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INTRODUCTION

Finding Fellow-Feeling in the City

On February 25, 1870, Frederick Law Olmsted addressed the American Social Science Association at Boston’s Lowell Institute. As a result of his leadership in the design, construction, and ongoing operation of New York City’s Central Park during the late 1850s and throughout the 1860s, Olmsted had become one of the nation’s most vocal interpreters of urban life. Although he would eventually try to persuade his Bostonian listeners of the civic value of building their own version of Central Park, he began his speech by telling them what they, no doubt, already knew—that the processes of urbanization that had radically reshaped their city would continue to transform the nation’s landscape. Unlike many of his fellow urbanists, Olmsted was only mildly troubled by the “amount of disease and misery and of vice and crime” to be found in cities, assured that “modern Science” would quickly fix these problems. He expressed much more concern for the city’s corrosive effects on the social interactions among its inhabitants. In what may be one of the earliest and most genteel descriptions of road rage, Olmsted explained that when he and those gathered to hear him walked “through the denser part of a town, to merely avoid collision with those we meet and pass upon the sidewalks, we have constantly to watch, to foresee, and to guard against their movements.” Such navigational wariness demanded of urban pedestrians a careful “consideration of [others’] intentions, a calculation of their strength and weakness, which is not so much for their benefit as our own.” On the city’s streets and sidewalks, Olmsted fretted, “our minds are thus brought into close dealings with other minds without any friendly flowing toward them, but rather a drawing from them.” The city’s built environment encouraged those who moved through it to regard each other “in a hard if not always hardening way.” Olmsted despairingly informed those gathered at the Lowell Institute that the mentally and emotionally “restraining and confining conditions” of the city he had just described compelled city dwellers like themselves to “look closely upon others without sympathy.”¹

Olmsted was simply telling his audience what many had already been saying, and would continue to say, about urban life—that the city dramatically changes the way individuals interact with and feel toward one another. In expressing their deep concerns about the ability of city dwellers to connect with one another in emotionally and socially satisfying ways, Olmsted contributed to an increasingly robust antiurbanist discourse that would pervade American culture for years to come. Antiurbanism in the United States has always had at its core the accusation that city life inevitably entails what Steven Conn describes as the “loss of intimate social relations” and “nurturing communities.” Although the language with which antiurbanists have accused the modern city of being incompatible with socially and emotionally legitimate relationships has evolved over time, this discourse has tended to revolve around the assumption that city dwellers could not develop fellow-feelings for one another. Olmsted was neither the first nor the last observer of city life to suggest that the interactions and affiliations among those who encountered one another in the city’s public spaces were emotionally hollow and socially insignificant.²

Like many other nineteenth-century urbanists, Olmsted articulated his particular misgivings about the social side effects of urban life through the language and logic of sympathy. By the mid-nineteenth century, the concept of sympathy had become for most Americans the social ideal against which they evaluated nearly every type of interaction and relationship. Closely informed by the writings of Scottish moral philosophers such as Adam Smith, Archibald Alison, and Hugh Blair, the U.S. culture of sympathy had taken shape since colonial times in a wide variety of political, religious, educational, and cultural settings. To invoke the concept of sympathy during this time period was to draw on a wide range of cultural sources and intellectual traditions, but perhaps none of these influenced the formation of sentimental culture in the United States more powerfully than Smith’s foundational explication of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Smith famously characterized sympathy as the imaginative process through which an individual acquires a “fellow-feeling” for another being. Because “we have no immediate experience of what other men feel,” Smith explained, “we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.” Through the use of their “imagination,” individuals “enter as it were” into another’s body and, in so doing, “become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.” While Smith was quick to admit that the most one could hope to achieve through an “imaginary change of situation” is a feeling “analogous” to that experienced by the object of one’s sympathy, not an exact replica, he nevertheless suggested that the emotional connection between individuals generated through this “extremely imperfect” and emotionally imprecise process qualified as “fellow-feeling.”³

Since the publication of Smith’s seminal account of sympathy’s affective operations, the term has been used to signify both the process by which individuals acquire a fellow-feeling for others and the emotional product of that process. Teasing apart the sympathetic process from its affective outcome helps clarify the complexion of the particular paradigms through which Olmsted and other nineteenth-century urbanists appraised urban life. These urban intellectuals worried that the early industrial city—with its influx of migrants and immigrants, the cultural instability and economic volatility that attended this in-migration, and its still relatively compact urban form—fundamentally interfered with the sympathetic process by discouraging urbanites from imagining themselves in the situations of those around them. Olmsted, in particular, worried that the built environment that molded Boston’s public realm in 1870—an environment that was still shaped primarily by the need of residents to reach their daily destinations on foot—prevented those it sheltered from inhabiting the sympathetic imagination.⁴ Given the perpetually crowded sidewalks on which urbanites most frequently encountered one another in public, they were more likely to “guard against” the “movements” of other pedestrians than form some idea of their sensations; instead of engaging “with other minds” in a way that would extend a “friendly flowing toward them,” city dwellers would inwardly experience a “hardening” of their feelings for their fellow urbanites. Furthermore, Olmsted reasoned that, even if pedestrians wanted to imagine themselves in another’s situation, they would have difficulty doing so because they typically had “no experience of anything in common” with those they encountered on the city’s overcrowded sidewalks. In short, Olmsted argued that the early industrial city undermined the ability of its inhabitants to make the sympathetic leap across the increasingly wide social, economic, and cultural chasms that separated them from one another.⁵

If nineteenth-century urbanists were concerned about the opportunities for individuals to participate in the sympathetic process while navigating the early industrial city’s public sphere, they were perhaps even more anxious about the ability of city residents to acquire the specific brand of fellow-feelings privileged by their culture—affections that might, according to Elizabeth Barnes, be said to fall under the category of “familial feeling.”⁶ For many of Olmsted’s contemporaries, a fellow-feeling could only qualify as a sympathetic feeling if it were qualitatively similar to the emotions that one might have for a family member or close friend: love, intimacy, brotherhood, sisterhood. Many nineteenth-century writers insisted that sympathetic emotions would enable individuals to experience social relationships as if they were familial ones. But in place of the familial feelings on which Olmsted and others felt strong social relationships and healthy communities should be built, Olmsted perceived that urbanites felt “vigilance, wariness, and activity” toward those they encountered on the city’s streets.⁷ His distress that individuals who encountered one another in the early industrial city’s public spaces would inevitably “look closely upon others without sympathy” echoes the concerns shared by many of his fellow urbanists about the inability of those inhabiting the industrial city to acquire familial feelings for one another. City observers would continue to rest their cases against urban life on the claim that sympathy was hard to come by in the city.

Like many urbanists who would follow Olmsted, his diagnosis of the city’s social shortcomings drove him to modify its built environment. His particular understanding of the process by which individuals acquire fellow-feelings and his expectations of the relational forms that those affections ought to assume motivated him to create public urban spaces in which city dwellers would be more likely to attain fellow-feelings for one another than they were on walking the city’s congested streets. Olmsted responded to what he perceived to be the impossibility of experiencing sympathy in the city by designing and constructing urban parks. He intended his parks to “completely shut out the city” and, in so doing, to provide their users with spaces where “they may stroll for an hour, seeing, hearing, and feeling nothing of the bustle and jar of the streets.” By providing urbanites with a “broad, open space of clean greensward” in which they could walk without having to “guard against” others’ movements and smaller nooks into which they could “bivouac at frequent intervals … without discommoding one another,” Olmsted’s parks gave urbanites opportunities to participate in the sympathetic process and establish familial feelings for one another.⁸ Although his parks operated within the public realm, Olmsted designed them to behave almost as if they were private domestic spaces that allowed city dwellers to place themselves in another’s situation. Unlike the smaller parks and public squares that punctuated the antebellum city and that provided places for what Mary P. Ryan describes as “informal, casual, largely unplanned social interaction,” Olmsted’s great parks promised users a more carefully managed and intimate social experience.⁹ Olmsted explained to the American Social Science Association that he intended his parks to reproduce the social atmosphere of the home by giving “play to faculties such as may be dormant in business or on the promenade”—faculties and feelings that facilitated the “close relation of family life, the association of children, of mothers, of lovers, of those who may be lovers.” He wanted to create public spaces that would “stimulate and keep alive the more tender sympathies.” The scores of urban parks Olmsted designed throughout the country expressed his powerful desires to help city dwellers achieve the intimate and tender relationships that he and his culture valued most.¹⁰

Olmsted’s evaluation of the interactions among urbanites in the city’s public spaces and his subsequent efforts to reshape the city’s built environment model a pattern of thinking about and acting within the city that other urban intellectuals would pursue in the coming years—a pattern that this book will trace over the course of the century following Olmsted’s speech to the American Social Science Association. In Olmsted’s wake, a long line of religious leaders, novelists, playwrights, journalists, social scientists, community activists, municipal and federal politicians, city planners, and others worried in their own particular ways about the ability of city dwellers to attain fellow-feelings for one another. While subsequent urbanists were equally invested in the affective quality of the interactions and relationships among urbanites in the city’s public spaces, they had very different understandings of the city’s role in frustrating or facilitating meaningful social relations among its inhabitants. Like Olmsted, many of the urban intellectuals who followed him wanted city dwellers to experience fellow-feelings for one another. But some of them thought quite differently about the processes by which those fellow-feelings could be realized and the particular interpersonal emotions that best signified those feelings. That is to say, not all urbanists thought that city dwellers ought to feel toward one another the same way that relatives and close friends felt about each other, nor did they sense that the ability of urbanites to obtain fellow-feelings for each other depended on their ability to imagine themselves in the situations of others.

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 “cosmopolitan affection” as distinct from and more desirable than the familial feelings valued in nineteenth-century sentimental culture—they still favored face-to-face interactions as the source from which valid fellow-feelings might spring.¹⁵ Although friend, neighbor, and citizen (rather than brother and sister) functioned as the relational forms that best captured the types of fellow-feelings promoted within settlement discourse, settlement workers sought to create spaces that would, like Olmsted’s parks, allow city dwellers to come into close contact with one another in a somewhat domesticated environment. The urban house served not only as the literal center of settlement work—the place where settlement workers lived communally and from which they carried out many of their community-improvement activities and sociological studies—but also as the movement’s spatial ideal. The cafés, kindergartens, theaters, and other public and semi-public spaces that settlement workers created in urban neighborhoods were extensions (sometimes literally so) of the settlement home and were designed to provide a place in which urbanites could cultivate friendships with one another.

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 discourse of urban sociability, giving the somewhat discrete attempts of previous urbanists to characterize urban affiliations as emotionally and socially 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.