Abstract
For some time now, students of cities have had remarkably little to say about culture, and students of culture even less to say about cities. I use culture in Matthew Arnold’s sense: ‘the pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits’.1 Of culture in Ruth Benedict’s sense, as manifested in the institutionalised malevolence of the Dobuans or the conspicuous and competitive waste of the Kwakiutl, there is much to be found in contemporary urban history.2
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Notes
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (New York: Macmillan, 1892) p. xi.
Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1959) pp. 130–223.
Max Kelly, ‘Urban History in Australasia’, Urban History Yearbook 1984, p. 72.
Anthony Sutcliffe, ‘Introduction: Urbanization, Planning, and the Giant City’, in Anthony Sutcliffe (ed.). Metropolis 1890–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) p. 12.
H. J. Dyos, ‘Some Historical Reflections on the Quality of Urban Life’, in Henry J. Schmandt and Warner Bloomberg, Jr (eds). The Quality of Urban Life (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1969); vol. 3 of Urban Affairs Annual Reviews, p. 32.
Ibid., p. 56.
Ibid.
H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (eds). The Victorian City: linages and Realities, 2 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).
H. E. Meller, Leisure and the Changing City, 1870–1914 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976) p. 41.
Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1938) p. 224.
Ibid., p. 230.
Ibid., pp. 231–2.
Ibid., pp. 262–3.
Ibid., p. 263.
Ibid., p. 290
Gunther Barth, City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980) pp. 229–30.
Ibid., p. 19.
In the course of an attack on Liberal proponents of religious disestablishment, he cast scorn on the notion that ‘the present troubled state of our social life … will be cured by the thoughtfulness and intelligence of the great towns’, like Manchester and Leeds (Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, p. xxiii).
Ibid., p. 11.
Ibid., p. 25.
T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949).
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
In the preface he observes, suggestively, that intellectuals, artists, businessmen, and professional men were more likely to know and encounter one another in Viennese cafés than would be likely in Berlin, Paris, or London. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980) p. xxvii. But while he goes on to relate Freud and Schnitzler, Klimt and Schiele, Loos and Wagner to the society and the politics of turn-of-the-century Austria, he does little to relate them to Vienna as a city.
Maurice Crubellier and Maurice Agulhon, ‘Les citadins et leurs cultures’, Histoire de la France urbaine, vol. IV: La ville de lâge industriel, ed. Maurice Agulhon (Paris: Seuil, 1983), p. 391.
Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820–1940 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) p. 201.
‘The towns of the twelfth century have a larger place in the world of trade and politics than in the world of letters. There was not as yet a distinctive urban culture such as arose in the later Middle Ages, still less any urban patrons of art and literature like those who appear in the Italian Renaissance’ (Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (New York: Meridian Books, 1957) p. 62).
Robert L. Lopez, ‘Hard Times and Investment in Culture’, in Wallace K. Ferguson et al., The Renaissance: Six Essays (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1962) p. 49.
William Fitz-Stephen, in John Stow, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, ed. John Strype (London, 1720) ii, Appendix, p. 13.
G. B. Knight, The Third Vniversitie of England, appendix to John Stow, Annales, ed. Edmund Howes (London, 1631) p. 1063.
Ibid., p. 1082.
Ibid., p. 1085.
Robert Vaughan, The Age of Great Cities (London: Jackson and Walford, 1843; reprinted Shannon: Irish University Press, 1971) pp. 102–3.
Donald J. Olsen, The Growth of Victorian London (London: B. T. Batsford, 1976) p. 20.
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© 1993 Theo Barker and Anthony Sutcliffe
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Olsen, D.J. (1993). Cities and Culture: An Embarrassed Silence. In: Barker, T., Sutcliffe, A. (eds) Megalopolis: The Giant City in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23051-8_12
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