Abstract
From the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, the countries of Europe and North America experienced unprecedented industrialization and urbanization. One consequence was to shift the center of cultural gravity away from the countryside, a shift often accompanied by antagonism toward the cities. Consequently, antiurbanism has been documented for the United States, England, and China, and its presence noted for Germany, Canada, Finland, Italy, Japan, and Russia. Yet, comparative studies that might reveal commonalities and differences across countries are few.1
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Notes
For exceptions, see Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Society in European and American Thought 1820–1940 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985)
Carl E. Schorske, “The Idea of the City in European Thought: Voltaire to Spengler,” in Oscar Handlin and John Burchard (eds.), The Historian and the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1963), 95–113.
My premise is Leo Marx’s observation that the city has become “an abstract receptacle for displaced feelings about other things.” See Leo Marx, “The Puzzle of Anti-Urbanism in Classic American Literature,” in The Pilot and the Passenger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 210.
Raymond Williams labeled “structures of feeling.” See his Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132.
See Robert A. Beauregard, When America Became Suburban (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 76–78
United States and Claire Colomb, “Unpacking New Labour’s ‘Urban Renaissance’ Agenda: Towards a Socially Sustainable Reurbanization of British Cities?” Planning, Practice and Research 22 (1) (2007): 1–24
On such relationships, see Andrew Sayer, Method in Social Science (London: Hutchinson, 1984), 82–87.
Raymond Williams takes this approach in his well-known The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).
Morton White and Lucia White, The Intellectual versus the City (New York: New American Library, 1926), 13.
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 23–31.
Peter J. Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 4.
James L. Machor, Pastoral Cities: Urban Ideals and the Symbolic Landscape of America (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 5.
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991).
Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1963 [1886]), 171–186.
See Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978)
Daphne Spain, How Women Saved the City (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 63–86.
James W. Tuttleton, “City Literature: States of Mind,” Modern Age 33 (3) (1990), 269–279.
Dennis R. Judd and Todd Swanstrom, City Politics: Private Power and Public Policy (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 50–52.
Machor, Pastoral Cities: Urban Ideals and the Symbolic Landscape of America, 14. For post—World War II antiurbanism, see Robert A. Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities (New York: Routledge, 2003), 150–178.
Joseph Harry, “American Anti-Urbanism and Its Evolution,” Journal of Voluntary Action Research 7 (3-4) (1978): 36–43.
On alternative and oppositional cultures, see Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), 40.
This periodization follows that in Alun Howkins, “The Discovery of Rural England,” in Robert Coles and Philip Dodd (eds.), Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 62–88.
D.M. Palliser, “Preface by the General Editor,” in D.M. Palliser (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), xix–xxiii
Jan Marsh, Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in England, From 1880 to 1914 (London: Quartet Books, 1982).
Darrin Bayless, “Revisiting the Cottage Council Estates: England, 1919–39,” Planning Perspectives 16 (2001): 171.
A.D. King, “Historical Patterns of Reaction to Urbanism: The Case of Britain 1880–1939,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 4 (4) (1980): 453–469.
A good description of rural leisure activities in this period can be found in David Matless, “‘The Art of Right Living’: Landscape and Citizenship, 1918–1939,” in Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (eds.), Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation (London: Routledge, 1995), 93–122.
John Lowerson, “Battles for the Countryside,” in Frank Gloversmoth (ed.), Class, Culture and Social Change: A New View of the 1930s (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1980), 258–280
Philip Lowe, Jonathan Murdoch, and Graham Cox, “A Civilized Retreat? Anti-Urbanism, Rurality and the Making of an Anglo-Centric Culture,” in Patricia Healey, Stuart Cameron, Simin Davoudi, Stephen Graham, and Ali Madani-Pour (eds.), Managing Cities: The New Urban Context (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), 63–82.
Peter Mandler, “Against ‘Englishness’: English Culture and the Limits to Rural Nostalgia, 1850–1940,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, 7 (1977): 171.
See Bayless, “Revisiting the Cottage Council Estates: England, 1919–39”; Ruth Glass, Cliches of Urban Doom (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 41–42
Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
R.J.R. Kirkby, Urbanization in China: Town and Country in a Developing Economy, 1949–2000 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 18.
Laurence J.C. Ma, “Anti-Urbanism in China,” Proceedings of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers 7-8 (1975–1976): 114–118.
George Chu-sheng Lin, “China’s Industrialization with Controlled Urbanization: Anti-Urbanism or Urban-Biased?” Issues & Studies 34 (6) (1998): 101.
Marina Basso Farina, “Urbanization, Deurbanization and Class Struggle in China 1949–1979,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 4 (4) (1980): 485–502
John Wilson Lewis, “Introduction: Order and Modernization in the Chinese City,” in J.W. Lewis (ed.), The City in Communist China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1971), 1–26.
Rhoads Murphey, The Fading of the Maoist Vision: City and Country in China’s Development (New York: Methuen, 1980), 18.
George C.S. Lin, “Chinese Urbanism in Question: State, Society, and the Reproduction of Urban Spaces,” Urban Geography 28 (1) (2007): 12–14.
The association of antiurbanism with the nationalist projects of authoritarian regimes has also been noted for Italy during the fascist period (1924–1945) under Benito Mussolini and in Germany during the Nazi era (1934–1945) under Adolf Hitler. See, respectively, Anna Treves, “The Anti-Urban Policy of Fascism and a Century of Resistance to Industrial Urbanization in Italy,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 4 (4) (1980): 470–484
Rhoads Murphey, “The Treaty Ports and Chinese Modernization,” in Mark Elvin and G. William Skinner (eds.), The Chinese City Between Two Worlds (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), 67 [17-71].
Rhoads Murphey, “Chinese Urbanization Under Mao,” in Brian J.L. Berry (ed.), Urbanization and Counter-Urbanization (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1976), 313.
Murphey claims in The Fading of the Maoist Vision that “China’s use of hsia-fang is of course a reminder of its still basically anti-urban bias” (100). See also Ma, “Anti-Urbanism in China,” 115-116. On the May 7 Cadre Schools, see Christopher L. Salter, “Chinese Experiments in Urban Space: The Quest for an Agrapolitan China,” Habitat, An International Journal 1 (1) (1976): 19–35.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Community Party,” in Lewis S. Feuer (ed.), Marx & Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), 11
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 69.
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© 2009 Michael J. Thompson
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Beauregard, R.A. (2009). Antiurbanism in the United States, England, and China. In: Thompson, M.J. (eds) Fleeing the City. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101050_3
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