic design elements Olmsted deployed to shut out the city and restore sympathy to urban relationships.
The Sociable City sets out to map the evolution of an urbanist discourse that initially remained tethered to the concept of sympathy but that shifted over the course of the first half of the twentieth century to revolve around the idea of sociability. The pages that follow track the evolution of a structure of sympathetic fellow-feeling and emergence of a structure of sociable fellow-feeling in U.S. urbanist discourse. If, as Raymond Williams has written, a “structure of feeling” refers to the “elements of social and material (physical or natural) experience” within which “meanings and values … are actively lived and felt,” this book examines the work of urban intellectuals who drew attention to the new ways in which city dwellers were navigating the shifting social and material elements of the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. city in order to experience fellow-feelings with those around them.12 Of course, the structures of sympathetic fellow-feeling Olmsted and other nineteenth-century urbanists embraced shifted and persisted well into the twentieth century and the urbanist discourses that embraced sympathy as the ideal form of fellow-feeling continued to shape the city’s built environment. But structures of sociable fellow-feeling became increasingly visible in twentieth-century urbanist discourse as observers of city life sought to make sense of the new social and material experiences available within the rapidly changing U.S. city. As urbanists confronted the inadequacy of the language and logic of sympathy to capture the significance of the many different forms of affiliation forged among city dwellers, they developed new patterns for talking about and assessing the social value of those affiliations.
As U.S. urbanists established a different set of expectations about what kinds of interdependencies among city dwellers mattered, they approached the expansion and redevelopment of the city’s built environment in very different ways than did Olmsted and those like him who valued intimate relationships. These urbanists sought to modify the city in order to better facilitate sociable interactions among city dwellers in public spaces and therefore to cultivate a very different set of fellow-feelings than the tender, familial fellow-feelings that Olmsted had placed at the center of his approach to urban landscape design. The structure of sociable fellow-feeling that emerged and gained currency within twentieth-century urbanist discourse inspired city makers both to preserve particular elements of the industrial cityscape and to construct new urban infrastructure. Those who privileged sociable relationships in their vision of urban life strove to create a very different kind of built environment than did those who felt that intimate relationships were the only relationships worth promoting. Intimacy tends to require private spaces, whereas sociability tends to flourish in public and semi-public spaces. While understanding the ways in which structures of sympathetic and sociable fellow-feeling shaped the physical structure of cities does not explain everything about the development and redevelopment of the U.S. cityscape, this understanding does allow us to make more sense of why city planners, developers, and politicians have endorsed certain urban forms and designs above others.
The Sociable City attempts to trace the effect of the mental and physical work carried out by a variety of urbanists on the U.S. culture’s urban imaginary and the landscapes that this imaginary has produced. It provides an intellectual and cultural history of the efforts of urbanists to assess the affective quality of the interactions among city dwellers in public spaces and of the ways in which those assessments have shaped the U.S. city’s built environment. At the heart of this project, then, is the claim that our society’s decisions about what kinds of interpersonal affections matter most have determined the kinds of cities that we have created. This assertion is a slightly more refined version of Jane Jacobs’s pronouncement in The Death and Life of Great American Cities that “private investment shapes cities, but social ideas (and laws) shape private investment. First comes the image of what we want, then the machinery is adapted to turn out that image.”13 This book investigates the history of what we have wanted urban relationships to look like and considers how those desires have shaped the cities in which we live. It carries out this investigation primarily by turning to source materials that tend to be overlooked by those who have made it their business to write about the history of urban life and thought: memoirs, plays, novels, literary journalism, and museum exhibits. Contrary to Morton and Lucia White’s insistence that it would be “extremely difficult to cull … a large anthology of poetry or social philosophy in celebration of American urban life,” this book contends that there is an expansive body of literary, cultural, and philosophical work dedicated to exploring and advocating the social configurations made possible by the city.14 Many of the urbanists that populate this book strove to legitimize the interactions and relationships among city dwellers that have been seen for far too long as socially and emotionally illegitimate.
The intellectual and cultural history that I construct in the pages that follow maps a transition within the tradition of U.S. urbanism from outlooks that privileged sympathetic structures of fellow-feeling to those that prioritized sociable structures of fellow-feeling. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, urbanists would, as the first two chapters demonstrate, continue to draw on and modify the language and logic of sympathy in their efforts to assess the wide variety of associations into which city dwellers entered. I pick up this history with the turn-of-the-century U.S. settlement movement. Settlement workers such as Jane Addams, who had chosen to live in the industrial city’s densest immigrant neighborhoods, called attention to the need for the city dweller to “make new channels through which his sympathy may flow.” Unlike Olmsted, Addams and other settlement figures such as Lillian Wald, Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, and W. E. B. Du Bois argued that urbanites could experience fellow-feelings for one another within the industrial city’s congested neighborhoods. While settlement workers sought to expand the range of affections that might be considered to adequately connect city dwellers to one another—Addams saw what she called