Abstract
Antiurbanism has a long lineage. Hatred of—or even ambivalence toward—the city or urban life seems a constant companion to the history of cities themselves. If we trace the long history of antiurbanism, we find a complex, varied phenomenon; one that changes as historical and political shifts make certain aspects of city either attractive or despised. In the end, antiurbanism is more than a mere hatred of city life. It is embedded in an overlapping series of economic, cultural, political, and sociological realities. It is a force that continues to have relevance in contemporary life, too, whether in terms of predicting or explaining political ideology or even mapping the variation of cultural habits and norms. Urban analysts tend to neglect the ways that nonurban areas and residents can manifest antiurban attitudes and behavior and they fail to grasp the importance of antiurban attitudes on political and cultural life. But in so doing, they also neglect some of the larger issues about the connection between space and consciousness, between ideas and location, and about the ways that other forms of social life—such as political values, religiosity, and so on—can be changed by nonurban environments. The commonplace view tends to be that nonurban areas are, in some way, those residues of the past; that they in some way are spaces where people have been untouched by cosmopolitan and modern ways of life.
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Notes
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
For classic examples, see Morton and Lucia Wright, The Intellectual versus the City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962)
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
G. MacLean, D. Landry, and J. Ward, eds., The Country and the City Revisited (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
David Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 251.
Ira Katznelson, Marxism and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 116–140.
For a discussion of this theme, see Robert Beauregard, When America Became Suburban (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 70–100
Daniel Lazare, America’s Undeclared War (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 187–211.
Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic (New York: Knopf, 2003).
The most interesting work on the ways that space limit or shape the context of individual life and interaction remains Torsten Hägerstrand, “Space, Time, and Human Conditions,” in A. Karlqvist (ed.), Dynamic Allocation of Urban Space (Farnborough: Saxon House, 1975)
Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 110–122.
Classical social theory is replete with this theme. See Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: Free Press, 1957)
Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology 44 (July 1938).
For an excellent discussion, see Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life (New York: Knopf, 1970), 137–188.
For an important discussion on this distinction, see James A. Christenson, “Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft: Testing the Spatial and Communal Hypotheses,” Social Forces 63 (1) (1984): 160–168.
For an important discussion, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 201–239.
Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel New York: Free Press, 1957), 409.
See Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1974)
Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” and Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place (New York: Random House, 1990).
Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 22.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990)
Tracy Strong and M. Hénaff, eds., Public Space and Democracy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
See Amy Kenyon, Dreaming Suburbia: Detroit and the Production of Postwar Space and Culture (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004)
Roger Salerno, “Alienated Communities: Between Aloneness and Connectedness,” in L. Langman and D. Kalekin-Fishman (eds.), The Evolution of Alienation (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 253–268.
See Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)
Iris Marion Young, “Segregation and Differentiated Citizenship,” Citizenship Studies 3 (2) (1999): 237–252.
For an attempt at theorizing this aspect of suburbanism and democratic life, see Susan Bickford, “Constructing Inequality: City Spaces and the Architecture of Citizenship,” Political Theory 28 (3) (2000): 355–376
Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic and Margaret Kohn, Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space (New York: Routledge, 2004).
See Carole Greenhouse, “Signs of Quality: Individualism and Hierarchy in American Culture,” American Ethnologist 19 (2) (1992): 233–254.
For an interesting discussion of this with respect to gender, see Anne Markusen, “City, Spatial Structure, Women’s Household Work, and National Urban Policy,” Signs (Spring 1981): S23-S43; Melissa Gilbert, “‘Race,’ Space, and Power: The Survival Strategies of Working Poor Women,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88 (4) (1998): 595–621
Kraack Kenway and Hickey-Moody, Masculinity Beyond the Metropolis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Loic Wacquant, “Urban Outcasts: Stigma and Division in the Black American Ghetto and the French Urban Periphery,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 17 (3) (1993): 366–383
Ali Madanipour, “Social Exclusion and Space,” in A. Madanipour, G. Cars, and Judith Allen (eds.), Social Exclusion in European Cities (New York: Routledge Press, 2005), 75–94.
See Sennett, Fall of Public Man, as well as Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1976).
George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 134.
For an important discussion of the role of the intersubjective mind’s capacity to constitute the objective social world, see John Searle, Mind, Language, and Society (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 111–134
Jürgen Habermas, Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 113–132.
The empirical evidence for this can be seen in voting statistics when broken down by region. See S. McKee and D. Shaw, “Suburban Voting in Presidential Elections,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 33 (1) (2004): 125–144
J. Gainsborough, Fenced Off: The Suburbanization of American Politics (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2001).
See C. Weber and C. Federico, “Interpersonal Attachment and Patterns of Ideological Belief,” Political Psychology 28 (4) (2007): 389–416.
See Stanley Feldman and Karen Stenner, “Perceived Threat and Authoritarianism,” Political Psychology 18 (4) (1997): 741–770.
Stanley Feldman, “Enforcing Social Conformity: A Theory of Authoritarianism,” Political Psychology 24 (1) (2003): 41–74.
This is also related to themes of anti-intellectualism. See Richard Hofstadter’s discussion of the distinction between “intellect” and “intelligence” in his Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1963), 24–51.
This, of course, is the argument of Richard Sennett. See his excellent studies, Families against the City as well as his more developed discussion in The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1977), 177-183. For a more contemporary discussion of the connection between nonurban life and conservative political ideas in American society, see Michael J. Thompson, “America’s Conservative Landscape,” in Michael J. Thompson (ed.), Confronting the New Conservatism: The Rise of the Right in America (New York: New York University Press, 2007).
There is a large literature on the ways that suburban space isolates individuals by means of structural design. See Kenneth Jackson’s seminal study Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)
Peter Katz, The New Urbanism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994)
Philip Langdon, A Better Place to Live: Reshaping the American Suburb (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994)
James Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993)
Peter Calthorpe, The Next American Metropolis (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993)
Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Towns and Town-Making Principles (New York: Rizzoli, 1991).
Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1961), 486.
Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism (New York: Vintage, 1974)
Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970).
Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder (New York: Knopf, 1970), 70.
For an excellent discussion of the role of fear in the rise of suburban culture, see Robert M. Fogelson, Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870–1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 117–200.
See Karen Stenner, The Authoritarian Dynamic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 52–84
For more on the lack of social conflict in suburban life, see M.P. Baumgartner, The Moral Order of a Suburb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
For an excellent discussion, see J. Eric Oliver, Democracy in Suburbia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
See Sennett’s excellent book, The Hidden Injuries of Class for more on this aspect of work life (New York: Knopf, 1972).
This is an elaboration of Maurice Stein’s insights in his book, The Eclipse of Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1960).
Louis Wirth, “The Scope and Problems of Community,” in Albert Reiss (ed.), Wirth on Cities and Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933), 166–177.
For an attempt at theor izi ng th is aspect of suburban ism and democratic l i fe, see Susan Bickford, “Constructing Inequality: City Spaces and the Architecture of Citizenship,” Political Theory 28 (3) (June 2000): 355–376.
Joseph Stiglitz’s critical extension of this model, “The Theory of Local Public Goods,” in M. Feldstein (ed.), The Economics of Public Services (London: Macmillan, 1977).
Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000 (New York: Vintage, 2003), 128.
For an excellent collection of essays on this theme with respect to New York City, see Jerilou Hammett and Kingsley Hammett, eds., The Suburbanization of New York (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007).
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Thompson, M.J. (2009). What is Antiurbanism? A Theoretical Perspective. In: Thompson, M.J. (eds) Fleeing the City. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101050_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101050_2
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