The Sociable City. Jamin Creed Rowan

significant the sensibility of a cultural formation. I argue that the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities signaled the consolidation and popularization of an urbanist discourse of sociability.

      The intellectual and cultural history that this book provides illuminates a more nuanced and enriched vocabulary for understanding the nature of social interactions within the history of U.S. urban thought. For too long, urbanists and historians have filtered their appraisals of the quality of social interactions among urbanites through inadequate urban types or oversimplified categories. For many, the figure of the flâneur has provided the primary critical angle into discussions about the affective dimensions of social exchanges among city dwellers in public spaces. The flâneur views other urbanites as commodities to be consumed rather than as individuals to whom he has emotional or ethical obligations.¹⁹ Early twentieth-century urban sociology reduced the multiplicity of relational forms into which city dwellers might enter to two categories: primary and secondary relationships. Sociology’s dyadic approach to urban sociality, along with its assessments of primary (superior) and secondary (inferior) relationships, persisted in urbanist thought for much of the twentieth century.²⁰ More recently, urbanists have been too eager to measure the value of affiliations among urban strangers exclusively in terms of the degree to which those affiliations create a sense of community or togetherness among city dwellers. But, as Ash Amin reminds us, the contemporary “turn towards the interpersonal as the measure of community offers an overly restrictive account” of the “phenomenology” of urban relationships.²¹

      By calling attention to the sophisticated modes of thinking about urban sociality in our past, we are in a position not only to understand better why we have built and managed cities in the ways we have but also to imagine an urban future that will more effectively preserve and facilitate the kinds of interpersonal associations and social networks that city dwellers will need for their lives to be as manageable, equitable, and fulfilling as possible. AbdouMaliq Simone persuasively and urgently points out the irony in the fact that the “very dimension that characterizes the city—its capacities to continuously reshape the ways in which people, places, materials, ideas, and affect are intersected—is often the very thing that is left out of the larger analytical picture.” The failure of those responsible for planning and operating cities to consider carefully the “city’s capacity to provoke relations of all kinds” as they look toward its future development and governance is, according to Simone, unacceptable; the “possibilities of ways of being in the city” with others must remain, he insists, “front and center in our collective considerations of urban life.”²² This book is an attempt to move a historically and conceptually rich conversation about urban fellow-feelings closer to the center of how we understand our urban past and the growing discussion about our planet’s urban future. By exposing how our decisions about what interpersonal affections matter most have shaped other decisions about what kinds of cities we build, we will be more open to acknowledging the validity of the new types of social arrangements that will inevitably continue to arise in cities and more willing to modify the built environment to make room for them.

      CHAPTER 1

      The Settlement Movement’s Push for Public Sympathy

      When Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr moved to the Nineteenth Ward of Chicago in 1889 and founded the Hull-House Settlement, they encountered a very different kind of city from the one Frederick Law Olmsted had responded to just twenty years earlier. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of Southern blacks, Italians, Jews, and other immigrants, along with significant economic transformations and technological advancements, had radically altered the city’s social landscape and built environment. Addams described the consequences of these explosive changes to the U.S. city after having lived in Chicago’s West Side for a few years. She was quick to point out the wear and tear on the city’s infrastructure caused by dramatic population growth, noting that the “streets are inexpressibly dirty, the number of schools inadequate, factory legislation unenforced, the street-lighting bad, the paving miserable and altogether lacking in the alleys and smaller streets, and the stables defy all laws of sanitation.” Addams also drew her readers’ attention to the fundamental shifts in how people lived and made a living in the city. Many of her West Side neighbors resided in the wooden homes that were “originally built for one family and are now occupied by several,” while others lived in the type of “brick tenement buildings” that had been springing up in the city since the late 1870s. Most of the city’s new residents worked in the factories and sweatshops that had recently taken root in the outskirts of Chicago, especially its southern and western edges. Because of these physical and social changes within the city, Addams noted, many of the neighborhood’s “older and richer inhabitants seem anxious to move away as rapidly as they can afford it”—a move made possible by new modes of mass transit that allowed these upper-class urbanites to live in new suburban communities and affordably commute downtown.¹

      The most concerning byproduct of the urban transformations Addams described was an intensified spatial stratification and subsequent emotional disconnection among city dwellers. In what would become a foundational document of the settlement movement, “A New Impulse to an Old Gospel,” Addams explained in 1892 that the city’s entire “social organism” had “broken down” into distinct classes and races, and that this breakdown was most visible in the “large districts of our great cities.”² Segregation had always been part of city life, but new lines of class and ethnic separation had emerged in the Gilded Age city. This new style of segregation was manufactured not only by emerging residential patterns initiated by a changing industrial geography and new forms of mass transit, but also by significant spatial transformations during the previous two decades that channeled urbanites away from public and toward private spaces. The late nineteenth-century city—with its apartment houses, large department stores, and houses of public amusement—became a place in which individuals could circumvent more easily than they could before the city’s civic spaces.³ Addams was quick to point out that cities such as Chicago also began to sidestep working-class neighborhoods such as the Nineteenth Ward and its inhabitants. She observed that the “club-houses, libraries, galleries, and semi-public conveniences for social life” were located just a few too many “blocks away” for her neighbors to access them and thus to interact with many of their fellow Chicagoans.⁴

      Unlike Olmsted, who worried that the early industrial city’s claustrophobic scale negated the possibility of fellow-feeling by forcing urbanites to encounter one another in tight spaces, Addams agonized over the ways in which the industrial city “deadens the sympathies” of its inhabitants by spatially separating them from one another. Despite her society’s supposed commitment to advancing democracy in the political realm—its willingness to “give the franchise to the immigrant from a sense of justice”—she found the blatant “lack of democracy in social affairs” very disturbing. She lamented the fact that city dwellers “live for the moment side by side” but do so “without knowledge of each other, without fellowship.”⁵ The established citizens in Chicago’s West Side, she observed, felt no obligation to invite any of the recently arrived Italian, German, Bohemian, Russian, Polish, or Greek immigrants to their homes to forge fellow-feelings with them. W. E. B. Du Bois observed an even more pronounced lack of fellowship among black and white city dwellers while living in the College Settlement of Philadelphia in the mid-1890s. While conducting sociological research among the thousands of black residents living in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, he learned firsthand that the segregation of urban blacks was “more conspicuous” and “more patent to the eye” than the segregation experienced by “Jews, Italians, and even Americans.” Black Philadelphians constituted a “large group of people—perhaps forty-five thousand, a city within a city—who do not form an integral part of the large social group.” Black urbanites fell outside what Du Bois would describe in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as the “pale of sympathy,” by which he meant the bonds of a familial fellow-feeling that so easily united white citizens.⁶

      Addams, Starr, Du Bois, and their settlement colleagues in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and other U.S.