Richard Sennett
The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life
(1970)
[50]CHAPTER THREE
═══🙡═══How Cities Bring
the Myth to Life
PEOPLE TALK OF THE "URBAN CRISIS" OR THE "URBAN revolution" as though the city had suddenly loomed up as an important focus of social life; the real revolution in city life, though, is the opposite of this popular concep- tion. We face an urban "crisis, " if that hackneyed word must be used, because something is dying out in city life at the present time, not because the cities are growing. And the elements of urban life present seventy or a hundred years ago are dying in such a way that the myths of a purified community have come to shape and stultify the city.
Intellectuals are prone to romanticize the past, so that when one speaks of something dying out historically it means the dead past was better. That is a peculiar blind- ness of much utopian thinking; since the past was better
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than the present, the future ought to restore the past. Such is not my intention: what can be learned from the condition of city life fifty or seventy years ago is perspec- tive about what is missing today, not a guide for how good cities in the future can be built. In this way, my own thinking has come to diverge from that of Jane Jacobs, in her strong and incisive book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. For she makes of the past an era of small, intimate relations between neighbors in city life, and sees that condition as one to be restored. This revival, as I shall try to show, can never be; we need to find some condition of urban life appropriate for an affluent, tech- nological era.
To say that city life is dying out may seem on the sur. face an absurd proposition. The population of metro- politan regions has grown at a fast rate, principally in a new kind of urban area, the middle-class suburb. All the technology of the city- -building, transport, communica- tions systems- -has grown immensely in the last seventy years. We are an age which believes that if technology and administrative complexity are growing, then "society as such must be becoming more vital. Thus the city ap- pears on the surface to be an ever more complex and important institution.
But when future generations of historians come to write the chronicle of this era, they may well note that its most marked feature was the gradual simplification of social interactions and forums for social exchange, underlying an ever-increasing elaboration of technological and bureaucratic systems. It may appear in the future that
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men of this era balanced their energies in a peculiar way, so that the enthusiasm with which they invented the tools for conducting life in a complex society was balanced by a sluggish lassitude in applying the tools for truly social purposes.
How such a paradox came about is the subject of this chapter. I should say I began to think about this problem by accident. In my own researches on modern family life in the United States, I began to realize a few years ago that the evolution of affluent suburban families in Amer- ica permitted certain myths of solidarity to take hold, permanently, in the way both parents and children dealt with each other. I was led to reflect on what confluence of family structure, city development, and the new condi- tions of affluence tended to create this psychological pat- tern. My thinking had no clarity until I realized that in the last decades the family has appropriated the social functions and contacts that men once sought in the broader arena of the city. This appropriation by the fam- ily of social "spaces" once felt inappropriate for the home has encouraged something perverse in the urban com- munal relations men have left, and in the family itself. This perversity is a seeking after solidarity and a fear of experiences that might create complexity or disorder. The theme of this chapter is that as the family and family-type relations men visualize for themselves in cities have be- come important, the purification patterns of adolescence are encouraged to take root in both the community and in the individual lives of family members. The result of this process is a duality: social life becomes more primi- tive, in the quest for a mythic solidarity, even as the tech-
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nological resources for more complex social structures increase.
For people who grew up on New York's lower East Side, or in the ethnic slums of Boston, or in the terrible indus- trial towns of England, this idea may seem to indicate a cruel indifference to what it once meant to be poor. Pov- erty was not beautiful for them: few slum romantics have lived in slums. But there were hidden threads of social structure in those poor city areas, threads that gave the people who lived there other regions of identity beyond the fact of their own poverty. Essentially, the last few decades of prosperity have righted the economic injustice these city people suffered, but at the cost of the breakup of their group life. It is this group life of the past that gives a fresh perspective on the patterns of social inter- action that now pervade the cities
Multiple Contact Points
Let us take a tour down Halstead Street, the center of Chicago's great immigrant ghetto, around rgr0. The street was twenty-two miles long, and for the most of it filled with a teeming population. Were we to start at its northern end and move south, we would be conscious that it was filled with "foreigners, " but at every place with different kinds of foreigners, all mixed together. A native might tell us that a certain few blocks were Greek or Polish or Irish, but were one actually to look at particular
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houses or apartment buildings, one would find the ethnic groups jumbled together. Even on the Chinese blocks of the street--for the Chinese are supposed at this time to have been the most closed of ethnic societies--there would be numerous families from Ireland or eastern Europe.
The functioning of all these groups on Halstead Street would appear hopelessly tangled to modern observers. For the apartments would be mixed in with stores, the streets themselves crowded with vendors and brokers of all kinds; even factories, as we moved to the southern end of Hal- stead Street, would be intermixed with bars, brothels, synagogues, churches, and apartment buildings. In the midst of this jumble, there were some hidden threads of a structured social existence.
Were we to follow one of the residents of Halstead Street through a typical day, the experience would be something like this: up at six in the morning, a long walk or a streetcar ride to the factory, and then ten or eleven hours of grueling work. With this much of his day we would be familiar. But when the whistle to stop work blew at six in the evening, his life would take on a dimension perhaps not immediately recognizable. For the path from the factory back home might be broken by an hour's re- laxation at a tavern or coffee house. Halstead Street was crammed in goo with little cafés where men would come after work to let the tension drain out, talking to friends or reading a newspaper. Dinner would usually be at home, but after dinner the man, sometimes with his wife, would be out of the house again, attending a union meeting, caring for a sick member of a mutual-aid society to which
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he belonged, or just visiting the apartment of friends. Oc- casionally, when the family needed some special help, there would be a glass of beer shared with the local polit ical boss, and a plea for assistance--a soft job for an infirm relative, help with a naturalization form, some in- fluence in getting a friend out of jail. Religious responsi- bilities as well pulled the man and woman out of the house- particularly if they were Jewish or practicing Catholics. The synagogues and churches had to be built in this strange city, and the money and organization to build them could come only from the little men who were their members.
The life of a child on Halstead Street in I9I0 would also have been different from what we might expect. The child of ten or eleven would be wakened early in the morn- ing, scrubbed, and sent off to school. Until three in the afternoon he would sit at a high desk, reciting and memo- rizing. This experience is not alien to us, but again, his life after school would be. For if he did not come home to work, and many did not, he would be out on Halstead Street selling or hawking in the stall of someone much older, who sold and cajoled the passing traffic just as he did. It is amazing to see in old photographs of Halstead Street the young and old, shoulder to shoulder in these stalls, shouting out the prices and the virtues of their wares. Many youths would, with the tacit consent of their parents, enter into the more profitable after-school activity of stealing--we read, for instance, in the letters of one Polish family of great religious piety, of the honor ac- corded to a little son who had stolen a large slab of beef from a butcher on the corner. Life was very hard and
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everyone had to fight for their needs with whatever weapons were at hand.
What was contained in this life on Halstead Street could be called a multiplicity of "contact points" by which these desperately poor people entered into social relations with the city. They had to make this diversity in their lives, for no one of the institutions in which they lived was capable of self-support. The family depended on political "favors," the escape valve of the coffee shops and bars, the inculcation of discipline of the shuls and churches, and so forth, for ongoing support. The political machines tended in turn to grow along family lines, to interact with the shifting politics of church and syna- gogue. This multiplicity of contact points often took the individuals of the city outside the ethnic "subcultures" that supposedly were snugly encasing them. Polish people who belonged to steel unions often came into conflict with Polish people who had joined the police. This multiplicity of contact points meant that loyalties became crossed in complex forms. The idea of an ethnic "ghetto culture" is not meaningful in describing these men, if the term implies a coherent set of activities and clear-cut affilia- tions.
This condition has been carefully described by the great Chicago urbanist, Louis Wirth, in his essay "Urbanism as a Way of Life." He tried to show in this essay how the city of necessity broke apart the self-contained qualities of the various ethnic groups. The groups were not like little villages massed together in one spot on the map; rather they penetrated into each other, so that the daily life of an individual was a journey between various kinds of
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group life, each one different in its function and char- acter from the others. The subtlety of this idea can be seen by comparing a city subculture, as Wirth observed it, to the structure of village culture from which the ethnic groups came. As Robert Redfield and, in a different con- text, Oscar Handlin, have shown, the salient character of small-village life was the accessibility of all its activities to all members of the village community; the culture of the village was pervasive because there were no discon- nected or isolated social regions. Although there was divi- sion of labor and rank, the character of the separate activ- ities was known to everyone. What made the ethnic sub- cultures Wirth wrote about seem different was that the separate activities, or different groups, depended on one another but were not necessarily harmoniously related. Each piece of the city mosaic had a distinct character, but the pieces were "open," and this was what made life urban. Individuals had the capacity and the need to penetrate a number of social regions in the course of daily activities, even though the regions were not harmoniously organized and may even have been at warring ends.
It is our stereotyped thinking about "working class" or "ethnic" culture that inhibits us from seeing the kind of variety cities possessed in the past. We make the life into the image of a village when in fact it was more complex, less unitarily organized. No easy myth of solidarity could develop out of this, no simplicity in a concept of who I am by what I do and what I believe.
It is this multiplicity of contact points that has died out in the city; in its stead, social activities have come to be formed in a more coherent mold.
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The Narrowing of Contact Points:
Changes in the FamilyIn the last half century, a majority of the ethnic groups in the city have achieved a state of prosperity for them- selves far beyond what the first immigrants ever dreamed of. This upward movement in material wealth has been matched by social withdrawal, wherein the older forms of complex association have been replaced by a simpler kind of contact structure. This new pattern is embodied in the growth of a specially strong and intense family life. To understand why the old pattern of multiple contact points died, one needs to know what kind of power this new family life possesses.
When I first began to do research on the structure of city family life, I encountered over and over a popular stereotype: the idea that city conditions somehow con- tribute to the instability of the home. Evidently, the as sumption is that the diversity of the city threatens the security and attachment family members feel for each other. Especially as suburban community life has come to dominate cities, there has grown up a mythological fam- ily image of affluent homes where Dad drinks too much, the kids are unloved and turn to drugs, divorce iS rampant, and breakdowns are routine. The good, old, rural families, by contrast, were supposedly loving and secure.
The trouble with this popular image is that it simply isn't true. Talcott Parsons has amassed evidence to show
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that the rate of divorce and desertion was much higher "in the good old days," at the turn of the century, than it is now. William Goode has taken the idea a step further by showing how divorce is less frequent in affluent homes than in working-class homes. There may still be a great deal of unrest and tension in these suburban families, but it cannot be allied to their structural instability. In fact, we shall see, it is the juncture of great formal stability with deep and unresolved tension that now marks these families; and it is these permanent families, with their unspoken and unresolved divisions, that have come to hunger after a mythic ideal of social solidarity.
The idea of the city weakening the family has also come to express itself in the popular perversions of the Moynihan Report on the family lives of the black ghettos. This document is actually about the impact of unemployment on family structure. It has been misread, however, as a description of how Northern city life has broken apart the black family, and is taken in a most perverted form as a sign that there is something too "weak" in black culture to enable it to withstand the terrors of the city. Actually the phenomenon Moynihan describes occurs wherever unemployment or intermittent employment is a long-term family experience. One therefore finds a much higher rate of female-headed households, with shifting male partners and "illegitimate" children, among perse- cuted rural Catholics in Northern Ireland than among the blacks of New York City. But the myth remains: some- how it is the big city that has done this.
This stereotype--the threat to family solidarity posed by the city--I investigated in my book Families Against
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the City for a group of middle-class people in Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century. What happened to these people was exactly opposite to the stereotype of family-city relations. For the disorder and vigor of Chicago life at that time pushed these families in upon themselves, as a means of defense against the diversity of the city. They became, in the words of Theodore Dreiser, "little islands of propriety, 29 self-contained, in- tense, and narrow in their outlook, self-restrictive and routine in the tenor of their family activities. They be- came safe places in the city at the cost of becoming suf- focatingly dull.
The striking historical character of these families was not their intensity as such, but their isolation. That is, what makes them different from the middle-class families of our time, and different from the poor im- migrants of their own day, was that they were almost totally islands, and had little contact with other families or small groups in their neighborhood. That kind of family isolation has abated; in times of crisis, families now in a neighborhood develop temporary bonds for mutual aid. But an increasing body of data is show- ing that the intensity, the inward-turning qualities of day-to-day family life have not died out but have con- tinued over the course of time. In fact, the direction of historical change in the city has been for large numbers of families, including the newly affluent working-class sector and the upwardly mobile segments of the black community, to come to share this characteristic once typical of the native-born, urban middle class.
What is meant by an "intense" family life? The condi-
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tion of middle-class family intensity that has passed down over the last century is defined by two structural charac- teristics. The first is that the interactions which occur in the family are taken as a microcosm of all the kinds of interaction that exist in the social world at large. There is nothing really "important" in social relations that cannot be experienced within the boundaries of the home Men who believe this conceive, therefore, of no reason for making social forays or social contacts that cannot be ultimately reconciled or absorbed in family life.
The second structure creating intense family life is the reduction of family members to levels of equality. This characteristic is much more pronounced in American urban families than European ones. The feeling consists, most vulgarly, in fathers wanting to be "pals" to their sons, and mothers sisters to their daughters; there is a feeling of failure and dishonor if the parents are excluded from the circle of youth, as though they were tarnished by being adult. A good family along these lines is a family where the people talk to each other as equals, where the children presume to the lessons of experience, and the parents try to forget them. That the dignity of all the family members might lie exactly in mutual respect for separateness and uniqueness is not conceived; dignity is conceived to lie in treating everyone equally. This brings the family members into a closer relation to each other--for there are taken to be, ideally, no unbridgeable gaps.
Both of these structures of intensity have become in fact structures for limiting the diversity of family ex- perience.
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The conviction of a family that it is the whole social arena in microcosm limits the experience of family mem- bers in both an obvious and a subtle way. It is clear that no congeries of four or five people represents the full spec. trum of attitudes and human traits to be found in the wider society. Family reality, therefore, becomes highly exclusive. Studies of intense family attitudes toward strangers reveal that the outsiders are judged to be "real, to be important and dealt with only to the extent that they resemble the limited social configurations within the family circle. The most striking form of this can be seen in situations where middle-class neighborhoods have been successfully integrated racially. The black families have been accepted to the extent that people feel they are after all "just like us, or as a respondent in one study put it: "You wouldn't even know from the way the . . family acts they were Negroes." Accepting someone ineradicably different is not what occurs under these conditions.
The subtle way in which families, feeling themselves a microcosm of the society, become self-limiting has to do with the base of stability on which such families rest. This base is the existence, or the belief in the existence of, long-term trust. For families to believe they are all important there has to be the conviction that no betrayal and breakup will occur over the long term. People do not concentrate their energies in one place and simultane. ously believe it may shatter or betray them. Yet long. term situations of trust and reliability are rare in the larger social world. Not only in work but also in a variety of human affairs there are experiences of power and sig- nificance that cannot depend on a mutual commitment or
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trust for a long period. The older forms of social contact were not predicated along these lines. Now, people refuse to grant worth to that which is shifting, insecure, or treacherous, and yet this is exactly what the diversity in society is built of.
The collapsing of family members to a state of equality often leads, in the same way, to a tragic self-limiting of the experience of family members. A recent project made psychiatric interviews in homes of "normal," "just aver- age" families in a modest suburb outside a large city. Over and again in these interviews adults expressed a sense of loss, sometimes amounting to a feeling of self-destruc- tion, in the things in their lives they had wanted to do and could afford to do, but refrained from experiencing for fear of leaving out the children. These sacrifices were not dictated by money; they were much more intimate, small-scale, yet important things: establishing a quiet spot in the day after work when a man and a woman could be alone together, taking trips or vacations alone, eating dinner after the children were put to bed. In another frame, fathers spoke over and over of how they had failed their sons by not being able to understand them; when the interviewers asked what they meant, the response usually came as a version of "he doesn't open up to me the way he does to his friends." Such burdens are acquired, so many daily chances for a diversity and change of routine are denied, out of the belief in the rightness of treating children as much as equals as pos- sible, especially in early and middle adolescence.
In one way, the belief in the family as a microcosm of the world leads to this will to believe the family mem-
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bers all alike, all "pals." For if the family is a whole world, then somehow the conditions of friendship and comradeship must he established within its borders, and this can only be done by treating all the family members as comrades who can understand each other on the same grounds.
The idea just advanced may seem untrue to the ex- perience many people have had in their own lives, an ex perience of family tension and estrangement unlike what previous generations of the family seemed to know. But there is a perverse, hidden strain to this family intensity that may make sense of the phenomenon. Perhaps I can illustrate this from some professional work now being done by family researchers.
The Urge for a Purified Identity
Hidden in Family IntensityA few sociologists of the family have recently been at pains to unravel a "guilt over conflict" syndrome. This syndrome appears in the attitudes of many intense-family members toward their families. The syndrome is quite simple to state, and it is quite painful to the people caught in it: good families, upright families, are happy; happi- ness is usually associated with tranquillity; therefore, when conflicts or fights arise in a family, the family (and the fighter) must be no good, tarnished, and somehow a failure. What sociologists like myself have tried to change
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is the acceptance by therapists of this syndrome as the correct way to view conflict; the facts indicate that fam- ilies in which conflicts are held down or suppressed turn out to have much higher rates of deep emotional disorders than families in which conflicts and hostilities are directly and openly expressed.
But the "guilt over conflict" syndrome is significant be- cause it is so deeply held a presupposition about family life: people look at conflicts between generations as an evil, revealing some sort of rottenness in the social fabric, rather than as an inevitable and natural process of his- torical change. Sharp personality differences within the children's generation, leading to fights or estrangements between brothers and sisters, are viewed as a sign of bad parental upbringing, and so on. Put another way, this anxiety and guilt over family conflict really ex- presses the wish that diversity and ineradicable differ- ences should not exist in the home, for the sake of social order. And in point of fact one of the most widespread middle-class family diseases is the attempt, usually fatal to a family's "happiness, to suppress divergence and separateness in the growth of family members for the sake of order in the family. It is the intensity of family relations, I believe, that brings this thirst for family order about. For if the family is going to survive as a whole society of its own, the following structures are necessary: an unusual closeness of everyday contact, an attempt to repress the experiential and age differences that naturally would set the family members apart, an attempt to set up assurances of long-term trust and the conviction that betrayals or separations will not occur.
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All these structures of intensity presume or aim at order And in the process of trying to establish family order along these lines, willful ignoring of biological or personal differences becomes necessary. Thus is the "guilt over conflict" syndrome a product of the desire for family intensity.
But suppression and avoidance of diversity along these lines is exactly of a piece with the desire for a purified disorder-transcending identity that emerges in adolescence. The desire for coherent identity is exactly the search to avoid diversity and painful unknowns in the social arena for the sake of some secure order. What I feel sure has happened over the last decades is that in tense family structure has developed aS a specific mechanism for making coherent identity desires a per- manent force in the lives of adults. This intense family configuration is the means by which adults have come to be frozen in the patterns of adolescence. The secret of these families, of their desperate longing for communion and fear of internal divergence, generating in turn all kinds of tension and hidden guilt feelings, is that they express the feelings of people still in slavery to the iden- tity-making powers developed in their adolescence. The structures of these families, the belief that the family circle is a microcosm of the world, the belief that family members must be equals to be able to respect one another, and the terrible guilt over family conflict are specific ex- pressions of men searching for the myth of solidarity in their lives, a solidarity born out of an inability to accept ambiguities and the painful unknown
I have previously tried to show in a general way how
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adolescent patterns might be transferred to the structure of community life. This intense family life is the agent, the "middleman, » for the infusion of adolescent fear into the social life of modern cities. The intense family pro- vides the materials from which the myth of common solidarity, described in the last chapter, is built. The intense family is the medium by which the whole com- munity of families, as well as the individuals within a home, become frozen in that adolescent ritual of purify. ing their identities.
The transfer from family to community can be under- stood by the following question: is there any reason to call this kind of family structure "urban"? Could it not simply be the character of modern American family life as such, and, since most families live in urban areas, be an "urban family trait by location only?
What contradicts such an explanation is the effect this family structure has on nonfamily social life. It is exactly the character of intense families to diminish the diversity of contact points that have marked out a com- munity life in the teeming cities at the turn of the cen- tury. For what families of this type have done is to assign the significant social space a person perceives in the city to one special social institution, the family group. The meaning of intensity in family life is its absorbative capacity, its power to collect the interests and attention of the individual to the tight-knit band of kin. Historically, the last half-century of city life has been marked by ex- actly this process, a decline in the multiple contact points and associations in the city, and a rise in the number of city groups whose family life has taken on the character
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of what was once a family pattern for a restricted class in the city.
The sign of this absorption is contained in the most dramatic of city changes over the last, affluent decades: the growth of affluent suburbs.
The Intense Family and the New Suburbs
The classic pattern of industrial city-suburb arrange- ments, up to the last twenty-five years, was the pattern still extant in Turin or Paris. Cities were arranged in rings of socioeconomic wealth, with the factories at the outskirts of town, workers' suburbs or quarters next to them, and then increasingly more affluent belts of hous- ing as one moved closer to the center of the city. There were exceptions to this pattern to be sure, but the band- ing seemed to apply to most of the great urban centers; in the United States, New York, Boston, and Chicago showed in general such a pattern at the opening of the present century.
In the wake of the depression and the Second World War, middle-class city dwellers in both Europe and America began a counter-urban movement of a kind not before witnessed in the history of cities. This flight to the suburbs is a complicated phenomenon that, decades later, sociologists are only beginning to grasp.
When the flight to the suburbs first began in massive numbers after the Second World War, it was commonly
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thought that its causes were related to the depression and to population dislocation in the war. But this ex- planation is simply inadequate to explain the persistence of the event over the course of time. An explanation for this suburban movement based on the economics of land is equally limited. Recent researches on choice differences between urbanite and suburbanite show that those who have moved out of the city center did so even when hous- ing costs in city and suburb were the same for them, and even when the cost of living in the suburb was actually greater than that of living in town.
Again, in the United States, the movement to the suburbs cannot be explained by the growing presence of Negroes in the urban centers after the Second World War. For one thing, these Negroes seldom moved close to areas where young middle-class urbanites had formerly lived; for another, the lower middle-class people whose neighborhoods were gradually taken over by Negroes did not move to far-lying suburbs, but relocated only slightly farther away from the urban core . There are some exceptions to this latter pattern; there are people in outer Queens who moved to avoid blacks, but few higher up the scale living in Darien, Connecticut, who did.
The historical circumstances of depression, war, land value, and racial fear all have played a role, but they are all offshoots of a more central change in the last decades that has led to the strength of suburban life. This deeper, more hidden element is a new attitude about the conduct of family life within and without the city.
Students of modern urban life are coming to under- stand, still in a piecemeal way, that people who now live
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in suburbs value their home settings because they feel that closer family ties are more possible there than in the city center. The closeness is not so much a material one. after all, families in city apartments are extremely close physically. Rather, as is now being learned, it is the simplification of the social environment in the suburbs that accounts for the belief that close family life will be more possible there than in the confusion of the city.
This simplification of the social environment in suburbs is the logical end in the decline of diverse communities, discussed in the last chapter, that has occurred as people have become more affluent. For in the suburb, physical space becomes rigidly divided into functional areas: there are wide swatches of housing, separated from swatches of commercial development concentrated in that unique suburban institution, the shopping center or shopping strip; schools are similarly isolated, usually in a parklike setting. Within the housing sectors themselves, new homes have been built at homogeneous socioeconomic levels. When critics of planning reproach developers for simplifying the environment in this way, the developers reply, truthfully, that people want to live "with people just like themselves"; people think diversity will be bad for social as well as economic reasons. The desire of people beyond the line of economic scarcity is to live in a functionally separated, internally homogeneous en- vironment; that is the crux of the matter.
People desire this simplification because it permits the intensity of family relations to gather full force. All ex- traneous elements, all unknowns, or unforeseen social conditions of surprise can be minimized. This arrange-
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ment of suburban life is a means for creating that sense of long-term order and continuity on which family inten- sity must be based. In this way the reduction of the suburban environment to a functionally separate, inter- ally homogeneous system permits desires for purified experience to reach their apex. The hidden assumption be- hind this belief is that the strength of the family bond might be weakened if the individual family members were exposed to a rich social condition, readily accessible out. side the house.
When the suburbs were first taking form along these lines in the decade after World War II, some critics, like David Riesman, began to criticize them for a kind of aim- lessness and emptiness in their social relations. But a hid- den bond of a peculiar kind of social relations was there. It was a common determination to remain inviolate, to ensure the family's security and sanctity through ex- clusionary measures on race, religion, class, or other "intrusions" on a "nice community of homes. ." Such bonds John Seeley found in his fine study Crestwood Heights and Herbert Gans reveals in his recent book on the suburb of Levittown, although Gans does not interpret his findings along these lines.
This kind of family living in the suburbs surely is a little strange. Isn't this preference for suburbia as a setting for family life in reality an admission, tacit and unspoken to be sure, that the parents do not feel confident of their own human strengths to guide the child in the midst of an environment richer and more difficult than that of the neat lawns and tidy supermarkets of the suburbs? If a close, tight-knit family emerges because the other
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elements of the adult and child world are made purposely weak, if parents assume their children will be better human beings for being shielded or deprived of society outside the home and homelike schools, surely the family life that results is a forced and unnatural intimacy.
Of course, there are many similar criticisms one could make of suburbs, all centered in some way on the fact that suburbanites are people who are afraid to live in a world they cannot control. This society of fear, this society willing to be dull and sterile in order that it not be con- fused or overwhelmed, thus shares something with the first middle-class families of the industrial city, families like those explored in my study of the Union Park neigh- borhood of Chicago. A fear of the richness of urban society prevails in both the early industrial city and the post-industrial suburbs of the middle class, and the family becomes a place of refuge in which the parents try to shield their children, and themselves, from the city.
However, given the processes of human development described so far in this essay, the malaise of suburban family life cuts much deeper. For these controlled com- munities, where people are such good friends, so carefully watching one another, are the expressions in urban terms of what a desire for purified experience can do to social life when it becomes dominant in a mass form. In the name of avoiding painful confusion, of establishing the "decencies" of life as regnant, the scope of human variety and free- dom of expression is drastically restricted; this is, in broad urban terms, exactly the same pattern as is to be found in those revolutionary regimes where "the good life" is rigidly imposed as a life of discipline. The multi-
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plicity of contact points is voluntarily reduced so that men do not lose their solidarity.
In this way intensive family life in America sapped a generation's interest in participating in dissimilar kinds of contact experiences in the city, therefore making these diverse forms of participations shrivel and lose their vitality in the last few decades. The withdrawal has been voluntary; it is not the result of an inevitable destruction caused by technological progress or the invasion of blacks. No mechanistic explanations are permissible that take this growth of family intensity and withdrawal from multiple contact groups out of the realm of human action. The suburban condition, which is now guiding as well the rebuilding of inner-city areas in the housing-project com- plexes like Lefrak City in New York, is a social creation, a social act. In that lies the great hope for rebuilding the cities, for social acts can change; they are not immutable and fixed.
The consequences of decline in wide contact points in cities can be seen most graphically in the realms of pleasure for men in cities, and the realms in which men struggle for power.
"All the Great Whorehouses Are Gone"
When I was a student living in a tenement on the south side of Chicago, one of my neighbors was a slightly tubby woman in her late thirties, who was fond of tight leopard-
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skin slacks, orange blouses, and slightly bluish lipstick, and who worked at night whoring. Occasionally she would have afternoon coffee at the restaurant next to our build- ing, and we got to know each other. One of her favorite themes, expounded at great length and with a wealth of references gathered through "participant-observation, was that the whorehouse as a social institution was dying out, and that trade was forced into private apartments and losing its social character. The police were lenient, she said-~-that was not the problem; rather, the customers had become discomfited by the old routines of staying around for a whole evening, talking and drinking with the girls before retiring to the bedrooms. Now they wanted their sex fast and privately.
This tirade struck me as a piece of local folklore and nothing more, until I began to do some research on municipal "clean-up" campaigns on crime in the last few years. What struck me about these campaigns is that they are emotionally fed by a desire to clean up or close down a kind of vice that, as my participant observer knew, doesn't exist. "Gambling dens and whorehouses, which a few years ago were considered in some Midwestern cities the result of black urban migration, are now few and far between in cities. There is plenty of gambling, in and out of the ghettos, and some whoring, but the activities are not communalized, not intended as a social gathering. One might know a numbers man, or business- men on trips might pick up lone girls at bars. The real crime, not touched in these emotional clean-up cam- paigns, centers on theft, the organized hard-drug traffic,
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and rackets, and to these kinds of crime the law-and-order crowd is indifferent.
But places for amusement and social contact less shady than the whorehouses or gambling rooms are also disappearing. In working-class quarters, pool halls and small bars have been rapidly on the decline. Respectable working-class men are now spending their time around the houses and yards that large numbers can now afford. The rise of affluence for these city dwellers has led directly to a new centering on home and family. Participation in church or synagogue life, as reported in the work of Will Herberg and others, is on the decline, even though many more people now formally hold church memberships. Richard Hogarth reports a similar withdrawal from local social centers in the more affluent working-class families of Britain.
This decline has been familiar to sociologists for some time. Less familiar, but equally important, are changes in the character of amusements and social meeting grounds for the urban middle classes. Since so little is known, his- torically, about middle-class people in cities, what needs to be judged is the social character of a process going on right now.
In the last ten or fifteen years, small restaurants, night clubs, and bars that cater to a middle-class clientele have encountered great financial difficulties, and have been largely supplanted by enormous chain operations--like Howard Johnson's, Longchamps', or a little less fancy, the McDonalds', groups. The small establishments find they cannot compete in volume economies and the like against
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these standardized giants. The same is true of the enormous hotel chains for middle-class people when they travel: it would be difficult to say what makes a Holiday Inn in Indiana different from one in New Mexico or Vermont.
The social effect of this is for middle-class people to conceive of social spaces that have a distinctive character to be intimate and small places, the most powerful being their own homes. When one wants to feel one is socializing in a personal, warm way, the downtown restaurant with a hundred tables is hardly the place; home is the place, now, where such contacts can be made. That middle-class life might be different can be seen in the style of entertaining practiced by many "old-school" middle- class families in Paris: friends can be entertained at a restaurant without discomfort, because the restaurant is usually small, and the proprietor an actual person, not a corporation with an "image." More importantly, the idea that entertaining and socializing is a public activity is accepted. Some of the Jewish delicatessens in American suburbs have this quality: one goes out to see and be seen, meets people by chance without discomfort in a public place.
But the main tendency of American middle-class social- izing is the opposite; "real" entertaining is sheltered and by invitation in the private house. This is why café life, either outdoors or indoors, has failed to catch on when attempted as part of central-city urban renewal, or in the newest shopping centers. One is more "comfortable" hav- ing a cocktail at home before dinner than taking one's wife out of the house for a respite to a café or tavern.
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For more affluent suburbanites, some social breaks from home occur through membership in country clubs. Social critics have been entirely too snobbish about these institutions, for they are one of the few real leverages against the intense household life of the suburbs. The difficulty with them is that they are homogeneous: by social and economic class obviously, and usually by race and religion as well. They are closed institutions, but they are at least something to widen the circle of meaningful "others" for suburban people.
These are the familiar signs of how socializing has polarized for a number of urban groups. For affluent people, public amusements have become the charge of mass, institutional businesses; the belief that the home is where personalized contacts should occur is therefore reinforced. Among working-class people of somewhat lesser means, the old neighborhood creations are dying out, in part because these "respectable" working-class families choose to spend more of their time at home. It is also true that the urban renewal of working-class neigh- borhoods is also destroying gathering spots. As Jane Jacobs shows, there has been destruction of arenas for social interchange-_-little bars, shops, and pool halls--because of a middle-class vision of what a comfortable and secure place should really be.
One can also interpret this decline of places of pleasure as a result of the "neighborhood" becoming much more definable and homogeneous in the modern city. Social scientists used to spend a great deal of time fighting with each other about the meaning of "neighborhood life" in cities, one of the principal points being that there was
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such a multiplicity of social contact that individuals could not be pinpointed neatly in neighborhoods. Now, I fear, they can. The growth of intensive family life, absorbing the energies of its members in the belief that the family is itself a microcosm of all there is in society, and the functional simplification of the urban environment in the suburban movement of the last quarter-century have made particular regions in the city all too identifiable in socioeconomic, racial, and functional terms. Now people really are getting to know who their neighbors are: they are just like themselves.
***populism again!!***
Arenas to Fight in
There is no more sacred shibboleth of urban reform than the cry that the bosses and the political machines of the city must go. Yet, under the impact of reform, the decline of these clubs have cut off one of the most vital contact points in the city. It may not be, as Daniel P. Moynihan once claimed, that the political machines are one of the great achievements of the modern city, but there is no denying their importance in giving individuals a con- nectedness to power and a forum for social as well as political exchange.
Something must first be said of the social character of political machines at the turn of the century. Often, forty or fifty years ago, these power groups had neighborhood clubhouses, where people came to meet and talk. The
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clubhouses were something more, as a social institution, than mere offices. And there was a sense of the closeness of help; some recent studies of Tammany Hall, for in- stance, show how it worked as a kind of court of last resort when people needed help. Handlin has made a similar point: the corruption and graft of these institutions was the way the goods of urban industrial society were spread down to the little man. The system of legality had to be violated if those at the bottom of the city's structure were to be "cut in" on power and its fruits.
What is important about political machines in today's cities is the way they have been fought by the virtuous and respectable orders of the city. For one sees, from the time of the Progressive Era reformers on, the urge in the cleanup campaigns to replace the personalized politics and influence peddling of the machines with routine, supposedly conflict-free bureaucratic organizations. In other words, in American cities the alternative to civic graft has been conceived essentially as the depersonalizing and routinizing of politics and political power : justice is taken to be free of personal influence and circumstance. Yet the effect of this has been a terrible paradox.
For insofar as the reform crusades have succeeded in amending the past, the little guys, the white working- class and lower middle-class voters, have lost their sense of connectedness with the body politic; when the machines lost a personalistic character, the little guys were isolated from the only channels of political influence they believed effective. The "alienated voter" phenomenon is not a slogan; there is, as anyone who has explored the feelings of people in ethnic neighborhoods will
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attest, a real and a powerful sense of disconnection. There is now a large debate going on in political science circles over whether in functional fact the little-voter is so cut off from power. From the human point of view, this debate is academic- -the people themselves feel cut off, perceive themselves as robbed of something they cannot put a name to.
What they have lost results from the polarization of city life into intense families and bureaucratized struc- tures of participation. What they have lost is an arena in the old sense of the word, a place to express themselves and fight with others in a direct way for power. The cause and its effect have an inner relationship.
For the spirit of reform is essentially a permutation of the "guilt over conflict" within the emerging families themselves. It is a belief that good relations between people are conflict-free, understandable in advance by defined rules, and stable over a long period of time. This attitude in its turn is an expression, a summation almost, of the desire for a purified identity. Reforming the corrup- tion of the city, to the extent it has succeeded, is a brief for trying to squeeze the explosiveness out of city life by removing the elements of surprise and disorder; rules re- place the vagaries of personal circumstance. But urban society becomes stratified in power relations precisely to the extent that people feel comfortable in using impersonal, bureaucratic rules as a means of achieving their ends . The upper middle classes do; the losers, the little people, do not. As the work of Robert Lane has so incisively shown, the political competence of working-class people, white as
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well as black, lies in forging personal relationships and affiliations as a means for exercising power. The lower half of the city's population is, in a drive for rational re- form, deprived of what it knows and understands about getting things done: the little deal, the contractor who cuts in his friends, the ward politician who calls a friend in city hall to repair a street or find a disabled constituent a nonessential job. Thus the polarization of contact groups and the congruent growth of the intimate home and the defined routines outside it create a power vacuum; the little guys in the city are deprived of a region in which to fight or cajole for what they need for themselves.
I do not intend to argue that we ought to increase graft anew, though it strikes me that a little humane graft is a good thing. But we ought to look at why machine politics came to power in the past, and salvage the good mixed in with the greed and viciousness of those regimes. To destroy the political club structures, as the middle-class reformers have succeeded in doing in many cities, simply cuts off much of the body politic from power and increases the "alienation" of these voters hence their tendency to turn to messianic solutions from the far Right.
The New Social Space of Cities
The processes of change described in this chapter could easily be misread, along what someone has called "slum- romantic" lines. I am not arguing that we return to the old ways of city life when times were hard; rather, I have
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tried to show how the emergence of a new city life in an era of abundance and prosperity has eclipsed something of the essence of urban life--its diversity and possibilities for complex experience. What needs to happen is a change in the peculiar institutions of affluent city life, in order to create new forms of complexity and new forms of diverse experience.
It is common for "slum romantics" to bemoan the loss of intimate social space and small scale in modern city life. But from the vantage point of what has been set forth here, the issue would appear to be the reverse. There has not been a loss of intimate small scale, per se, but rather a loss of multiple foci of small scale. The urban family of this affluent era has developed a power to absorb activities and interests that were once played out in a variety of settings in the city. Indeed, it might best be said of city life during the past twenty-five years of suburban growth that the scale of life has become too intimate, too intense.
For it is out of the ordering patterns of this new inten- sity that the evils of purified community life can arise. It is the polarization of intimacy that permits withdrawal from active participation in unknown social situations in the city: after all, why venture beyond home, since it is a mirror of all that lies beyond? It is this same inner-turn- ing little world that, unused to the daily shocks of con- frontation and the expression of ineradicable conflict, reacts with such volatility to the disorders of oppressed groups in the city, and meets the hostility from below with an oppressive hand greatly out of proportion to the original challenges.
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Most important, this new configuration of polarized intimacy in the city provides the individual with a power- ful moral tool in shutting out new or unknown social relations for himself. For if the suburbanized family is a little world of its own, and if the dignity of that family consists in creating bases of long-term stability and trust, then potentially diversifying experiences can be shut out with the feeling of performing a moral act. For the sake of "protecting the home' a man refuses to wander or explore; this is the meaning of that curious self-satisfaction men derive in explaining what they gave up "for the sake of the children." It is to make impotence a virtue.
In these ways, the polarization of contact groups in the development of cities during the age of affluence has created a generation of adult puritans. The new virtue, like the religious puritanism of old, is a ritual of purity- ing the self of diverse and conflicting avenues of ex- perience. But where the first puritans engaged in this self-repression for the greater glory of God, the puritans of today repress themselves out of fear, fear of the unknown the uncontrolled. The intense family is the via regia by which this fear is maintained; such a family makes out of even men's intimate lives a known function. Given this transformation of the family, the less intimate social relations in cities have also had to change. The material abundance in the modern city has been manipulated to make suburbanized space, in new inner-city housing as well as in the suburbs themselves, space that is purified to a brutal and functional simplicity.
I believe we can learn to put the material wealth in city life to use as an agent of freedom, rather than volun-
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tary slavery. But to do so we shall have to reverse a complimentary pattern of withdrawal from complexity that has grown up in the professionalized shaping of urban places by city planners.