The Fall of Public Place

Sociologisk Arbejdspapir Nr. 9, 2001 Michael Hviid Jacobsen & Nilesh Chatterjee The Fall of Public Place - Sociological Reflections and Observations on a Supermodern American Ghost City Sociologisk Laboratorium Aalborg Universitet Kroghstræde 5, 9220 Aalborg Ø Tlf. 96 35 81 05, fax 98 15 75 75, e-mail: [email protected] Michael Hviid Jacobsen & Nilesh Chatterjee The Fall of Public Place Sociological Reflections and Observations on a Supermodern American Ghost City Copyright 2001 Forfatterne og Sociologisk Laboratorium ISSN: 1399-4514 ISBN: 87-90867-09-2 Sociologiske Arbejdspapirer udgives af Sociologisk Laboratorium, som betegner det faglige miljø omkring sociologiuddannelsen på AAU. Her udgives mindre arbejder fx seminaroplæg, konferencebidrag, udkast til artikler eller kapitler – af medlemmer af miljøet eller af inviterede bidragydere udefra, mhp. formidling og videre befordring af den løbende fagligt-sociologiske aktivitet. Redaktører af serien er professor Jens Tonboe (ansv.) og ph.d.-stipendiat Michael Hviid Jacobsen. Eksemplarer kan bestilles hos Aalborg Centerboghandel, Fibigerstræde 15, 9220 Aalborg Ø, tlf. 96 35 80 71, fax 98 15 28 62, e-mail: [email protected] 2 Michael Hviid Jacobsen & Nilesh Chatterjee The Fall of Public Place Sociological Reflections and Observations on a Supermodern American Ghost City 3 4 LIST OF CONTENT 1. Introduction: Towards a Sociology of the City …………………………. 7 2. The Idea of Supermodernity - Novelty or Recycling? …………………. 13 3. The Corrosion of Community …………………………………………… 19 4. Agoraphobia American Style …………………………………………… 28 5. The Pandemonium of Condominiums…………………………………… 33 6. The Quest for an Urban Utopia…………………………………………… 39 7. Car Culture and Compartmentalism ……………………………………. 49 8. Urban Space Wars ………………………………………………………… 59 9. Consumer Culture and the New Bodily Asceticism …………………….. 64 10. The Divinity of Propinquity ………………………………………………. 75 11. The Re-Enchantment of Public Place ……………………………………. 78 12. Conclusion: The Fall of Public Place ……………………………………… 88 List of Neologisms or Unfamiliar Terminology 99 ………………………………. References “Whatever else they are, cities are also physical artifacts made by people”. - Witold Rybczynski 5 6 THE FALL OF PUBLIC PLACE - Sociological Reflections and Observations on a Supermodern American Ghost City† 1. Introduction: Towards a Sociology of the City Strangers always meet foreign places, and especially foreign cities, with conflicting and indeed confusing feelings of promise and excitement, apprehension and disbelief. The mystery and revelation of the new possibilities and the novelty of awe-inspiring experiences ahead combines with the anger over the wasted opportunities and the lack of comprehension for a cultural construction that appears both alien, hostile and peculiar. Most of the stranger‟s interactions with the new city are mediated through the spaces that are public. As Michael Waltzer (1986:470) writes, “Public space is a space we share with strangers, people who aren‟t our relatives, friends or work associates. It is space for politics, religion, commerce, sport; space for peaceful coexistence and impersonal encounter. Its character expresses and also conditions our public life, civic culture, everyday † This paper is the visible outcome of the cooperation of the two authors while working in Houston during the months of February through April 2000 at the University of Houston, Sociology Department, and the University of Texas, School of Public Health respectively. During the Oslo Summer School of Comparative Social Science in 1998, the two authors met and had the chance to discuss many of the points that later became this monograph on the city. This piece arises from a mutual interest in and dissatisfaction with the architecture, structure, and communality of the particular city of Houston. Thus, the paper is an attempt to present ideas of what the negative consequences of this kind of planning (based solely on economic profits using cultural constructs like freedom of space and movement) are and what is to be done to avoid these. Ultimately, this paper uses Houston as a case in point to argue for the larger transformation taking place in urban space as a result of the rampant evolution of capitalism and our specific social responses to that globalizing influence of capital. The paper is based on informal conversations with informants, a rather unstructured work process and an initially intended practice of cerebral hygiene from which follows that only a minimum of direct references will be made to existing and by now authoritative literature and that many of the observations may appear to be nothing but trivial everyday assumptions or taken-for-granted knowledge. However, certain insights are found in the literature of fields such as the sociology of the city, human geography and urban sociology and the authors through the work process discovered that cerebral hygiene in a field like this is not recommendable if one wishes to communicate knowledge and findings with some connection to prior research. We would like to thank Lori Leonard at the School of Public Health for her time and insightful comments and Paul Smith, Houston native, for letting us bounce some of our ideas. The authors are also grateful to Sociologisk Laboratorium at the University of Aalborg, Denmark for providing the foundation and forum from which the ideas of this paper can circulate and hopefully proliferate. 7 discourse”. Thus, as a newcomer enters a new setting, it is this encounter with the public spaces that evokes different degrees of differing emotions, at times mutually contradictory ones, and is, in some way or the other, simultaneously repelled and attracted by the new place at which he or she arrives. Most succumb to the attractive option of being enchanted by the place they are in, while a few stay disenchanted, keep nurturing the repelling aspects, and keep that critical notion intact. This ambivalence is basic to the human condition in general but is particularly part and parcel of the so-called post-modern condition described by so many prominent scholars and is probably an inescapable feature of both the activities of the mind as well as of the habits of the heart. In the following paper we will, by a conscious nurture of the critical imagination described above, focus on a specific and localised aspect of cultural settings that is a major cause behind this ambivalence, an especially dynamic and fluxing structure, namely the city. The city is in many ways a melting pot between the old and the new, the idyllic atmosphere of the countryside and the urbanity of the metropolis, the past and the future and is thus a very obvious place to investigate if one wants to understand and comment on contemporary social practices and structures either in order to support these or if one has the aspiration to change them. This is particularly true if you are a newcomer with eyes wide open. Michael Waltzer, the political scientist and exponent of communitarian values, rightly contended, that “cities are, like novels and movies, necessarily subject to lay criticisms. So, too, though less gloriously, are the dehumanized wastelands we have created, even in the midst of the city itself” (Waltzer 1986:470). Cities are many things and possess many qualities at one and the same time: it is a place, a set of objects, a set of beliefs, a pattern of exchanges and flows, is both visible and invisible, is a historical and temporal entity, a place of the spectacular and the mundane alike, is the object of urban professions and is an understanding of itself together with many other aspects (Miles et al. 2000). Moreover, the city is also the object of social scientific scrutiny and thus often comes under the critical lenses of sociologists although it has been claimed again and again that social scientists suffer from spatial amnesia.1 In the subsequent parts of this paper, however, the reader will discover that space is of utmost importance in the work of social scientists and will find not merely lay criticisms but equally the utilisation of sociological insights and concepts in order to describe and analyse the feeling of living in a city and what impact urbanity have on people. 1 Jens Tonboe (1993) has shown how important space and discussions about spatial aspects of social reality have been for many schools of sociological thought including positivism, historical materialism, human ecology, German idealism, structural functionalism, neo-positivism, neo- marxism and several others. 8 The city we will be talking about here as an example and illustration of the aforementioned ambivalence is the fourth largest in the U.S.A. in terms of population and is inhabited by approximately two million people (the larger Houston-Galveston area has about four million people), and spans over 617 square miles, and is, compared to European standards, a very big buzzing and pulsating city. Or is this so? It is undoubtedly the fourth largest city in the United States and it is, equally indisputable, the centre of the oil and natural gas industry and energy capital of the world, medical research and technological and aerospace industry. Other factual information are that the median age of the population is 30.4 years and the city where they live encompasses 311 city parks, more than 1700 churches, more than 40 AM and FM radio stations, 15 commercial and public radio stations, and a per capita income of around $28,000. We shall throughout this paper, which offers both a critical angle at Houston as well as contain an introduction to parts of the general terminology of urban sociology, however, not try and look at the factual level of social reality. We will descend below the visible structures and manifestations of the city of Houston and try and look particularly at the content and meaning of the words pulsating and buzzing and whether or not they seem to be apt descriptions of the general functioning of city life in Houston and to what extent they are appropriate phrases to describe the experiences of everyday life of people living here.

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