The Spirit of Cities

THE SPIRIT OF CITIES T H E S P I R I T OF CITIES Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age Daniel A. Bell and Avner de-Shalit princeton university press princeton oxford Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved Third printing, and first paperback printing, with a new preface by the authors, 2014 Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-15969-0 The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows Bell, Daniel (Daniel A.), 1964– The spirit of cities : why the identity of a city matters in a global age / Daniel A. Bell and Avner de-Shalit. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-15144-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Cities and towns—Social aspects. 2. Identity politics. 3. Urban policy. I. De-Shalit, Avner. II. Title. HT151.B415 2011 307.76—dc23 2011019200 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Garamond and Archer Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 TO CITY-ZENS CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Preface to the Paperback Edition: The City and Identity xi Introduction: Civicism 1 Jerusalem: The City of Religion 18 Montreal: The City of Language(s) 56 Singapore: The City of Nation Building 78 Hong Kong: The City of Materialism 111 Beijing: The City of Political Power 140 Oxford: The City of Learning 161 Berlin: The City of (In)Tolerance 191 Paris: The City of Romance 222 New York: The City of Ambition 249 Notes 279 Selected Bibliography 321 Index 333 vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The idea for this book came to us in early September 2001, when we were walk- ing the streets of San Francisco (the official reason for the trip was a meeting of the American Political Science Association). We were struck by the charm of the city and speculated that it would be a good idea to walk the streets of different cities and write a book about our experiences. A few days later, however, terror- ists struck in New York, and the plan was shelved. It seemed impossible to imag- ine that it would be possible to stroll in our favorite cities without fear of the world collapsing before our eyes. Fortunately, we were too pessimistic, and the project was revived a few years later. At this stage we had read a lot on strolling as a method of research, and we encountered much enthusiasm and encouragement. Hence, we would like to thank the generous support of the Max Kampelman Chair for Democracy and Human Rights at the Hebrew University, the Lady Davis Fellowship (which al- lowed Daniel to spend two months in Jerusalem), as well as the Department of Philosophy at Tsinghua University in Beijing and the Institute of Arts and Hu- manities at Jiaotong University in Shanghai. We are also grateful to the East Asian Institute in Singapore for supporting Daniel’s stay in Singapore longer than was strictly necessary. We wish also to express our thanks to three very en- ergetic and helpful research assistants, Orly Peled, Alon Gold, and Nimrod Kovner, and to Emilie Frenkiel, Marie-Eve Reny, and Kevin Tan, who helped us to secure photos for the book. Much of our research focused on talking to family members, friends, and strangers in the streets of our nine cities, and some of these interviews were in- tensive and very long. We want to thank our interviewees: they were patient, helpful, and very cooperative. They are named in the book itself, so we won’t thank them by name here. Early drafts of chapters were presented and discussed in seminars and work- shops. We are grateful for the feedback of our colleagues at Concordia Univer- sity, Duke University, Fudan University, Hebrew University, Heilongjiang Uni- versity, Huafan University, University of Hong Kong, University of Macau, City College of Hunan, McGill University, Princeton University, Rhodes University, Oxford University, and Tsinghua University. We confess that some of these ideas were presented before they were mature and we thank our colleagues for pa- tiently putting us on the right track. We are very grateful for family members, friends, and colleagues who discussed and commented on individual chapters: Judy Abrams, Tevia Abrams, ix x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Eitan Alimi, Daniel Attas, Shlomo Avineri, Bai Tongdong, Céline Bell, Julien Bell, Valérie Bell, Eyal Ben-Ari, Fran Bennett, Annie Billington, Sébastien Bil- lioud, Kateri Carmola, Joseph Chan, Maurice Charland, Chee Soon Juan, Anne Cheng, Chua Beng Huat, Ci Jiwei, G. A. Cohen, Sébastien Correc, Nevia Dol- cini, Jack Donnelly, Michael Dowdle, James Fallows, Fan Ruiping, Emilie Fren- kiel, Nicole Hochner, Noam Hofshtater, Ian Holliday, P. J. Ivanhoe, Jiang Haibo, Lily Kaplan, Gillian Koh, Lee Chun-Yi, Donna Levy, Li Ying, Liu Kang, Kim- berley Manning, Kai Marchal, David Miller, Glenn Mott, Lilach Nir, Anthony Ou, Paik Wooyeal, Randy Peerenboom, Daphna Perry, Kam Razavi, Marie-Eve Reny, Mike Sayig, Tatiana Sayig, Phillippe Schmitter, Joseph Schull, Daniel Schwartz, Shlomi Segall, Song Bing, Kristin Stapleton, Kevin Tan, Joel Thora- val, Wang Hao, Lynn White, Jonathan Wolff, Gadi Wolfsfled, Benjamin Wong, David Yang, Peter Zabielskis, Bo Zhiyue, and Zhu Er. We are particularly grateful for friends who commented on the large bulk of the manuscript—Parag Khanna, Leanne Ogasawara, and Jiang Qian—as well as for two referees for Princeton University Press, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Weinstock, who wrote thoughtful and constructive reports that helped us to improve the manuscript. Princeton University Press has been excellent. Our editors—Ian Malcolm and Rob Tempio, as well as the press’s director, Peter Dougherty—have been supportive and enthusiastic, and have encouraged us throughout the vari- ous stages of publication. We are also grateful for the careful copyediting of Madeleine Adams and to Leslie Grundfest for the efficient production of the manuscript. Last but not least, we are most grateful to our family members. If it’s true that our identities were constituted in our cities, they helped us along the way and made the whole thing worthwhile. PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION THE CITY AND IDENTITY Who am I? Which social relations constitute my identity, and how do they shape my social responsibilities? In the twentieth-century, the nation became the main source of political identity and site of collective self-determination. A patriot takes pride in her own country because it expresses a particular way of life in its history, politics, and institutions. But states find it increasingly difficult to provide this sense of uniqueness because they have to comply with the demands of the market and international agreements. They have less autonomy when it comes to shaping their policies according to their own values and ideas of the good (unless they cut themselves off from the rest of the world, like North Korea or Bhutan). In the twenty-first century, much has been written about the rise of global identities and cosmopolitanism. Due to migration, free flow of labor and capital, the internet and the new social media, and the exchange of customs, more and more people experience of sense of cosmopolitanism. The extreme manifestation of this trend is the “Davos Man,” somebody who has transcended all national allegiances and views himself as a “citizen of the world” (or views the world, to be more negative, as a place where he can enrich himself ). But how common is the “Davos Man”? Even in Davos, it turns out, few identify themselves solely (or even mainly) as a “citizen of the world.” Our book was presented at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in 2012, and it generated heated debates between proponents of competing city loyalties: Johannesburg versus Cape Town, Washington versus New York, and so on. Cities, it seems, can also shape the identity of modern (wo)man. The desire to experience a sense of uniqueness and particularity seems deeply rooted in human nature. With the decline of national attachments, the best place to look for a supplement (or a replacement) might be “down” to the city rather than “up” to the world. Can cities provide the alternative? Can they provide a sense of uniqueness, of a particular political identity? Well, today more than half the world’s population xi xii PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION lives in cities, compared to less than 3 percent in 1800. Not surprisingly, the city has become an important area of research. Most of the theorizing about cities tends to focus on what makes urban life special compared to small town and rural life: cities allow for economic development and low per capita carbon emissions, they are sites of creativity and innovation, and so on. The “smart” or “ideal” city, will try to maximize these advantages according to one matrix of success. Theories arguing for the general advantages of urban life are important. But there is hardly theorizing about what makes cities special and different from each other and why city-based identities matter from a normative point of view, and we felt we needed to take an initial stab at this work. It seems obvious that “city-zens” take special pride not just in the fact that they live in an urban envi- ronment with characteristics that make urban life desirable compared to rural life, but also that they take special pride in the fact that they live in an urban en- vironment that is special relative to other cities.

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