As settlement leaders and other early twentieth-century thinkers continued to expand the concept of sympathy in order to accommodate the social and affective dynamics of a variety of relationships, other urban intellectuals pursued an urbanist discourse of sympathy that accentuated the singular importance of relationships founded on emotional intimacy. Nowhere was this strain of urban sympathy more visible than in the public housing movement of the 1920s and ’30s. Despite the encouragement of public housing advocates such as Catherine Bauer to consider the needs of society more broadly, many social scientists, city planners, politicians, and other urbanists responded to the social ills facing the early twentieth-century city—overcrowding, decaying infrastructure, and unaffordable urban housing—by stressing the need to provide spaces in which city dwellers could maintain the close familial relationships that these social ills appeared to threaten. Many public housing proponents contended not only that better, more affordable housing would improve relationships within families but also that these new structures would create the physical environment in which unrelated urbanites might acquire familial feelings for each other. As the Federal Theatre Project’s production of Arthur Arent’s One-Third of a Nation (1938) made clear, the passage of the U.S. Housing Act of 1937—which created the political mechanisms through which cities received federal funds for slum clearance and low-income housing construction—signaled the codification in federal policy and, subsequently, in the city’s built environment of a relatively narrow and conventional understanding of fellow-feelings.16 Despite the efforts of some settlement workers, social scientists, and public housing activists to use the language and logic of sympathy to account for a range of fellow-feelings that connected city dwellers to one another, New Deal political ideologies and cultural narratives calcified the conceptual possibilities of sympathy in such a way that an urbanist discourse that revolved around sympathy became nearly incapable of signifying and privileging anything other than emotionally intimate relationships. In its codified and calcified form, the urbanist discourse of sympathy facilitated an approach to urban redevelopment that sacrificed local streets, small commercial establishments, community gathering places, and other public spaces for the construction of housing projects, large commercial developments, public works, and highways—an approach that was primarily invested in the development of private spaces and that would sustain the nation’s urban renewal agenda for decades to come.
While the deep intellectual and cultural traditions that supported an urbanist discourse of sympathy continued to inform conversations about the nature of affiliations among city dwellers, urban intellectuals in the middle decades of the twentieth century began to develop what I have chosen to call a discourse of sociability. Aware of the increasing inability of an urbanist discourse based on sympathy to account for and validate interactions among urbanites in public spaces that did not necessarily engender intimacy but that nevertheless generated fellow-feelings, urbanists cultivated alternative ways of thinking and talking about the broad spectrum of social processes and emotions that might activate and signify fellow-feelings. The final three chapters of this book trace the emergence of this discourse of sociability. The fellow-feelings that the urbanists who contributed to this discourse made visible and valuable belonged to the public domain’s affective orbit rather than the private sphere’s emotional loop. Perhaps no other group of urban intellectuals more single-mindedly developed the discourse of urban sociability than the first wave of city journalists at the New Yorker—journalists such as E. B. White, Meyer Berger, Joseph Mitchell, and A. J. Liebling. Compared to the intense interpersonal emotions commonly associated with sympathy, the types of fellow-feelings that New Yorker reporters claimed connected city dwellers to one another in the public realm were relatively mild and modest. The urban intellectuals who operated within the discursive framework of sociability called attention to the ways the emotional impulse to appreciate, cooperate with, protect, or simply recognize another human being were capable of linking urbanites to one another in emotionally meaningful and socially satisfying ways—even when those affections did not result in brotherhood, sisterhood, or friendship. The urbanist discourse of sociability that these writers began to develop at the New Yorker clarified and gave credibility to the affective processes entailed in what Iris Marion Young describes as the “being together of strangers.”17
Although the discourse of sociability emerged in the pages of the New Yorker and in urban tenement novels such as Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) during the interwar period, its distinct approach to making sense of urban relationships found its clearest rationale in the relatively young science of ecology.18 In the postwar years, many urban intellectuals turned to the evolving discipline of ecology to extend the public’s understanding of the affective dimensions and relational possibilities of the interrelationships among city dwellers. Ecologically minded urbanists tapped into mid-century ecology’s new cache of scientific data and social terminology to call attention to the types of cooperative relationships among city dwellers about which New Yorker journalists and tenement novelists had written. The ecological discourse that these urbanists drew on—a discourse popularized by individuals such as Rachel Carson and institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History—further illuminated and validated the kinds of interdependencies among urbanites who were not necessarily familiar with one another but who shared the same urban environment. New ecological research that emerged during the interwar and postwar periods also pushed urban intellectuals to recognize that the breadth and depth of the interdependencies that connected city dwellers to one another were far more extensive than city journalists, tenement novelists, and others had realized. Mid-century urbanists who took up ecological habits of thinking saw new kinds of interrelations among urbanites—especially among those who did not physically or socially interact with one another in, but who still shared, the city’s public realm. Ecological urbanists were quick to point out that, while individuals might attain fellow-feelings for those with whom they shared the city through face-to-face interactions, they might just as easily feel sociable toward those with whom they had never personally interacted. They suggested that the kind of “being together of strangers” capable of producing fellow-feelings did not necessarily require the physical and temporal co-presence of strangers.
This ecologically inflected discourse of sociability offered community activists, city planners, and politicians an image of the city that helped them challenge the ways in which urban renewal projects were remaking the city’s built environment and disrupting its social orders. Rather than demand the creation of alternative spaces or the construction of better private ones, the discourse of sociability called for the preservation of the public spaces within which the interdependencies among urbanites had been established and continued to operate. To tear down a building or remove a street to make room for a civic center or highway, ecological urbanists argued, was to upset a multitude of fragile relationships in impossible-to-anticipate ways and thus to throw the city’s delicate social ecosystem out of balance. Those who valued the city’s informal and often invisible social networks insisted that preserving and creating a physically diverse built environment would be critical if the city were to sustain the somewhat less emotionally intense fellow-feelings capable of binding an increasingly diverse population of city dwellers to one another. Perhaps no urbanist articulated the discourse of sociability and its spatial implications more precisely or persuasively than Jane Jacobs, one of the twentieth century’s most important city planners and urban writers. Jacobs synthesized and elaborated the