Читать книгу The Sociable City - Jamin Creed Rowan - Страница 10

CHAPTER 2

New Deal Urbanism and the Contraction of Sympathy

In 1941, the Henry Street Settlement produced a play titled A Dutchman’s Farm at its Neighborhood Playhouse on New York’s Lower East Side. Put on, as settlement leader Helen Hall recalled, by one hundred and fifty of the settlement’s neighbors, “from dramatic groups to mothers’ and fathers’ clubs,” the production staged the history of housing on the Lower East Side in an effort to persuade its audience of the need for federally and state-funded slum clearance and public housing programs.¹ In the play’s climactic scene, six mothers from the Lower East Side travel to Washington, D.C., to appear before a Senate committee and voice support for public housing legislation. As the spokeswoman for this small delegation, Mrs. Ziprin summons what had become the settlement movement’s standard argument about the need for better and more affordable housing when she informs the committee that her ten-year-old son is “already estranged” from his tenement home because it is “not attractive to him.” She passionately explains that “a home should be attractive and decent enough so that no barrier springs up between our children and ourselves. They must not become strangers!”² According to Mrs. Ziprin, the physical quality of the home determined the emotional quality of the feelings that bound families together. She attempts to persuade the Senate committee that the construction of attractive and structurally sound homes through government assistance would eliminate the affective barriers that had sprung up between children and parents who occupied the city’s tenement flats. Public housing would, she assures the senators, restore emotional stability to her family and other families living in rundown buildings in cities across the nation.

The one hundred and fifty Lower East Siders who put on A Dutchman’s Farm joined a much larger chorus of city dwellers who, during the 1920s and 1930s, pointed to inadequate and unaffordable housing as one of the most pressing issues facing U.S. cities. Although congested living quarters continued to be a problem about which city dwellers complained—especially in the neighborhoods where a rapidly growing number of black urbanites lived—many urbanists shifted their attention away from the number of people sharing a single tenement flat and focused instead on the quality and cost of a home in the city. As the labor and material expenses of urban housing rose dramatically over the first two decades of the twentieth century, lower-and middle-class urbanites found themselves in the position of having to pay a higher percentage of their income for an increasingly smaller percentage of the city’s decent housing stock. Additionally, new modes of financing real estate developments in the city made it more profitable for developers to construct large-scale and upscale commercial and residential developments, thus diminishing the proportion of affordable and livable housing available to working-class urbanites. As the city settled into its early twentieth-century form of factory districts and residential neighborhoods tethered to downtown department stores, office skyscrapers, and luxury apartments by the railroad, subway, and streetcar, many urbanites struggled to secure attractive and affordable shelter. City dwellers such as Mrs. Ziprin tended to feel that the quality of their relationships, especially with their own family members, were threatened not by the number of people living under a single roof, but by the age and upkeep of the spaces in which they lived.³

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.