Where We Live Now - Publication Studio

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where we live now
where we live now
an annotated reader
www.suddenly.org
matthew stadler First published by www.suddenly.org
© 2008 www.suddenly.org and the authors
This second edition published by www.suddenly.org
© 2009 www.suddenly.org and the authors
Designed by Tae Won Yu
Copyedited by Haili Jones Graff
The excerpted texts have been edited for concision.
A dagger symbol † appears in the breaks wherever original
material has been removed by the editor of this anthology.
Printed and bound by www.lulu.com
WHERE WE LIVE NOW: an annotated reader
Edited and annotated by Matthew Stadler
With respect to the originals, certain idiosyncrasies of spelling, style, and formatting have been
retained in the excerpts and in their accompanying notes. Bracketed editorial comments and
insertions are from prior editors, and not of our imposition.—Eds.
Permission acknowledgments are printed on pages 451‑453 of this volume.
The acknowledgments page shall be considered an extension of the copyright page.
The publisher respects international copyright laws. Any omissions or oversights in the
acknowledgments section of this volume are purely unintentional.
Photo credits: Front cover, lower: Edward S. Curtis (1914); from volume 10 of North American
Indians (1926). Spine, lower: “The Haida Village of Skidegate, 1878,” photographer unknown; from
the collection of the National Museums of Canada.
All rights reserved.
Distributed to the book trade by Verse Chorus Press
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ISBN 978-1-891241-49-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008908205
where we live now
where we live now
an annotated reader
Edited and Annotated by Matthew Stadler
matthew stadler where we live now
This book, indeed the entire project called suddenly, has depended on
the generous hard work of talented people who, if they are paid at all,
are never paid enough. Our reward is the work we do together. This
book is dedicated to those who made it, principally Haili Jones Graff,
Jason Kinney, Forrest Martin, Sergio Pastor, Orit Tashman, Nico
Wright, Tae Won Yu, Diana George, and all of the book’s contributors.
I feel lucky to have found such talented people. The time and effort
they gave to this project may not bring them the money they deserve,
but it will enrich the public of which they are a part. I’m convinced it
will prove worthwhile. Thank you.
matthew stadler where we live now
“Perhaps here we shall be other than the administrators of poverty.”
—Lisa Roberston
The Weather
matthew stadler 10 where we live now
Table of Contents
xv
Introduction
by Matthew Stadler
21
Where We Live Now
by Thomas Sieverts (translation by Diana George)
Theory
85
excerpts from The German Ideology
by Karl Marx (1847)
95
excerpt from “Towns and Cities”
by Fernand Braudel, in The Structures of Everyday Life (1975)
125 excerpt from Topophilia
by Yi-Fu Tuan (1970)
137 excerpt from The Country and the City
by Raymond Williams (1972)
History
151 “Nuu-chah-nulth account of First Contact 1778”
by Gillette Chipps, in BC First Nations Studies Teachers Guide (1978)
153
excerpts from Journal of the Third Voyage
by Captain James Cook (March 1778)
159 excerpt from Native American Architecture
by Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton (1992)
matthew stadler 11
169 excerpts from Peoples of the Northwest Coast
by Kenneth M. Ames and Herbert D. G. Maschner (2000)
185 excerpts from “Before Lewis and Clark, Lt. Broughton’s River of
Names, The Columbia River Exploration of 1792,”
by Jim Mockford in Oregon Historical Quarterly (Winter, 2005)
189 “The Four Myth Ages,”
by Louis Kenoy, as transcribed by Melville Jacobs and published
in Kalapuya Texts (1944)
195 excerpts from Indians in the Making
by Alexandra Harmon (1994)
209 excerpts from “The Glittering Plain”
by Robert L. Benson, in Land of Tuality (1975)
217 excerpts from Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition
by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes (1841)
219 excerpts from Washington County: Politics and Community in
Antebellum America
by Paul Bourke and Donald DeBats (1995)
237 excerpts from Portland: The Metropolis of the Pacific Northwest
by Oregon Immigration Board (1889)
241 excerpts from Samuel’s Directory of Portland
by L. Samuel (1873)
245 excerpts from Native Seattle
by Coll Thrush (2007)
277 excerpts from Boomburbs: The Rise of America’s Accidental Cities
by Robert E. Lang and Jennifer LeFurgy (2007)
Theory after History
293 excerpt from The Country and the City
by Raymond Williams (1972)
12 where we live now
305 excerpts from Territory Authority Rights
by Saskia Sassen (2007)
317 excerpt from “An Introduction to the Information Age”
by Manuel Castells, in The Blackwell City Reader (1998)
325 excerpts from The Polycentric Metropolis
by Peter Hall and Kathy Pain (2006)
343 “The Generic City”
by Rem Koolhaas, in S, M, L, XL (1994)
367 “Nothing But Flowers: Against Public Space”
by Aaron Betsky, in Slow Space (1994)
387 “Notes on art and aesthetics where we live now”
by Stephanie Snyder (2008)
Literature
393 “Our anniversary trip to Passage and the visit to the wildlife museum
south of Weeks where two French poets seemed particularly relevant”
by Howard W. Robertson in Odes to certain interstates and Other Poems
(2003)
401 “Spatial Synthetics: A Theory”
by Lisa Robertson, in Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office
for Soft Architecture (2003)
403 “To Landscape”
by Sam Lohmann (2008)
407 “What You Pawn I Will Redeem”
by Sherman Alexie, in Ten Little Indians (2005)
427 excerpts from S P R A W L
by Danielle Dutton (2008)
439 excerpt from Holy Land
by D. J. Waldie (1994)
matthew stadler 13
449 biographies of literary contributors
455 bibliography
481 index
Introduction
Matthew Stadler
The French historian Fernand Braudel makes the astonishing claim
that any city “has to dominate an empire, however tiny, in order to exist at all.”
For Braudel, a commonplace that we witness every day—the boastful preemi‑
nence of cities—serves as a categorical definition. Braudel got his definition
from Marx, who put it even more sharply: “The antagonism between town
and country begins with the transition from barbarism to civilization, from
tribe to State, from locality to nation, and runs through the whole history of
civilization to the present day.” For both Marx and Braudel, class division and
domination are the origin, even the constitutive element, of urbanism.
The city has always been a jealous hero, the lead actor in the story of the
nation or the globe. Rome, London, New York, and, in every region, little subempires … Cincinnati, Denver, Portland. All of them, despite their dynamism,
geographical imprecision, and collective nature, stubbornly stride around
history’s stage as if they were autonomously acting individuals. Their stories
are of ascension through hardship to dominance. The city cannot live without
boasting.
The boasts of cities fill whole libraries and Web sites, shape university pro‑
grams, and drive an economy whose boundaries are unknowable. From civic
boosterism of the sort that every chamber of commerce and regional think
tank turns out, to the more deeply considered global inquiries into the history
and future of urban forms, our economic and cultural investment in the story
of the city is immense. We care deeply, and are willing to spend tremendous
cultural, political, and financial capital on the working out of this story.
matthew stadler xv
Increasingly, that story is a tragedy. The tale turned up by think tanks and
planners in every part of the globe, by pundits and aggrieved neighbors alike,
is one of threats and struggle. Blighted downtowns become subsidized sites
of high-end investment; the remnants of a dying farm economy become the
treasured focus of advocacy groups pursuing costly, often divisive legislation
to save farms. Wanting better lives for ourselves and our children, we place
these twin ideals, the city and the country, at the center of our politics. And yet
everywhere we turn, the glimmering image of the dense urban center ringed
by green farms and countryside is erased by eruptions of growth (or, equally,
neglect) that are so far beyond our ken that we can only paint them all with the
same broad brush: that shapeless word, “sprawl.” This unspecific threat—this
failure to find language—is the sharpest evidence we have of our helplessness.
Sprawl has no autonomous history or ontology; it is a negation, the absence of
something else, the failure to build city or countryside. Sprawl is the disap‑
pearance of an idea. So how can we go on speaking of the city and the country,
yet not remain fixed in the downward spiral of loss?
Raymond Williams believes the terminal expression of the story of city and
country “is the system we now know as imperialism.” Charles Mudede sees
that same global system come home to roost in the proliferating landscapes
of sprawl. Observing the lively dereliction of strip highways, Mudede finds “a
monstrous, zombie form of colonialism” that “looks from a distance much
like a medieval or small city (an early form of colonialism) with an immedi‑
ate urban shadow.” In Mudede’s landscape, the “rural idiocy” once decried by
Marx takes up a new home address in the suburbs. The tragedy of city and
country provides a stage for our struggles on which the curtain need never
fall.
But the story of the city has other modes. It can be used as a battering ram
to justify political change, or it can thrill us and quicken our attention, like
celebrity gossip. Champions of urbanism, such as Lewis Mumford or Peter
Hall, describe a city that resembles one vast, collective celebrity, a glittering
hero whose every fortune and misfortune compels our deepest feelings. Con‑
sider, for example, the excited, voluminous reports of the new Asian mega-city.
As with celebrities, we measure the importance of our favorites against the
puniness and offenses of lesser stars. We readily project our own fates, our
failings and triumphs and potentials, and watch them play out in the fates of
cities. These are the dominant modes by which we talk about the city.
While gossip is preferable to tragedy, neither mode offers us useful tools for
living here now. Their stories can only delight or terrify us with dreams and
memories that enchant exactly to the degree that they are in fact absent from
the landscapes where we live. We need new language, new descriptions, and,
xvi where we live now
in Thomas Sieverts’s words, “a new subject for our politics.” This book is an
attempt to find them.
Where We Live Now has two purposes. First, to introduce the work of Thomas
Sieverts in an acceptable English translation. Second, to make the case that
indigenous settlement of North Pacific America (see the discussion below)
ought to be studied as urban history, a suggestion that follows directly from
Sieverts’s observations. It is a simple proposal, but a far-reaching one. I believe
it will help change the way we think and talk about cities. Along the way, I
speculate about this story’s meanings, what lessons we might learn from it,
and what worlds lie hidden behind our failure to pursue it … wild speculations,
really, that no responsible historian would ever make. And that is because I am
not a historian, but a writer, unconstrained by the niceties of that profession.
And I am ready for change.
Change is long overdue. We struggle, as Thomas Sieverts points out,
to accept the passing of the old city. Our love for the vibrant, preeminent
urban center blinds us to new forms and paradoxically leads us to burden
what remains of the old city with functions that compromise its historic role.
“Revitalization” turns the center into a planned community of wealthy urban‑
ites feeding an economy of shopping and cultural tourism. Meanwhile, the
periphery turns into a battleground pitting development against nature. The
city’s need (or at least its tendency) to expand outward becomes the enemy
of farms and green space. How did these widely variable elements come to
be fixed in such stark, irresolvable opposition? What common ground or
common purpose can be found?
Where we live now is a dynamic, shifting landscape of all these things:
nature, dense settlement, rich and poor, wild and planned. None of it resembles
the old ideals of city and countryside, despite massive investments of money
and law to force the construction or preservation of these ideals. The land‑
scapes where we live are obstinate and ungainly, spoiling our ideals at every
turn. So how can we live here and understand it, as it is? How can we finally
leave the long, divisive story of the city and the countryside behind us?
An answer lies nascent in Thomas Sieverts’s text, which describes the
hybridity, dynamism, and polycentricity of the landscapes where we live. As
he puts it, “they have both urban and rural characteristics. Where we live lies
between the singular, particular site as geographical-historical event and the
sameness of all space in the global economy; between space as a field of imme‑
diate experience and space as a distance measured solely by time; between
matthew stadler xvii
a still-surviving myth of the city and a countryside just as deeply rooted in
our dreams.” In every way, Sieverts says, this landscape is “in between;” that
is, the once-solid polarities by which we had organized space and place have
collapsed into an entirely new condition. “Following tradition,” Sieverts goes
on, “we still call this sort of development a ‘city.’ Or we designate it with such
abstract concepts as ‘conurbation,’ ‘metro region,’ or ‘urbanized countryside,’
because we realize how inadequately we grasp these spaces with our concept
‘city.’” Uneasy with any existing terms, Sieverts coined the term Zwischenstadt,
which literally means “in-between city.”
Among the many urban historians who have described these landscapes,
Sieverts is neither the best known nor the most influential. His neologism,
Zwischenstadt, is used by European planners; but, despite retaining the origi‑
nal German in extant English and Japanese translations, Zwischenstadt has
not been broadly adopted as a tool by planners elsewhere. Nor has it fueled the
popular imagination the way that other terms, such as “edge city,” have.
Sieverts suffers from his place in-between, catering to neither planners
nor the public, but making a middle ground that beckons both. His insis‑
tence that the professions of architecture and planning alone cannot solve
the problems of the city does not lend itself to easy adoption by planners. Yet
neither does he cede the task to strictly populist solutions. He insists on the
value of a specialist discourse but argues that it cannot function apart from
the realms of art and literature or the public imagination. As in the built
environment itself, these once-solid divisions have collapsed.
All of this follows from Sieverts’s central assertion: that the middle ground,
the new in-between condition, must be articulated. The popular imagination
is the key to better urban planning. If this middle ground, where the work
of planners and the popular imagination find a new common language, is
neglected, then nothing will shift us away from the tragedy of the city and
country and into frank engagement with the landscapes where we live.
Sieverts alone seems to grasp the radical nature of this shift. He is not
content to help planners revise their understanding of the city, but insists
that they rethink that starting place entirely. He acknowledges that while we
mourn the passing of old forms, we must also dispense with them. He has no
appetite for the tragedy of the city. That drama is done. The negation of the city
is terrifying, yet Sieverts insists on nothing less. Better, he turns this negation
into an affirmation of something else, a pattern of settlement at once more
sustainable, more enduring, and more deeply inscribed.
The shortcoming of nearly every other account of the contemporary city is
the unbreakable tether to Marx’s history, to the city as an expression of agricul‑
ture and the emergence of markets, class division, and domination—the story
of town and country. No matter the landscape, all our thoughts and analyses
xviii where we live now
go back to that narrow model of urbanism. And any path forward is charted by
the compass of those lost ideals, obliging us to navigate the future by moving
either away from or back toward them.
But what if change does not happen this way? What if competing logics
and contradictory stories persist, coexisting through time and space, like the
radio signals that fill the ether, silent and unheard until we tune them in?
What other histories lie dormant in the night? This book attempts to recover
one—the story of urban settlement in North Pacific America before the midnineteenth-century arrival of Euro-American “city builders.” It is just one
history, and there may be many more. (The discovery of polycentric urban
settlement dating back 1,500 years, in Upper Xingu, in the Brazilian Amazon,
was announced as this book went to press.) By looking for urbanism where
Marx saw only tribes, we hope to recover a useful history of the landscapes
where we live now.
“North Pacific America” is the name poet Richard Jensen gives to the west
coast of North America, more or less from Sitka down to Brookings, and as
far inland as a car can go in a day. His label is meant to replace old names like
“the Northwest” (a geographical misnomer that stemmed from the Northwest
Fur Company’s early-nineteenth-century monopoly on the region’s furs) or
“Cascadia” (an ecological region defined by certain watersheds that are regu‑
larly and repeatedly contravened by roads, capital, people, and the crossways
movement of nearly everything except fish). North Pacific America was a
coherent cultural region, home to immense, complex trading networks (as
many as 11 distinct language families that nevertheless shared central trade
depots, a common trade language, and a fiat currency that was recognized
across thousands of miles), long before the arrival of Euro-American travelers.
The several dozen nations that lived here before the British and Americans
(and for a long time, with them) shaped an in-between landscape that was a
predecessor to ours today.
Here we find an urban history rich with the interdependency of global and
local forces; the shaping force of flows; the blurring of time and place; and the
inextricable interpenetration of the built environment and nature, of town and
country. This polycentric, dynamic landscape was home to a settled popula‑
tion of more than one hundred thousand. Because they lacked agriculture and
other tropes of European urban life, these settlements have never been looked
at as cities. But the new lens provided by Sieverts and Manuel Castells, among
others, brings the history of where we live now, an urban history, into focus in
these long-enduring patterns of indigenous settlement.
matthew stadler xix
So, what good will this do? As Sieverts points out, the challenges we face
cannot be solved by architects and urban planners alone. If we ask them to
continue building our lost ideals of city and country, they can only extend the
grim pleasure of our tragedy. Instead, we face the considerably harder work of
shedding our ideals and learning new images and patterns. What we lack is
imagination—the ability to articulate new patterns—a problem that is better
addressed through art and literature than through any catalog of acceptable
urban design. History is the scaffold on which art and writing grow.
For the most part, artists and writers have had to choose a nostalgic mode
or work against history. Accounts that run counter to the story of the city and
the country either organize themselves as reactionary or remain incompre‑
hensible. This is a hard position to work from. So long as we write or imagine
against a history—against a shared story of how we came to be—we generate
imitative work, a kind of negative image of that which we react against. Writ‑
ing against history can never change the subject; it can only go on talking
about the same thing, negatively.
This book traces a different history, a new history to work from. It follows
this with the first fruits of the art and literature emerging from it, work that
comes from a positive articulation of a common past. The power of this work,
this shared story (as against the hard struggles of reactionary art that critiques
and inevitably reinforces an oppressive history) is bracing. It is possible that it
could also become liberating.
Tragedy is exhausting. Our spirits need something better. This book is not a
work of scholarship—it is a provocation, a call to historians and writers and
artists to begin the hard work of showing us where we live now. History and
art and literature matter. They are essential instruments for making a better
future, a landscape where we all can live, eyes wide open, without tragedy and
regret.
xx where we live now
Where We Live Now
excerpted from Zwischenstadt: zwischen Ort und Welt,
Raum und Zeit, Stadt und Land, by Thomas Sieverts
translated by Diana George
Where People Live: A Nameless and Indistinct Space
The city has been expanding into the countryside ever since the train, the car,
and electronics broke through the spatial limits once set by the muscle-power
of man and animal. The city’s expansion and the degree of its diffusion have
followed the progress of technologies of communication and transportation.
The railroad lent itself to a radial and linear expansion of the city, the car
filled out land surfaces, and electronics gave rise to a borderless expansion.
These developments in the city’s form rest not only on technical inventions
but also on deep historical causes. Even before the arrival of these technical
inventions, the forces that had formed the compact city and held it together
for 150 or 200 generations—that is, the forces of feudalism and guilds; walls
and markets; temples and churches; priest-kings, knights, and monks—had
already reached their end.
Perhaps the compact city is only an interlude in the long development of
the ways people live together. From the perspective of evolutionary theory,
human beings are among the social primates, preferring to live in lightly
bound groups, out on the open savannah and along the edges of the forest.
The compact, walled-in city would therefore be a historically determined form,
its adoption compelled by historical forces. With the disappearance of those
forces, this form would “naturally” dissolve once again.
Against this, a cultural historian might say that human cultural devel‑
opment in the last five thousand years is inseparably bound up with the
development of the compact city. Therefore the city belongs to the essence of
thomas sieverts 21
humans as cultural beings; with the dissolution of the compact city, human
culture would also be at risk.
Around 1800, the walls surrounding Europe’s cities were taken down and
the moats were filled in; the debate about whether this was an improvement is
as old as the events themselves. From the start, opinion was divided: some citi‑
zens felt that opening the city to the surrounding countryside exposed them
to new threats; others greeted the liberation from crowding and constraint.
Goethe was among those who welcomed the city’s opening:
Even the bigger cities are now taking their walls down, castle moats are being
filled in; cities are now nothing but vast expanses, and a traveller seeing all
this could well believe that universal peace had been secured and the golden
age was at hand. No one feels comfortable in a garden unless it looks like open
countryside; nothing should remind one of artifice, of constraint; we want to
breathe freely.1
Whatever the city dwellers’ reactions may have been back then, this much
is certain: in modernity the world over, the city extends itself into the sur‑
rounding countryside, creating its own form of urbanized countryside or
ruralized city.
Following tradition, we still call this sort of development a “city.” Or we
designate it with such abstract concepts as “conurbation,” “metro region,”
or “urbanized countryside,” because we realize how inadequately we grasp
these spaces with our concept “city,” which calls forth entirely different asso‑
ciations. For lack of a better term, I want to call such a form—consisting of
various tracts of different uses, styles, and topographies—where we live now.2
The landscapes where we live extend into vast areas; they have both urban and
rural characteristics. Where we live lies between the singular, particular site
as geographical-historical event and the sameness of all space in the global
economy; between space as a field of immediate experience and space as a
distance measured solely by time; between a still-surviving myth of the city
and a countryside just as deeply rooted in our dreams.
Where We Live as International Phenomenon
This landscape where we live now, which is neither city nor country but has
characteristics of both, has no suitable name nor is it visually remarkable.
Despite its namelessness it can be found all over the world: with the global‑
ization of capitalist-industrial modes of production, the concomitant ways of
life and land-use patterns have spread everywhere. In-between landscapes of
twenty to thirty million inhabitants have arisen in Asia and South America.
Apart from their massive economic, cultural, and topographical differences,
such in-between landscapes worldwide all share this feature: they bear hardly
any relation to local, preindustrial city forms. Across all the cultures in the
world, the landscapes where we live share these same characteristics: a
seemingly diffuse, unordered structure of varying urban tracts, containing
individual islands of geometrical order; no clear center; and many functionally
differentiated branches, networks, and nodes.
This type of landscape is conspicuous wherever cities have so expanded into
their surrounding environments as to merge into a single metropolitan region,
but they are most clearly found where the traditional historical city-forming
forces were never in effect; for example, in Germany’s Ruhr or in the metropo‑
lises of the Third World. In the landscape where we live, the relation between
wide-open countryside and developed area is often reversed: the countryside
is no longer the surrounding “ground” but has become a delimited “figure.”
Conversely, the developed areas, in their size and openness, have taken on the
character of an all-encompassing landscape. This in-between landscape is a
lived experience; you can call it “city” or “country,” depending on your inter‑
ests and perspective. The causes that give rise to this diffuse form are various,
but everywhere they have this fact in common: the city-forming forces and the
borders they once set have come to an end.
†
Where We Live as Composition
The urban periphery, the urbanized countryside—or, as I call it, where we live
now—is generally seen as a cultural void. The cultural content of the land‑
scape where we live cannot be held up against any existing measures of high
culture or popular culture, of landscape or natural beauty. Nor can its visual
and formal possibilities be grasped in this way. To comprehend and unfold the
in-between landscape’s formal composition, other sources and perspectives
will have to be found.
Between extremes, we find the everyday elements of where we live: colonies
of single-family houses; light-industry tracts comprising the most astonishing
mixture of still-functioning workshops, but also villas, empty sheds, and ware‑
houses; overgrown gardens and abandoned fields; nightclubs and discount
superstores. Also hospitals, stables, and remnants of farms; groves and ponds;
power lines, old train tracks, berms, and footpaths.
thomas sieverts 23
Entry points for an interpretation of and a formal reckoning with where we
live are likely to be found in the concept of the heterogeneous landscape, in
the images of almost incomprehensible milieus, in the experience of time in
its different dimensions, in notions of mood and atmosphere found in many
modern films (in jump cuts, in shifts and disruptions; also in television com‑
mercials that present visual sequences without a narrative thread). These offer
the most fitting models for interpreting where we live now.
Analogies with reading texts of modern literature, or with the experience
of listening to certain types of new music, will perhaps lead us further than
futile attempts to impose order with architecture. Architecture and the way
it shapes a certain type of urban space are merely individual components of
the landscape where we live now (even if they are important components);
architecture can no longer determine the form of the in-between landscape
as a whole.
A concern with the everyday world of the landscape where we live as a
cultural configuration has to draw on a different aesthetics, other than the
tradition of architectural aesthetics. Cultural studies scholar Susanne Hauser
points to this in a different context, one that gets at a very important aspect of
the landscape where we live: the formation of industrial wastelands, and their
interpretation and reevaluation. Here above all a concern with paraesthet‑
ics plays a role, as David Carrol has developed it with reference to Nietzsche,
Lyotard, Foucault, and Derrida. According to Hauser:
“Paraesthetics indicates something like an aesthetics turned against itself, or
pushed beyond or beside itself, a faulty, irregular, disordered, improper aes‑
thetics—one not content to remain within the area defined by the aesthetic.”
[Carrol] The prefix “para-” is thus read in the sense of “by the side of, along‑
side of, past, beyond, to one side, amiss, faulty, irregular, disordered, improper,
wrong.”3
This concept of paraesthetics could open up a perspective on the in-between
landscape’s chaotic wealth of forms; if these forms have been regarded as ugly
according to conventional norms of beauty, they are forms that contemporary
art has already discovered. Hauser again:
A paraesthetic position would sensitize one to a variety of spatial, temporal,
and material transitions between beautiful and ugly, useful and useless, moral
and reprehensible. Therefore, such an understanding continually expands the
margins and borders of the aesthetic understood in the broadest sense, as that
which is socially and culturally perceivable, and charged with significance.
†
Where We Live as the Result of
Countless Individual Rational Decisions
The diffuse city appears unplanned, but it is shaped by countless individual
rational decisions—rational when considered for themselves, at least. A typical
example from an old industrial area: there was a road; then a factory was built
there to process local farm products, say, or mineral resources. The factory
brought worker housing with it, which in turn brought gardens to supply the
workers with food. Next the people needed schools and stores. The growing
labor pool and consumer market brought further developments; social wealth
increased; a basis for further specialization and division of labor arose; more
roadways and public establishments became necessary. And so urban growth
proceeds without any plan, according to the principle that “settlement creates
settlement.”
Another example, this one from the Third World: An old city attracts cityimmigrants who have left their villages for widely varying reasons, or for
several such reasons at once; for example, they leave because of overpopula‑
tion and lack of food, triggered by unemployment, or they hope that city life
will be liberating. These settlers want access to the benefits of the city, and,
at the same time, they want to lead a semiurban, agricultural way of life. The
consequence of these decisions—decisions that are logical in themselves—is
once again an unstructured, open field of settlement between city and coun‑
try, which then develops further, with its own workplaces and stores, into an
independent landscape that is neither city nor country.
Home buyers in Western European cities cause structurally comparable
settlement patterns. These buyers look for properties they can afford, from
which the core city can be reached as easily as the surrounding countryside.
Such decisions, sensible enough in themselves but multiplied many times
over, result in the built-up landscape; at first it is almost entirely residential,
and then, after a period of construction and consolidation, workplaces and
shopping centers come along in its wake. Only then does it become an inbetween landscape, freed from the core city, autonomous, and capable of
mutual trade relations with the core city.
In Germany this development can be seen in statistical analyses like the
following. Small towns are not attracting new inhabitants, even though landuse planning had intended the small towns to function as centers. Instead,
peripheral communities attract new inhabitants. A forecast from the Federal
thomas sieverts 25
Research Institute for Geography and Land-Use Planning states that the bor‑
ders of settled areas will grow by 10 percent a year until 2010 (in contrast to
a growth rate in the urban core of only 4 percent). “It’s becoming clearer and
clearer that the surrounding residential environment is the decisive factor in
choosing where to live, and not, as in the past, proximity to the workplace.”4
In the United States, a similar pattern occurs on a much larger scale. The
catalysts are freeway exits and shopping centers, as well as, for several years
now, huge suburban office parks; these phenomena are at once the results of
settlement activity and the instigators of further settlement. These extensive
in-between landscapes have long since detached themselves from the origi‑
nal cities; indeed, the relationship of dependency is often reversed, and the
residents of the impoverished cities find their jobs in the surrounding land‑
scape.5
Even where planning for major interconnected city expansions would seem
to encourage intense centralization, these newly planned city configurations
become, instead, loosely differentiated and largely decentered fields of settle‑
ment. However they were planned, they are shaped instead by the diffuse and
always changing configurations of everyday life.6
In the sequential development of in-between landscapes, there are interna‑
tionally comparable stages:
After a phase of rapid urbanization, intensified by migration from the country
to the city, a slower phase begins, in which the birth rate is the main cause of
population growth. In later phases, as in Western Europe, the annual urban
growth rate sinks to 1 percent, and the migration rate climbs again; behind
this are the hidden consequences of an aging urban population and the flight
of young families into the attractive outlying towns and villages.7
The initial freedom to choose where to build decreases as time goes on:
space gets filled up, and new developments have to deal with ever-narrowing
boundaries. At some point all the available land is developed and the land‑
scape where we live is “all built up.” Further development can come about only
by increasing density, repurposing developed areas, and renewing abandoned
spaces. Old developments become superfluous; they are repurposed, rebuilt,
and finally abandoned once again. All in all, it is an apparently planless carpet
of settlement, still bearing the marks of old fence lines and waterways and the
remnants of abandoned farms, like a palimpsest in which traces of an older
writing shimmer beneath the new.
The Autonomy of Where We Live
No matter how the causes of urbanization differ all over the world—the coal
and steel industries in the Ruhr in Germany or the Midlands in Great Brit‑
ain; or migration away from the overpopulated provinces, as in India, Africa
and South America; or the trend toward concentration of wealth in private
property and the desire to move to affordable land, as in the United States
and Europe—regardless, the diffuse landscape where we live always unbinds
itself from the core city (if there was a city to begin with) and becomes autono‑
mous.
Common qualities connect Greater Tokyo with the Ruhr, Mexico City with
Bombay, and São Paolo with BosWash (the single conurbation between Boston
and Washington). Even Greater Stuttgart or the Rhine-Main area could be
characterized as in-between landscapes. Such differences as there are concern
variations in residential density and traffic congestion. The in-between land‑
scapes of the Third World are denser and more concentrated than the diffuse
form of in-between landscapes in the industrialized world. In comparison
with the Third World’s gigantic in-between landscapes of twenty million or
more inhabitants, perhaps we should view the increasingly fused-together
developed areas of Germany as a single in-between landscape.8
What Karl Ganser said about the Emscher region now holds true for all the
cities of the world, as soon as they surpass a certain size threshold or whenever
they arise where city-forming forces are no longer in effect. For example, in
the Ruhr:
This 800-square-kilometer settlement-band [ … ] is essentially completely
developed. It is an in-between landscape that does not correspond to our image
of a city or to our nostalgia for unspoiled countryside. Faced with an immedi‑
ate future of limited growth potential, we cannot simply remake the existing
settlement patterns. We must take them as given and precipitate out their
hidden qualities.9
In every in-between landscape, open space and settled space interpenetrate
one another. A common characteristic of these landscapes is the continual
attempt to realize what I call the “Tucholsky principle”—by analogy with
Tucholsky’s poem “The Ideal,” which apostrophizes someone who longs to
have a house located simultaneously on the streets of Berlin and the shores
of the Baltic Sea. The Tucholsky principle attempts to unite opposites, to take
thomas sieverts 27
part in both society and nature, to connect the country idyll with modern
urban comfort.10 The early socialists Owen and Fourier also strove to unite
the urban center with the open countryside, as did the city-planning reform‑
ers Ildefons Cerdá and Ebenezer Howard, and the visionary architects Frank
Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and, in Germany, Ludwig Hilberseimer.11 Today,
the everyday practices of countless homebuyers continue these tendencies,
leading to a maximal use of the border areas between settled space and open
countryside. These ecologically important border areas that attracted our pri‑
mate ancestors have lately captured the interest of mathematicians who have
tried to plot urban growth in terms of fractals.12 Their provocative results show
that firstly, at the macrolevel of the metropolitan regions, the patterns of urban
growth and of distribution of variously sized settlements are very similar all
over the world, and secondly, as with fractals, these patterns are self-similar
at various scales. These patterns occur almost independently of political, cul‑
tural, and socioeconomic context.
In Germany, these near-universal patterns are shaped by a particular form
of municipal self-governance and its relation to migration patterns:
The developments are urged on by immigration and segregation, over which
town planning has no power. These are also the problems that the inhabit‑
ants themselves cause by their individual decisions, and, simultaneously, these
same inhabitants feel the effects. Therefore, it would be more meaningful not
to define town planning as the attempt to negate such tendencies, but rather to
presuppose them as the conditions for solving these problems.
Moreover, developments are shaped by the fact that each municipality, vil‑
lage, and incorporated area must look out for its own interests. In competition
with one another, municipalities tend to exploit the fact of their location on the
periphery of settlement-centers, pushing for expansions of the periphery that
redound to their advantage. Town planning is powerless here—at least in terms
of “regional planning.” And it cannot be otherwise, so long as the separate
municipalities of one conurbation do not coalesce into a single governmental
unit. But to do so, each particular municipality would need to largely give up
its political existence or expand it, as the case may be, and such things are not
likely.13
Not only is planning restricted to the municipal level; lack of public funds
also sets narrow limits for planning. With the shrinking of public funds for
infrastructure and public works, regional planning is losing another of its last
instruments for an effective, active influence on regional growth.
The In-Between Landscape and the Countryside
While significantly similar phenomena occur on the macrolevel of the inbetween landscape (no matter how they may vary politically and culturally),
on the microlevel of three-dimensional building structures, there are socio‑
economically determined differences. These differences can be ranged along a
scale provided by the theoretical models of the 1920s and 30s: between Le Cor‑
busier’s ville radieuse and the early Hilberseimer’s “Metropolis Architecture”
at one end of the scale and, at the other, Wright’s and the later Hilberseimer’s
designs for U.S. cities. The density of built spaces and the degree of largegrained or fine-grained interpenetration with open space determine the
character of each particular in-between landscape. Asian cities tend ever more
toward Hilberseimer’s Metropolis Architecture; American cities are polarized
as either Metropolis or Wright’s “Broadacre City”; German cities are a mixed
form, combining ville radieuse and Broadacre City. The in-between landscape
can develop a multitude of settlement patterns and building styles, so long
as it remains legible in its network and so long as it remains embedded in
its surrounding landscape like an archipelago in the sea. The surrounding
landscape must become the real connective tissue of where we live now. In
assessing and evaluating the in-between landscape, interpretations differ.
Whenever anyone brings up “sprawl”—which is really more of a transforma‑
tion of the landscape—as an argument against where we live, you have to keep
in mind that for every kind of city, for the compact centralized city as much
as for the garden city, open countryside is an indispensable component, even
where its use character has changed from providing farmland to providing
ecological balance and recreation.
Even cities with large populations, such as Shanghai or Calcutta, were
until recently so compact, so residentially and commercially dense, that mere
handcarts and pedicabs could easily supply them with daily produce from
the surrounding countryside. The square acreage of Mexico City (which has
roughly 20 million inhabitants) corresponds to that of Berlin (with 3.5 million
inhabitants).14 In nineteenth-century Berlin, inhabitants of the compact resi‑
dential neighborhood could reach their garden plots out in the green spaces
on foot or bicycle. When one takes into account the open space that is actually
part of the total urban acreage, the apparent differences in density of various
cities and neighborhoods become similarities. Even the Märkische quarter
in 1960s Berlin, by our standards an incredibly dense urban neighborhood,
turns out to have had an average density when its necessary complement of
open space and recreational areas is taken into account.
thomas sieverts 29
Freedom to Develop vs. Adaptability and
Conservation of Resources
For landscapes where we live in mature industrial societies, specific condi‑
tions hold sway: on the one hand, there is a multitude of activities, and on the
other, a great deal of freedom in the choice of where to locate those activities.
In the late-industrial and post-industrial landscapes where we live, density is
low and building mass is large. Looked at rationally and economically, there
is just too much built space, especially because this space is in use for only
a short part of the day or of the year. The question is whether we can afford
the burdens of running, maintaining, repairing, and renovating these inbetween landscapes, as well as supplying them with energy, or whether these
unsupportable burdens will force us to find more economical forms of the
landscapes where we live. In principle, we have a lot of freedom to choose
where to locate buildings, functions, and green spaces; with the decline of
location-specific heavy industry and the rise of the service industry, with roads
and utilities almost everywhere, the restrictions on location have loosened.
Functions and structures could be developed in accordance with a region’s
natural and cultural advantages, as well as socioeconomic conditions (prices
and costs) and sociocultural desires (lifestyle and buying power). The latter
are changing profoundly. Reduced work hours and days-long blocks of free
time during the week, a shortened working life in the form of lengthened
education at the beginning and early retirement at the end, as well as work‑
ing from home—all these are altering the travel patterns between life in the
country and work in the city. This will facilitate a further spatial separation of
work and home (except for a few middle-rank contract workers), rather than
facilitating mixed uses.
The developments just sketched tend toward a further expansion of, and
further segregation of land uses within, the landscapes where we live. This
could have the effect that the resulting city structures, because of their trans‑
portation costs, resource consumption, and monofunctional use patterns, can
no longer adapt to a deep structural transformation.
With the aid of electronics, increased freedom in location of urban func‑
tions could permit mixed uses and dense city structures. Making use of all the
possibilities of telecommunications could lead to a less commuting-oriented
way of life, thereby minimizing transportation volume. The in-between land‑
scape could enable this type of city structure, though this would presuppose
a different lifestyle. The question remains open, how and whether we could
succeed at preparing our cities today for what appears to be a likely future: a
structural transformation caused by drastically reduced resources.
In the near future, half the world’s population will inhabit in-between
landscapes. These structures will often be so large, with populations of ten
to thirty million, that inhabitants never have occasion to leave the in-between
landscape in the course of their daily lives. All the needs of everyday life will
have to be met within the borders of the in-between landscape, including the
production of food in an urban farming economy. The urban fields of the inbetween landscape also have to maintain ecological balance; the in-between
landscape will not have any “outside spaces” to offset ecological imbalances.
The fate of the in-between landscape is the fate of humanity. No country
has an inborn advantage here; every culture can learn from the others. In
this respect, the division of the world into First, Second, and Third Worlds
becomes ever more harmful, and we in the so-called First World must climb
down from the arrogant role of teacher and enter into dialogue to learn from
other cultures.15 This holds particularly true under the conditions of economic
and ecological scarcity with which the First World will have to come to grips,
either voluntarily or in response to catastrophes, when it is left to get by on
only its share of global resources.
Economic globalization transforms the world into a system of interlinked
pipes. The export of jobs and capital is linked to the import of poverty, which
will force us to drastically alter our way of life. Already in the foreseeable
future, the border between rich and poor will not be drawn between North
and South; it will run straight through all the cities of the world, and the First
World will not be exempt.
Despite the worldwide spread of the in-between landscape, until now all the
cultures of the world have stood helpless before the task of conceptualizing it.
We lack concepts, for several reasons:
• The landscape where we live has no identity of its own, neither in the imagi‑
nations of its inhabitants nor as a field for politics.
• The task can no longer be solved with the traditional means of city-building
and architecture. New paths must be taken, but these are still unclear.
• Our fascination with the myth of the city distorts our perception of the
periphery's realities.
thomas sieverts 31
The Distorting Myth of the City
In view of the much-maligned expansion of the city into surrounding areas,
there is a massive campaign in favor of the traditional, densely packed Euro‑
pean city, with its mixed uses, its land-parcel structure, and its public places
delineated by the walls of buildings; all this is upheld as the sole model for
contemporary city-building.16 Perfectly good arguments are advanced: a dense
city saves energy because of its relatively small square acreage and its large
building mass; it optimizes the use of built space, especially when uses with
different daylight needs are stacked vertically on a single plot of land. Den‑
sity and mixed uses make short travel routes possible. Mixed uses, again in
combination with density, lead to lively public spaces and rich experiences,
especially for children. Finally, density creates an unmistakable, contrast-rich
delineation between city and countryside.
Despite all these plausible advantages, today we can build a new city of this
type (or a new city neighborhood of this type) only as an exception. The social,
economic, cultural, and political conditions have changed too profoundly.
All attempts (and I say this though I myself believed in them until recently)
to make the image and structure of the historical European city directly into
the universal and binding model for the future are, in my opinion, destined to
fail. I will go even further and say that it is not a question of coolly taking note
of the situation, but rather of bidding farewell to this well-loved image, and
doing so with a proper measure of disillusioned mourning. In bidding farewell
to an image so sought-after in the midst of the current boom in city-tourism,
an image so inexhaustible in its cultural complexity, we would do well to keep
the following in mind: Love for the city is a relatively recent phenomenon. The
era of contempt for the city lies only one generation back.
Bidding farewell to the city, mourning it, and reinterpreting its history also
mean standing up for the preservation and—where it has been destroyed—
rebuilding of this historical city-form that will never come again. Wherever
possible, we should do everything we can to maintain existing old cities in
their present form, to protect and preserve them, to take care that they are not
distorted by uses that destroy their urban fabric, hollow it out, or even erase it,
as is happening today almost everywhere.
I remember my astonishment and alarm when I found out, in the course
of a planning study for a city center that dated from the Middle Ages, that the
ground-floor tenants of these ancient buildings had removed the staircases in
order to gain three more square meters of commercial space and a meter-anda-half of display window. The upper floors were reachable only by a vertical
climb up a set of iron rungs affixed to the rear wall of the building. The empty
rooms were fitted out with curtains and lights in simulation of “life.” It wasn’t
worth trying to use those floors anymore.17 Here it is fitting to mention that
a few years ago the retailers along Frankfurt’s der Zeil (the Row), the high‑
est-volume shopping street in Germany, offered to take over from the city of
Frankfurt all responsibility for maintenance and supervision of this street,
and especially to disburden the police of the duty to maintain order there.18
This is precisely the type of inner-city decay that must be fought against.
Wherever the particular cultural, social, and economic conditions allow it,
we should demand new forms of the dense, mixed-use city, as, for example,
the rebuilding of the Lower New City of Kassel.19 But Kassel was an excep‑
tional case, a delayed rebuilding of an inner-city expansion on the grounds
of the old city; such exceptional cases could be of general use only if certain
characteristics of our society were fundamentally reversed, if private and per‑
sonal mobility, as well as the desire for natural beauty and a great deal of
private space, were to become available to a much broader spectrum of the
population.
In practice, these approaches help us to make progress only in exceptional
cases. As models for planning, these approaches fail when confronted with
the reality of the in-between landscape—and today the in-between landscape
is by far the larger part of the city. In fact, a one-sided love for the old city is the
main reason we repress the challenge presented by unloved suburbia.
This too-powerful image of the old city, which is becoming an empty cari‑
cature of itself, doubly distorts our view of the reality of our cities today, in
which the historic downtown comprises a mere fragment of the overall city.
The power of the old city becomes suddenly clear in the following thought
experiment: we cannot imagine a city we know, even a city we grew up in,
without its downtown, although the built space outside downtown is ten times
as big.
This fixation on the old city calls forth prejudices in observing and evaluat‑
ing the suburbs and the periphery. Here, without really looking closely, we
speak dismissively, using derogatory terms such as “suburban sprawl,” “can‑
cerous growth,” “overdevelopment,” “overuse,” and “wasteland.”
This tangled mass of prejudices distorts our view not only of the peripheral
space of the landscape where we live, but also of the present reality of our city
centers. If we do not content ourselves with gazing at the cladding on the old
historical façades, but take a closer look, we see that the historical downtowns
increasingly resemble suburban shopping malls. High rents and the compe‑
tition with shopping malls in suburban green spaces mean that only chain
stores and highly profitable services can afford to be located downtown. At the
same time as the closeout sale on bourgeois culture, everyday city life is driven
out of downtown; gone are handicrafts and the many varieties of trade, as well
as anything strange or unique. With the help of specially tasked city planners,
thomas sieverts 33
the historical downtown is quietly transformed into a perfectly ordinary shop‑
ping mall. The burden of downtown, to bear the identity of the entire city,
grows as the balance between city core and periphery shifts ever further in
the direction of the periphery. The identity-structure known as “the city” is
overburdened and collapsing.
Therefore we must not love our downtowns to death, filling them up with
pseudohistorical buildings and overburdening them with supposedly urban
functions, for example, a demand for retail stores at any cost. This leads to
the destruction of the city. If we want to protect the old city, we must, on the
contrary, use all available resources to support urban living. We must open
“downtown” functions in new urban fields in other parts of the city as well,
to reduce the pressure on the historical downtown. Such new urban fields
offer a chance for the in-between landscape to become independent from the
old city.
If we want to recognize and accept the entire city in its reality—and that is
the minimal requirement for a thoughtful relationship to it—then we must
work through a set of concepts that are weighed down with beautiful old
images; we need to test these concepts for their current validity. We will have
to clear away a lot of rhetorical debris to regain access to the reality of the
city. It’s a matter of simple things, and of connections we usually forget or
repress.20
†
Testing the Concepts
The following five concepts will be examined for their validity as tools for
understanding and working on the city. They all play an important role in
the current theoretical and political discussions of urban planning: urbanity,
centrality, density, mixed use, and ecology. In a certain sense (a sense oriented
toward the old city), they characterize the “good city.” All these concepts have
a long history, which will only be gestured toward here; what matters is how
they are used today.
These five key concepts are interconnected, and they refer to one another,
and yet it is worthwhile to consider them separately, because they each accen‑
tuate particular aspects of the discussion.
Urbanity
A key concept of the discussion is urbanity. The concept of urbanity, as developed
by Edgar Salin in particular, is best described as a quality of the enlightened
bourgeois city; urbanity designates a sociocultural form of living and not a
quality of a particular urban spatial structure. Where urbanity holds sway, city
inhabitants treat strangers and one another alike in a tolerantly cosmopolitan
way.21 Today the concept of urbanity is often limited to the mere image of the
dense nineteenth-century city; the loss of urbanity is decried, and it is said that
city planning ought to see to it that urbanity is restored. In this general dis‑
cussion, a somewhat flat and vague but still very suggestive concept of social
urbanity comes into play. Here urbanity means, in contrast to provincialism,
an atmosphere of cosmopolitanism, tolerance, intellectual engagement, and
curiosity. However, in our imaginations, this social concept of urbanity is still
too tightly connected with the image of bustling commercial streets, squares,
and marketplaces, the image of lively discussions in coffeehouses, the image
of a seductive abundance of commodities and services. The concept of urban‑
ity is still not connected closely enough to a specific cosmopolitan way of life.
In the image of the city one notices the essential deficit. Lacking a dense and
lively street life, we often force the built urbanity of streets, with continuous
façades, squares, and avenues to stand in for lived urbanity.
Urbanity is largely historically determined. It is based not on social and
political qualities but on an idealized image of the bourgeois European city
of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, as recorded in novels and
travel writing. The early sociological studies of Georg Simmel and others,
however, viewed this type of urbanity very critically.22 We may decry the flat‑
tening of the concept of urbanity into a mere caricature, but this caricature
still has a powerful influence. Today this ideal image of urbanity is stripped
of beggars and thieves, of the pillory and the gallows, all of which had marked
the mood of the eighteenth-century city at least as much as any enthusiastic
bustling about in markets and squares. All that remains is a chemically puri‑
fied image of urbanity.
The street scenes recorded in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel
writing show us a density of street life that is nearly unimaginable today;
in Central Europe we experience it only during large outdoor festivals like
Oktoberfest in Munich. We can also experience this dense street life in its
preindustrial form in developing countries; this type of urbanity is the central
component in today’s booming city-tourism. But precisely there it is apparent
that the preindustrial form is to be read as an expression of a certain socioeco‑
nomic situation, even an underdevelopment. We Europeans would not be able
to stand such a way of life for very long.
thomas sieverts 35
An entertaining description of the difficulty of life under conditions of
urban density and mixed uses in my home city of Hamburg is given in the
Booklet of the Swans on the Elbe (Elbschwanenbüchlein) by the local Baroque
poet and Imperial Count Palatine of Wedel, Johann Rist (1606–1667); Rist
was writing in the seventeenth century, but conditions were still not much
different at the beginning of the nineteenth century:
During the recent war, I had to spend time in the world-famous city of Ham‑
burg, where I experienced the stark difference between city life and country
life. I lived in one of the most fashionable streets, which was also the city’s main
thoroughfare. There was an endless coming and going of carts and wagons,
early and late; they often met head on, and because they could not easily get past
one another in the narrow street, the drivers cursed so foully that I thought the
rooftops would collapse under this blasphemy and bury us all. In the large and
spacious building in which I lived, sugar was processed, which caused a great
deal of activity; night and day the employees hauled sugar upstairs and down,
making a constant racket. My next-door neighbor on the right was a goldsmith;
on the left was a coppersmith who was also, in addition to coppersmithing,
having some construction done in his home. The noise those carpenters made
all day can well be imagined; then too the incessant hammering and banging,
now from the goldsmith, now from the coppersmith, from early in the morn‑
ing until late at night, were enough to drive anyone mad. Across the street from
me was a spur-maker who scratched away with his files until my head ached;
I often wished he would take his files to Augsburg and sit with them there in
the market all day long. Worst of all, during this time I was confined to my bed
in unbelievable pain, owing to a leg injury I had sustained in an accident; for
weeks at a time I never left the house. When at last I left the city and returned
to my own place in the country, even though I found it devastated, havocked,
and plundered, I still thought it a heaven compared to the hell I had left behind
me, so vexatious was that noisy city life.23
Thus life in the alluring, romantic destinations of today’s Third-World citytourism, as well as street life and pub life in European cities of the nineteenth
century, can be seen as the other side of some very harsh living and working
conditions. Would we really want to live as our great-grandparents did, and
have to flee our cramped living quarters for the only open space available to us,
the street? And use a pub as our extended living room? To put it another way:
the much-maligned loss of urbanity in our European cities is also the direct
consequence of vastly improved living and working conditions; many activities
that were once displaced into public or semipublic space can now be done in
our apartments, offices, and workshops. Loss of urbanity, for us, goes hand
in hand with liberation from intrusive social control; loss of urbanity brings
greater individual freedom and latitude. The loss is part of an emancipation
from economic, social, and natural constraints. This emancipation has its eco‑
logical and social price; we do not know exactly how long we will still be able
to afford it. The liberation from the old historical constraints has so far led to
a continuous spatial “thinning” of social activities. In the course of a genera‑
tion, the living and working space needed for each city inhabitant has doubled;
residential space alone has grown in the last few decades at least half a square
meter every year, and the automation of production has increased the ratio of
surface area per employee. Any improvement in the standard of living—beyond
certain basic needs—is increasingly invested in private property. If we compare
today’s density of living space and working space with the idealized conditions
of the nineteenth century, we see that cities then were four to five times as
dense as they are now. (Meaning, those nineteenth-century cities approached
the density of today’s Third-World cities.) This thinning of possibilities for
spontaneous social contact is strikingly clear in the following observation. In
the street, children are so unlikely to randomly come upon other children of
the same age to play with that other forms of meeting and play have had to be
devised; the children call each other on their phones.
The social significance of public space as that which holds people together
has weakened today. Existentially, public space is hardly necessary any longer.
As political gathering place and as space for affirming solidarity, public space
is still occasionally needed for demonstrations—really it is irreplaceable for
this purpose. But all other activities that were once done in public space have
migrated away, into bigger, more comfortable apartments and workplaces, into
specialized clubs and leisure facilities, into shops and department stores. What
was once necessary for survival—the mutual aid of neighbors—has today been
replaced by society-wide insurance against fire, sickness, and emergencies.
Today’s city residents can choose their social contacts independently of their
city’s density, less according to proximity or neighborhood and more according
to nonspatially mediated interests and desires.
This development toward a transspatial orientation could be slowed down,
perhaps: one could increase “spatial resistance” by slowing down the expansion
of the highway system and raising the cost of driving a car, thereby increas‑
ing the value of spatial proximity. But the overall trend cannot be reversed. It
would already be quite an achievement to make better use of buildings’ full
capacity by temporally staggering activities in different shifts; use-density and
contact-density would thereby increase. However, despite the loss of immediate
social significance, despite the thinning of uses, and despite the development
of transspatial orientation, public space remains the foundational framework:
only through public space can the landscape where we live be perceived and
thomas sieverts 37
comprehended. As an experiential framework and as a sign of identity, public
space is more important than ever for the comprehensibility and legibility of
this landscape.
The image of the old urbanity and its public space is still so attractive that
for decades now it has been artificially staged; for example, in the creation of
leisure-time shopping experiences in downtown pedestrian zones and subur‑
ban shopping malls. Everyday life is staged.24
If, on the one hand, the undiminished attraction of the shopping-center
experience seems to indicate a hunger for urbanity, and if, on the other hand,
we cannot be satisfied with urbanity as staged by retailers, what practical
significance can the concept of urbanity still have today? What aspects of its
broader significance are still relevant for the city of today and tomorrow? We
don’t want to do without urbanity, even in its purified form, cleansed of all dirt
and suffering, because that would mean completely giving up on an important
characteristic of the European city. Therefore we must make an effort to create
new forms and new spaces of urbanity.
To that end, it has to be stated that qualities like cosmopolitanism, intel‑
lectual engagement, tolerance, and curiosity are not bound forever to specific,
historically determined forms of space; they can also arise in other spaces,
spaces that are publicly accessible and have the room and atmosphere for
encounters. These are the spaces that the American social philosopher Michael
Walzer would like to call “open-minded spaces” (in contrast to “single-minded
spaces”). In this sense many American university campuses surpass the
urbanity of European city centers. It must also be noted that today, if we look
more closely at markets and squares, street cafés and festivals, there are forms
of sociality in public space to which we can ascribe urban qualities if we do
not set the cultural bar too high. These forms of sociality are to be promoted
and supported, if not created, by means of designated spatial and functional
arrangements.
Perhaps the staging of urbanity is unavoidable; it may even be an oppor‑
tunity for city cultural policy. Today urbanity requires special occasions on
which to make itself manifest. This task, however, cannot be left to the retail
stores. We must take this task seriously as an essential part not only of cultural
policy, but also of sports policy; it is important to engage people who are oth‑
erwise not reached by culture. Urbanity has, even in Europe, changed from an
existential fact of life to a cultural goal to be striven for. Perhaps there must
be, alongside the theater directors, city directors who will stage the public
spaces of the city.25 This need not mean a complete “festivalization” of politics,
in which any policy area that cannot be effectively staged is neglected. “City as
stage” must not eclipse the other two meanings, “city as workshop” and “city
as home.”26
There is obviously another industrially developed culture with a high stan‑
dard of living in which—in an entirely different form—we still find forms of
the old urbanity: in the Japanese metropolis. Here in the richest industrial
nation of the world, the density of living space and working space is so intense,
due to the high cost of land, that many activities that in Europe are considered
private take place there in public or in semipublic institutions: bathing, eating,
entertaining friends, amusing oneself, and even lovemaking occur in semi‑
public spaces, often in very luxurious spaces.27 Could this type of urbanity be
a model for us? I am skeptical, because even in Japan these uses of space are
declining as the standard of living rises. We will examine the principle of dis‑
placing certain functions from the home into public space when we examine
the concept of mixed use.
Centrality
Closely connected with the concept of urbanity is the concept of centrality. Cen‑
trality is to be understood not just geometrically; it also connotes significance,
importance, and power. The idea of a center designates a place where you find
everything essential, a place from which all the major developments begin.
In a metaphorical sense, our inner orientation probably also functions by
means of “central places” where we store our knowledge so we can find it
again. Almost every traditional form of order makes use of stepwise, hierarchi‑
cal levels. The official planning system of Germany, for example, is based on
a coordinated, pyramid-shaped system of central places. The system of cities
and of city centers is ideally interpreted, and normatively planned, as a clas‑
sical, hierarchical tree-structure. This corresponds to Ludwig Erhard’s image
of an ordered, structured society, which fits in with a likewise hierarchically
ordered system of administration.
The classification of cities in accordance with a hierarchical principle of
central places of varying rank was nothing more than their subsumption
under an idealized principle of order. In the preindustrial era and long into
the industrial era itself, hierarchical order made many things simpler and was
a rational instrument of national planning. Since then, hierarchical order has
become outmoded. The reality behind the concepts of center and centrality
has already dissolved and become part of other ordering structures. For a long
time now cities have no longer been, if they ever were, organized according to
a hierarchical tree-structure. The city-system should be understood, instead,
as a network with nodes.28
thomas sieverts 39
In such a network, ideally all parts are equal; in principle there is no pri‑
oritizing hierarchy. Each part of the city can take on central tasks (that is,
tasks that are unique or at least not ubiquitous), but each city-part also retains
its ordinary qualities, performing the tasks that are undertaken everywhere
else. This ideal constellation holds true for our cities today only in exceptional
cases; for the most part, we still have to deal with pronounced central forma‑
tions of varying kinds, and that is all to the good.
For many reasons and for a long time now, the evolution of our cities has
been tending toward a deconstruction of spatial hierarchies of centrality, in
favor of more spatially self-similar, evenly distributed specializations of func‑
tion and of labor.
In the competition between cities, the city structure is quietly and surrepti‑
tiously migrating from the city to the urbanized countryside. Inevitably, as it
migrates, this city structure is gradually forced to give up its familiar historical
stamp and its familiar legibility between the poles of center and periphery.
With the dissolution of the concept of center, the concept of periphery also
loses its meaningful content, especially as the periphery enriches itself with a
wide variety of centers.
This tendency is sometimes sharply criticized; it is said that it leads to a
hollowing-out of the city center, that it worsens overdevelopment and erases
the boundary between city and countryside.29 Politicians and administrators
therefore try to work against it, without being able to do much more than slow
down a powerful trend that is driven by intercity competition.
An in-between landscape that is structured as a network has, rather than
just one big functional center corresponding to the historical city core, numer‑
ous functionally and symbolically varied centers, which complement one
another and which together comprise the in-between landscape’s essence as
a city.
Here there is a hidden danger of making terrible mistakes: currently, the
trend is toward ever-larger monofunctional specialized centers for shopping
and leisure—sealed-off worlds separated by parking lots whose vast asphalt
slopes recall the scarp-and-counterscarp structure of ancient fortifications.30
Without the integration of everyday functions into these centers, and with‑
out making these centers accessible by anything but cars, the city becomes
almost uninhabitable for many women, children, teenagers, and old people,
because the majority of the population—though this fact is again and again
repressed—does not have recourse to a car. Therefore politics must aim at
minimizing the use of the car.
The question of forming concepts of center and centrality that are adequate
to today’s conditions must therefore be answered anew. The single center, in
which all essential city institutions are combined, will no longer exist; none‑
theless, a city needs a center that stands for its essence. Paradoxically, this
center will become, in a time of functional transformation, all the more stable
and significant the fewer functions it has and the more it is symbolically
charged with a wealth of meanings and an open capacity for various interpre‑
tations. A good example—though it is not from an in-between landscape—is
the ruin of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin. Although it is
of little architectural value and basically nonfunctional, it is the unquestion‑
able center of West Berlin, precisely because it is effectively functionless and
therefore has a wealth of meanings. This became particularly clear when the
architect Egon Eiermann built his modern church with its modern tower right
next to it; naturally he wanted to tear down the ugly, old, useless ruin. There
was a widespread protest across all levels of society, although only the very old
could still connect the church’s name with an experience of the Imperial era.
For the generation that was older than sixty, the broken spire was and still is
a last reminder of the war and the nighttime bombings; for the forty- to fiftyyear-olds it was a sign of the postwar reconstruction era; and for the young it
was the last space of freedom in the midst of a commercialized world. In the
1960s, it would be occupied by hippies and flower children, and today it is still
a meeting place for outsiders and the young.
Density
The third concept, important alongside urbanity and centrality, and separable
from them only for purposes of analysis, is density. In recent years dense
development has been held up as universally desirable. Only through dense
development can urbanity be combined with the growth limits necessary for
protection of the natural environment, or so it is claimed.31
This argument, at first glance so self-evident, is to be met with skepticism
because it rests on a mass of unproved assumptions. The concept of density is
used undifferentiatedly in discussions of city planning, but we must differen‑
tiate clearly between built density (so-and-so-much surface and mass of built
space per unit of settled area), spatio-visual density (the degree of discernible
spatial enclosure), and social density (quantity and quality of possible social
contacts per unit of settlement). These three dimensions of density correlate
with one another only in a particular way; the discussion of urbanity already
hinted at the discrepancy between spatial and social density. Certain forms of
built density work against the frequency and quality of social contact, as, for
example, the concentration of many apartments around an elevator in a highrise building.
thomas sieverts 41
But even the relation between built density and spatio-visual density is rela‑
tively indistinct. Low-rise buildings permit smaller gaps and therefore more
intimate spatial structures. The secret to the spatial design of the beloved
medieval city lies in the fact that the closed spaces of the narrow treeless
streets stood directly across from broad, garden-like courtyards; these court‑
yard spaces were filled up only later. The original density of the medieval
city was very moderate. Of course there can be a close correlation between
spatio-visual and social density, if the buildings, with their window “eyes” and
their entryways like theater loges, are all oriented toward the common social
space of the street. The social quality is not dependent on absolute density; it
depends rather on the spatial arrangement of that density.32
High density is also demanded in a still broader context: that of the eco‑
logically sensitive integration of the city into the surrounding countryside.
It is claimed that only with high density can we save valuable building land
and minimize sprawl. This is a widely held view, which nevertheless is true
only in a limited sense. This much is clear from the experience of the 1920s:
increasing the built density is worthwhile only up to a certain moderate limit,
beyond which it contributes hardly anything to the effort to save land; beyond
a certain point, built density actually worsens living conditions.
There are simple reasons for this. Each city dweller takes up a certain
amount of the overall settled area. Only 40 or 50 percent of the land each city
dweller needs is residential building land. The remainder is taken up by work,
transportation, services, and common facilities. In such a pattern of land use,
if you increase the average residential density by half, you save only 10 to 12
percent of the overall settled area, and that at the cost of qualitatively damaging
the conditions in the most humanly sensitive part of the city, the residential.
As building density increases, the land thereby saved also decreases, and the
cost of that savings becomes ever more questionable.
This is not a brief on behalf of detached single-family houses, but on behalf
of a thoroughly moderate increase in density, somewhat on the order of den‑
sity one finds among tightly packed, low-slung buildings, or among three- and
four-story row houses with small yards.
An appropriate level of density for the landscape where we live would have
to increase from today’s utilization level (gross built surface per unit of land)
of approximately 0.2 to 0.3 for the usual detached single-family houses and
0.4 to 0.6 for row houses and duplexes. In view of the great need for buildingland, an appropriate utilization level could reduce the need for building-land
by half, without impairing the quality of the housing.33
Built density in the city is also demanded from the point of view of pro‑
tecting land. This is clearly a problematic argument, because it gets itself
entangled in multiple conflicts. Ecological balance on the plot of building-land
itself can be realized only at a gross built surface ratio of at most 0.8. If built
density increases beyond that, the ground becomes overwhelmingly “sealed
off” or overbuilt. The principle of building density, which makes it possible
to balance the environmental impact on the building site itself, runs into a
conflict due to the scarcity of land parcels and the rising cost of land. Thus
the demand for many tall buildings runs into ever-sharper conflict with the
demand to use land sparingly and economically.
In Germany this conflict is well illustrated in the Statutory Code on Con‑
struction and Building (Baugesetzbuch) of July 1, 1987. In paragraph 1, section
5, the stated goal is to use land sparingly and also to protect it. At first, every‑
one would agree to this goal without a doubt. On closer observation, however,
difficulties arise as soon as one takes both concepts literally. For example,
how is one to judge the law’s demand if high building density minimizes the
area of land needed but compels a complete paving-over of the land until no
more natural land remains? Is this not rather a matter of the conceptual pair
“surface-sparing but simultaneously land-destroying”? Conversely, a minimal
building density could, under the right circumstances, be carried out in an
extremely land-protecting way, though certainly not in a land-plot-sparing way.
Here it’s a matter of the opposite conceptual pair, “land-protecting but surfacewasting.”
The linked concepts in the German land-use law, at first so self-evident,
are in open conflict with one another. That can probably be traced back to
the fact that despite their common ecological goals, the two concepts have
different origins. The demand for surface-sparing methods of building is the
older one; it goes back to the overdevelopment discussions, to the discussion of
the “great landscape destruction,” and to old debates about the optimal use of
infrastructure; besides that, it is a function of the rising cost of land. “Surface”
is here meant in the macro dimension of both the land parcel and the overall
surface of the landscape. The demand for surface-sparing methods of build‑
ing has aesthetic as well as economic overtones. By contrast, the demand for
land-protecting methods of building is much more recent; it goes back to the
discussion of land conservation, which thematized the land in its deep and
micro dimensions. The concept is in the background of public discussion of
the popularized concept of sprawl. “Sprawl” seems so immediately clear that
everyone connects to it other equally current concepts like “development as
environmental destruction” and “suburban wasteland” and “concrete jungle.”
Therefore, the concepts “land-protecting” and “surface-sparing” are not
very helpful on their own, unless they are further qualified. Both the protect‑
ing and the sparing stem from the wide range of the ecological debates, but
their incompatibility points to deep, unresolved conflicts within the ecology
movement itself.34 The Swiss deal with the conflict between land-protecting
thomas sieverts 43
and surface-sparing with the lovely concept of practicing “good housekeeping
with the land,” which can be interpreted in place-specific ways.
The principle of ecological balance would have to be demonstrated on the
settled land itself, or in immediate functional interdependence with it, because
many important ecological interactions have only a limited range, for example,
the air currents that are so important for city climate and which can be halted
by even minimal barriers. If you combine this rule with the principle that a
relaxing landscape should be only a short walk away, strict limits are set to the
extent of high-density, sealed-off tower-block developments.
If one wants to spare building-ground—very sensible and necessary—then
one must begin with workplaces, because these are the biggest expanses of land
in reserve. But the economy militates against this. As communities compete
for workplaces, no city in Germany has yet been able to compel its commercial
and trade sectors to use dense building methods, and to undertake production
and storage in high-rise buildings. On the contrary, business expands into the
surrounding edge communities that make no such demands; moreover, by
subsidizing land prices in industrial areas and business parks, the edge com‑
munities worsen an already improvident mode of land use.
The land given over to transportation uses also holds a great reserve of
surface area, which could be mobilized if the norms were not so stiffly wielded
and highway departments did not exist in technocratic isolation. In contrast,
many public institutions, like schools and kindergartens, need a great deal of
open land and are difficult to build densely or ground-sparingly; but one could
adapt them to multistory buildings and thereby minimize the extent to which
they use up surface area.
When taken beyond a reasonable measure, the demand for residential den‑
sity therefore usually benefits individual landowners and building owners,
who profit from it. On the other hand, density of construction is seemingly
unavoidable—and this makes it so beloved of municipal authorities—because
land purchased at such a high price must be exploited to an irresponsibly
high degree. This means that everything that goes along with the residen‑
tial, broadly construed, everything from parking places to recreation areas, is
increasingly displaced onto the general public: streets are made into parking
lots, and playing fields are pushed into public parks. The scarcity of open space
again intensifies use and further burdens the residential areas.
Another question is whether today’s use of residential land—which has
thinned and sprawled beyond a reasonable measure of density—can be mini‑
mized through high land prices and through an alteration in our notion of
a good life, for example, living semicommunally in households expanded
beyond the standard one-family-per-household arrangement. Here too the
expansion or contraction of peri-residential functions could contribute. Such
a development must set itself against a standard of comfort set by an older
generation, and it must be prepared for in the long run. A separate apart‑
ment; one’s own room, kitchen, bath, toilet—these were achievements of the
previous generation; they have already become so self-evidently necessary that
hardly anyone would give them up voluntarily today.35
It must be repeated that the essential reserves of land are in commercial
land and workspaces. My thesis is that the stabilization and reduction of spe‑
cific residential and commercial land uses are more important for ecological
improvement than a sheer increase in density. It is a matter of uncoupling
improvements in the quality of life from increasing consumption of land, just
as the uncoupling of productivity from energy consumption has already been
achieved.
Aiming for the urban density of the nineteenth century, which is supposed
to have functioned so well, leads nowhere. The nineteenth-century city could
be built so densely only because the provision of a public good like open space
was so irresponsibly bad; above all, high density was attained because there
were no cars. Everyone who now has to raise small children in an otherwise
beautiful urban neighborhood dating from the nineteenth century knows
what this means: children cannot go outside except when accompanied by
adults, because the streets are much too dangerous. Children have to play in
specially fenced-off areas, which they reach only by crossing the dangerous
city streets.
Hong Kong and Singapore have social and built densities well beyond
those of nineteenth-century urban Europe. However, they can function only
because, on the one hand, horizontal shifts of different uses are consistently
undertaken, with uses that have little need for daylight housed in multistoried
but still low-rise buildings surrounded by tall apartment buildings, and, on
the other hand, the open space on the roofs of those low buildings is fully
utilized. Also the climates of Hong Kong and Singapore, in which shade is
preferable to sun, help considerably.
Here we can observe the origin of a new type of city with its own rules and
laws, which no longer have anything to do with European tradition.36 So far
this type has been realized only in undemocratic, authoritarian conditions; it
remains to be seen whether it will still retain its attractions in democratically
founded and democratically governed societies.
The most important factor for Hong Kong’s social acceptance is that almost
every spot has a close visual and spatial connection to the sea and the moun‑
thomas sieverts 45
tains. When one judges Hong Kong’s phenomenal density, one must also keep
in mind this landscape of sea and mountains. I must also repeat and empha‑
size that in recent decades very high-density residential areas, even if they are
not of the Hong Kong/Singapore type, have not been achievable in democrati‑
cally governed societies, despite the unquestionable ecological advantages.
Mixed Use
The mention of Hong Kong leads us to the concept of mixed use. Mixed use is
seen as a necessary component of urbanity and as an effective way of minimiz‑
ing motorized traffic. In principle, this is all well and good, especially because
the growing proportion of service employees promotes a mixture of living and
working space. But at the same time one must ask exactly how uses are to be
mixed: within a single building, a street, a neighborhood, or a district?
The answer will vary according to the goal that mixed use is supposed to
achieve. Do we want a small-scale balance of interests and the direct mutual
responsibility of people living and working together at various income levels
and various qualifications? Then we will want mixed-use plots of land, vari‑
ously sized but as small as possible; these will be the building blocks of the
city.37 Only by mixing uses on one plot of land and within one building can we
ensure that different uses are integrated in accordance with their sensitivities
to location, access, and emissions. Only then can we arrange all these uses in
a small space, so that they are packed in maximal density without impairing
the most fragile of uses, that of living.
But do the conditions necessary for this—for anyone other than a small
number of midlevel contract workers—actually exist? In the nineteenth cen‑
tury, the mixed-use plot of land in big cities like Vienna, Berlin, and Budapest
had an economically and architecturally optimal building structure: locations
of various quality at varying rent prices, such as the forecourt (with rents dif‑
ferentiated according to basement, piano nobile, upper stories, and garret),
workshops for handicrafts, storage space, and, not least, the back building
(Hinterhof ) for even poorer tenants. All these elements together made up a
building type that optimized land use. At the same time, because it spread
the risk, this type of building minimized capital outlay while providing some
pension insurance, especially considering that the broad range of investments
available today did not exist then. The mixed-use lot resulted in a fine-grained
social mixture that had great advantages, as pointed out by James Hobrecht.38
Today, however, we lack the socioeconomic conditions for such a building
type. It would be difficult today, within a single building, to vertically mix the
various uses that have become more much more specific since the nineteenth
century. The criteria for residential standards are now set by law at a high level.
Above all, the middle-class owner of such mixed-use buildings has become a
rarity. Into his place have stepped the great capital concerns, the combines,
corporations, banks, and insurance companies with their anonymous funds.
The trend away from investing in material things and toward investing in
abstract forms like shares, banknotes, and funds surely cannot be stopped,
although all efforts should be made to keep the citizen connected to the city as
owner of his own building.39 Perhaps one could succeed in linking small, local
real estate firms with local capital and local commitments.
The mixture of uses within one building will become significant in another
dimension: the dimension of time. In the future, buildings will have to be
adapted to varying demands with the goal of attaining a resource-conserving
longevity, changing from offices into apartments and back again. This presup‑
poses buildings that are less functionally specialized, which at the same time
is a condition for small-scale mixed uses. But keeping buildings flexible for
various future uses presupposes a kind of spatial redundancy; for example,
through higher stories and room for expansion. Do investors today think in
the long term, and are they ready to invest in flexibility? Today the normal case
is the separation of uses in different buildings along the street, despite the fact
that such placement ruins possibilities for smaller-scale mixed use. Or else
uses are separated by neighborhood or district: in a single district, uses that
need a lot of space and generate heavy traffic and harmful pollutants can be
arranged along a main road, so that an undisturbed proximity of living and
working is possible (a structure that city planner Roland Rainer wanted to
make his principle for city planning in Vienna in the 1960s).
In practice, however, such efforts at mixing uses encounter major obstacles,
owing to the uniformity of our economy; in production and trade, as well as
in the entertainment industry, the tendency toward rationalization and spe‑
cialization leads to ever bigger units with ever fewer employees. These large
units, for example, supermarkets or big-box stores vending a specialized type
of product, or spatially concentrated services in the entertainment industry,
replace a multiplicity of smaller stores, workshops, and cinemas; and they
are difficult to integrate into a small subdivided structure. The trend toward
supersizing also affects delivery vehicles; an 18-wheeled truck cannot maneu‑
ver in a small street. Finally, leisure time on weekends and vacations becomes
ever more rigidly organized in the “artificial worlds” of big leisure centers with
comprehensive arrays of consumer choices. 40
Here is a main reason for the obvious bleakness of our new city districts:
free time is spent elsewhere. The last remaining mom-and-pop stores in the
beloved city neighborhoods of the nineteenth-century city are expensive, and
they have to be, given the lack of opportunities for rationalizing these busi‑
thomas sieverts 47
nesses. If we want to escape from the monofunctional barrenness of our cities,
we have to do something about the seemingly automatic progress of rational‑
ization and specialization. Is this possible? There seem to be promising trends
in retail, toward the reestablishing of neighborhood stores. Perhaps a change
in store hours would lead to the establishment of large kiosks in the immedi‑
ate vicinity of apartment buildings; these kiosks would stay open late into the
night and take over a number of social communication tasks, somewhat like
the Büdchen today in Cologne. However, there are also countertrends; tele‑
shopping and Internet shopping, for example, are shutting out the traditional
retail store and the specialty store. In the newer tower-block neighborhoods,
the big supermarket chains are negotiating exclusive contracts with the prop‑
erty developers, to shut out competing supermarket chains.
Another important goal of densely packed mixed uses is a reduction of
motorized traffic: a dense proximity of living, working, and shopping could
reduce automobile use and encourage walking and bicycling. At the same
time, such density could contribute to lively street life and a natural, low-key
type of social surveillance.
This line of argument, apparently so self-evident, can unfortunately only
be based on a small group of city inhabitants who can still live in a unity of
time, place, and work. Today’s spatially and functionally differentiated society
means that most people are not free to choose a workplace and a home in close
proximity. Already within the family, everyday errands take family members
far from one another. In addition, the better-earning classes want houses with
lots of space, a yard, and proximity to a country landscape, while their highly
specialized and high-paying jobs are often located at large, centralized compa‑
nies. Rather than mixed use, there is extreme spatial polarization. The spatially
divisive effects of shortened work hours have already been discussed.
Still, everything speaks in favor of striving once again for cities that are
as mixed as possible; more and more services can be easily combined with
living spaces. Perhaps in the places where we live the trend toward more and
more space per resident will be reversed by moving some activities out of our
dwellings and, as in Japan, concentrating them in larger, more luxurious
public facilities like bathhouses, hobby workshops, and clubs. It may not yet
be apparent, but a decrease in purchasing power will probably force us to live
more closely together one day; in the poorer neighborhoods of our inner cities,
this has already begun. Mixed-use city districts offer a certain segment of the
population the opportunity to reach both shops and workplaces on bicycle or
on foot. Electronics will aid such a decentralization, not only in the form of
opportunities to work from home, but also by decentralizing offices. 41 Besides,
mixed-use city districts are simply more interesting. They offer children and
teenagers more varied experiences; they offer the less educated and less suc‑
cessful more opportunities for half-day work and other casual employment.
Such districts can also better integrate the jobless and the newly arrived.
Studies in Frankfurt compared two equally large populations of immigrants,
one in the inner city and one in a monofunctional tower-block development on
the city periphery, planned and built in the 1960s. The percentage of immi‑
grants on social welfare was one third lower in the inner city than on the
periphery. 42
Mixed-use districts would also offer better spatial conditions for the devel‑
opment of new forms of mutual aid; neighbors could take on social services
that public institutions, owing to lack of funds, no longer offer. The current
highly concentrated social welfare system is costly and alienating; it will there‑
fore have to be decentralized. 43 Finally, mixed-use districts could encourage
ecologically oriented energy cooperatives, in which energy from waste or the
waste itself could be reprocessed locally. For many reasons, mixed-use districts
are better prepared for hard times.
An implementation of the ideal of strongly mixed use is blocked, however,
not only by the already mentioned rationalization, specialization, and enlarge‑
ment of production and retail, but also by another essential factor: the almost
unlimited market in real estate speculation. The highly differentiated real
estate markets, which originated in the spatial and functional division of labor,
exclude certain economically weaker uses. Therefore a mixture of offices and
residences in a central place is difficult to implement.
The spatial segregation of functions is often traced back to the Athenian
city charter. This is largely nonsense. As already shown, functional segregation
is a consequence of differentiated land values, which leads to an arrangement
of uses according to their economic viability and their mutual tolerance of
certain burdens like pollution or noise. Concentrating and segregating some
uses also reduces production costs. 44 On the other hand, this leads to extraor‑
dinarily low levels of tolerance for disturbances in new residential areas. The
charter of Athens simply raised certain socioeconomic norms to the level of
ideological aims, but the charter also thereby undoubtedly contributed to a
hardening of norms.
The implementation of mixed uses presupposes at least the following:
limits on the size of businesses, which will promote a mix of uses; better con‑
trol of the burdens of noise, pollution, and traffic at the source of the use itself,
rendering superfluous the principle of mutual tolerance of burdens; equitable
spatial conditions throughout the entire city, to counter a price gap between
better and worse locations; and, not least, a greater tolerance for normal city
disturbances—in contrast to today’s tendency, which is a marked decrease in
tolerance for the noise of children and sports games (alongside an astonishing
tolerance for traffic noise).
thomas sieverts 49
The mix of living, working, and services that continues today—even if it
is endangered—in cities such as Berlin, Vienna, Barcelona, and Budapest,
can be traced back to the equally distributed density and the field-like struc‑
ture of the nineteenth-century city; with a very broad range of similar spatial
conditions at various locations, this city structure equalized land prices and
smoothed out price fluctuations. It is this quality of equitable spatial condi‑
tions (which expresses itself in, among other things, buildings with a uniform
eaves-height) that is so fecklessly put at risk today, for example, in Berlin.
Ecology
With the arguments concerning traffic reduction, the energy crisis, and recy‑
cling, we come to our final and most difficult concept, that of urban ecology. If
there is today an undisputed aim of city development, it is the aim of sustain‑
able city development. It is a question of integrating the city into the natural
cycle as compatibly as possible. Ecology has rightly become the leading concept
of city planning. A simple thought-experiment suffices to show that it is not
possible for the entire world today to repeat the course of urban growth exactly
as it once occurred in the industrialized nations; the world’s ecosystem would
collapse. Therefore, there is an urgent need to redirect this growth.
The cities of old Europe have good conditions for doing this. They are rela‑
tively rich; their population counts are stable; their agricultural lands have
some excess capacity; the average educational level is high. European cities
can show other cities of the world how to make themselves sustainable, before
environmental catastrophe forces them to do so. 45 But which path should be
taken and to what end?
This question can be broken down into two opposing theses:
• The essence of the city must necessarily stand in opposition to nature.
• The city can become a component of a man-made nature.
These two theses rest on fundamentally different interpretations of the
city and of nature. The first assumes that human beings and their cities are
outside nature, against it even, and that they cause profound damage to the
natural bases of life. According to this interpretation, human beings should
in the future remove themselves as far as possible from the workings of
nature. They should recycle materials, use as little land as possible, live in the
least ecologically sensitive areas, and limit their interaction with nature to the
absolutely unavoidable. Their technical and civilizational systems should have
as little contact with nature as possible, so that nature is left to itself.
This approach—attributing to nature a sui generis status, as the orthodox
environmental movement does—is the opposite of the thesis that interprets
humans and cities as part of nature, a nature that would not exist, even in
its most conservation-worthy areas, without humans. The city too has long
since become a second nature, with a wealth of plant and animal varieties that
surpasses the varieties of the surrounding farmland. The bigger the city, the
greater its biodiversity. 46 But people have to agree that, as biological beings,
they must cease destroying the artificially cultivated bases of life that they
have spent centuries building up.
It becomes ever more difficult to differentiate between originally “natural”
nature and technically manipulated nature. Nature appears to man, in the city
and outside it, in a technically altered and influenced form. Many important
indices for environmental well-being are no longer experienced directly, but
through mediated forms and abstract measurement data—for example, air
quality, ozone levels in the atmosphere, nitrate content of the groundwater,
heavy metals in the soil—data which in turn deeply influence our image of
nature. There is no getting away from this interpenetration of the natural and
the technical. 47
In their exaggerated forms, both interpretations are unproductive for our
concern with the city; everyday practice must find a usable position between
the extremes. I personally tend more toward the latter interpretation, that of
man-made nature, and would like to follow its consequences further.
A glance at an aerial photograph of any major conurbation shows that here
the figure-ground relation between city and country has reversed itself. The
open countryside has become a delimited figure within the background of a
field of settlement; the settled area itself could be read as a special form of land‑
scape which surrounds the open land. Both areas, the building-free interior
land as well as the surrounding settled area, are almost entirely man-made:
one can rightly maintain that at least in the urban regions everything—city as
well as country—is built. We can criticize this situation or lament it, but we
cannot reverse it.
If one radicalizes this train of thought just slightly, against the background
of the historical development of our culture, then we see that between city
and country there is the ecological and cultural continuum of a built struc‑
ture. This cultura, in the original Latin meaning of both the cultivated and
the constructed, is represented in agriculturally and economically optimized
farmland, in greenhouses, in garden allotments, in old neighborhoods of
single-family houses sitting on immense greenswards, in settlement colonies,
thomas sieverts 51
in nineteenth-century city neighborhoods that were almost completely paved
over but were flecked with little gardens, as well as in high-rises with “green”
roofs. All of these structures, and not only areas that are empty of buildings,
must make their contribution as cultura to the support of our socioeconomic
and natural bases for life. This would clearly presuppose a radical reinterpreta‑
tion of “building”: buildings could also be interpreted as “artificial cliffs” that
can harbor plant and animal varieties, and both cultural and natural heritage
would have to be protected and developed on the same piece of land. “Accord‑
ingly, ‘building’ must not be judged as an assault on nature and landscape, but
as a seed of change, which creates new spaces and new areas that are equally
worthy of protection.”48
To take this position seriously would mean that, in a profound sense, we
ourselves are responsible for our fundamental bases of life. We would then
understand that we cannot use pollution credits or environmental sanctions
or compensatory measures to obtain absolution from a benevolent Mother
Nature who works on our requests. We would understand that we cannot buy
our way out of the question of which nature we really want.
The attempt to balance things out with “pollute/pay back” regulations often
leads to absurdities. Some environmental protection agencies seem to care
only about securing high compensation payments from particularly harmful
building projects; presumably the money can be used to build little biodomes
someplace else.
The ecological burden is in any case too crudely comprehended by these
environmental regulations, as the concept of the ecological footprint shows.
The ecological consequences of cities—for example, importing raw materials
and exporting garbage—reach far beyond their immediate surroundings and
into other countries and continents. Therefore the regulations, so necessary
to a transitional period when they are applied rationally, are little more than
a sop to good conscience, while actually concealing the real problems. These
problems require a more thoroughgoing, more radical perspective and a dif‑
ferent concept of the cultural landscape.
The history of the cultural landscape shows that it was always in the midst
of transformation. The type of built landscape that today we take as a bench‑
mark for the protection of culture and landscape, including, for example,
the beloved orchards, originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, and from the beginning it had all the characteristics of being a
transitional stage to our own epoch. 49
Today’s beloved landscapes are actually the result of violent interventions. Take
for example what we consider the very epitome of the cultural landscape and
the most conservation-worthy natural landscape, the moorland. It is the result
of systematic deforestation and disastrous over-cultivation. Nevertheless, the
preservation of moorlands is regarded as a task of environmental conservation.
This involves preserving the cultural landscape of previous centuries, and at
the same time conserving the coevolution of the cultural landscape along with
its flora and fauna. Even culturally significant and conservation-worthy land‑
scaped parks such as those in Muskau in Saxony are relics of a thoroughgoing
transformation of previous conditions. The great garden designer Prince Pück‑
ler-Muskau took the existing landscape and turned it almost completely inside
out; at the time, he was vilified for his attack on nature and on the landscape.
He “fined” himself by giving the town a new Rathaus in compensation. But the
violent landscape interventions of that time are precisely what we now consider
so culturally and environmentally significant, so worthy of preserving, in and
around Muskau.
In the spirit of this dynamic evolution, the goal should be to develop a new
kind of cultural landscape, in which food production, ecological balance, and
recreation are brought into a new synthesis. Much the same could be said for
building: the opposition between built-up areas and countryside must be over‑
come in a new synthesis.50
Here, in conclusion, is another recommendation for research into the eco‑
system:
Cities have to be much more tightly integrated into their surrounding land‑
scapes. Drinking water should, in the medium term, be drawn from surface
water, which can be replenished, rather than from the deeper, more fragile
aquifers. Waste water should be recycled, after the separation or separate puri‑
fication of industrial waste water, just as is done in rural areas. To minimize
the city’s heat absorption, areas as large as possible (including rooftops and
building façades) should be planted with vegetation, and the rainwater should
be not drained away but should be used for cultivation. Finally, food should
once again be produced locally, close to the city, to minimize transportation
expenses. Some food could be produced in greenhouses on the edge of the city.
One could also try, with artificial means, to convert inedible biomass (algae,
reeds) into food for people (for example fish).51
thomas sieverts 53
We cannot avoid thinking about the cultural landscape best suited to our
society; it will have to be different from the old cultural landscape we already
know and love. This new cultural landscape must be in an urbanized country‑
side in an urban region, a landscape between nature and culture.52
The city of tomorrow consists of a concentration of compact settlements; there
will be spaces of open land both inside and outside the settled areas; these
interior and exterior landscapes will fulfill particular urban functions. Open
land as a structure interior to the city creates potential surfaces for water cycles
and air cycles. These new functional perspectives also have retroactive effects
on structures of agriculture and settlement, on the landscape’s image and its
function as recreation. The city’s identity comes not only from its built surfaces
but also from its unbuilt, “vegetative” surfaces.53
City and country must enter into a new symbiosis, polarized between bio‑
technological systems in the city and new wildernesses in the country. Urban
ecology will transform itself from a science used primarily for the analysis and
protection of existing remnants of landscapes into a discipline that actively
develops new forms of city-cultural landscapes.
On-site
Urban peripheries are often used only as spaces for particular functions. Here
we find building-supply stores, bedroom communities, and recreational areas.
The significant places are thought to be elsewhere: historical downtowns,
parks, and vacation destinations. For two years now I have been taking visitors
and locals on tours of Cologne’s urban periphery. During these two-day excur‑
sions, I try to give people a feeling for the beauty of these discontinuous spaces,
which are usually experienced absently, and in which one normally goes for
long stretches without experiencing anything that could be recognized as an
event. In Cologne’s urban periphery, especially on the schäl Sick (the “wrong
side” of the Rhine), which is cut into segments by highways and train tracks,
discontinuity results in surprising sequences of spaces. Characteristic of this
urban periphery are the habitat quality of the “empty” spaces on the one hand
and, on the other, the fractal wealth and complexity of the life-forms that sus‑
tain themselves and develop anew in the shadow of the competition among
big cities. Through Cologne’s long history as a fortress-city, stretching from
Roman antiquity to the end of the first World War, and through its later role
as a traffic interchange of West Germany, the gaps in the city’s image are par‑
ticularly numerous, and they create, at all scales, a distinctive formal quality.
Looking from the Center Outward
What would New York be without Brooklyn and Queens, Paris without its
banlieues, a port city without the ocean, Cairo without the desert? Only in
proximity to wilderness do we recognize culture. Civilized life is not possible
without this awareness of the conditions of culture.
This mode of reading the periphery as wilderness is the counterpart to
reading it as landscape. Both modes of reading are justified, as aids to inter‑
pretation and through the specific experience of the urban periphery.
• The periphery is a complex cultural landscape where individual areas such
as empty fields and parking lots, absent intentional design and purposive
annexation, form wildernesses.
• Periphery is wilderness, a macrostructure neither intentionally designed
nor purposively acquired, within which are scattered numerous isolated
microstructures, individually designed and acquired.
Consuming Perception and Productive Perception
The ability to receive impressions and “wild” data (“wild” in opposition to what
is already decoded, already contained in an image), to decode them for oneself,
integrate them into an image and interpret it, and also the ability to fill empty
spaces with associations, memories, and projections, this is what I call senti‑
mental, productive perception.
When we come from the world of decoded information (the cultural land‑
scape) into nameless and insignificant wild places, boredom sets in at first. We
cannot read what comes to us. Thus boredom becomes irritation. Only after a
while does productive perception set itself going, and then the world around
us starts to fill up. Empty spaces are necessary to train people in the capacities
of cultural beings: decode, integrate, interpret, associate, project, remember.
Aesthetic Sustainability
What is experienced negatively as fragmentation and lack of context can also
be experienced positively as a high degree of complexity, as a wealth of frag‑
ments, as an abundance of ecological and social niches, and as a subjective
spatial enlargement by means of not-having-an-overview. An environment
of lasting significance should never submit itself to an image. With every
encounter it should create new vague glimmers of images.
thomas sieverts 55
The Significant Place and the Anywhere
The significant place always has a readily graspable visual order, usually a
geometrical one.
The significant place would become, without the context of the just-any‑
where, a mere tourist attraction. Without the nameless, the renowned decays
into mere cliché.
†
An Interpretation of the Landscape Where We Live
The city is transforming itself into something new, which we perceive and
evaluate according to our previous experiences and our personal attitudes. For
the last several decades, the measure of value has been the idealized old city,
but now our attitude is undergoing radical change: after a period in which
the landscape where we live was widely condemned as a “cancerous growth”
that was said to be “devouring the countryside,” now the pendulum is swing‑
ing the other way. A certain school of architects and urban planners—having
taken up Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas and having also latched onto a
somewhat modish enthusiasm for Tokyo—is now uncritically enthusiastic
about the “fractal wealth” and the “anarchic dynamism” of where we live. I
want to eschew both these perspectives by soberly tracing the potential of the
landscape where we live and by confronting the dissolved city structure with
its own worsening social and cultural problems. This chapter concludes by
setting out theses concerning the comprehensibility and legibility of the land‑
scape where we live.
Perspectives and Questions
These attempts to soberly describe the landscape where we live, to disenchant
the myth of the old city, and to clarify our concepts should help us to see the
reality of our cities, critically but without prejudice. It is evident that the open
landscape has changed from the ground that surrounds the city to a delimited
figure within a surrounding mass of settlement. The city core has taken on
the character of a shopping mall, while the shopping centers try to imitate the
urbanity of the city core. The historical downtown comprises only a small frac‑
tion of the city; other centers of gravity have arisen on the periphery.
If we seriously attempt an unbiased look at this cluster of varied urban
fields, then perhaps we can, as an experiment, positively perceive the land‑
scape where we live as a “city-archipelago” with qualities of its own.
Instead of talking dismissively about urban sprawl, we could recognize a
tightly knit interpenetration of open space and settlement. Using new formal
perspectives, we could recognize that the open spaces within the urban
landscape bind it together. Rather than criticize a lack of urbanity, we could
perceive a decentralized cultural diversity with new possibilities for cultural
activities—different cultural activities, to be sure, than the ones in the old city,
but none the worse for that; they reach more people. Rather than lament the
loss of centrality, we could recognize a modern network structure as well as
the emergence of new forms of order that are better suited to our pluralistic,
democratic society than the old centralized models.
An unbiased, sober perspective is required because the real possibilities for
change are narrowly constrained. Not only is the structural form of the city
cores nearly complete, but the in-between landscape is essentially built; it is
already here. New construction in the landscape where we live will be mini‑
mal, at least if we start making better use of the buildings we already have.
This analysis could lead to the mistaken conclusion that we have to resign
ourselves to making do with the city just as it is. The opposite is the case: never
before in history has the city been so malleable a cultural product. Location is
of diminished importance for many functions, and they can now be combined
much more freely. Because of shortened work hours, electronic communica‑
tion, and contract work, people are much freer in their dealings with time
and space; therefore they can develop completely different ways of life. Today
work and work arrangements can be, at least in part, temporally and spatially
unconstrained.
At first it sounds paradoxical: the fundamental structure of the city is nearly
inalterable, human behavior can scarcely be shaped by means of urban plan‑
ning, and yet despite all this, we have considerable freedom in designing the
landscape where we live. The paradox resolves itself when we add the dimen‑
sion of time. It’s a question of taking advantage of what is already happening
anyway; the reuse, remodeling, repairs, adaptations, renewals, displacements,
and modernization processes that, depending on the region, constitute an
average change rate of 2 to 5 percent a year. Within a generation a city can be
substantially rebuilt, a little at a time, if these countless individual measures
are directed toward a few socially significant goals.54
There are major opportunities for transformation, on a scale affecting
European Community politics, in the reform of agriculture as a result of eco‑
logical and agricultural necessities. Today European farmers receive roughly
thomas sieverts 57
half their income from general tax funds, and the EC prescribes almost exactly
what the farmers can plant and how much of the land must lie fallow. Why not
connect this area of policy to urban planning at last, and develop a new cultural
landscape, integrated into where we live, in which food production, recreation,
and the ecological balance between built and open space form a new unity?55
This would allow us to work with the hidden advantages of the landscape
where we live and to mitigate its disadvantages. Karl Ganser sketches these
advantages and disadvantages in the following way:
The frequently overlooked advantages are small-scale divisions, mixed func‑
tions, and polycentrality rather than an “overcentralized” orientation toward
a dominant city core. Criticisms are typically directed at: “settlement-pulp;”
the lack of demarcation between settlement and countryside; the automobile
dependency of this type settlement; the lack of overview; the provincialism of
each of the many centers; the supposed lack of “urbanity.”56
In designing the landscape where we live, we need not emphasize only
economic and functional aims. Those can be achieved today with almost any
form of city. Cultural and ecological aims must be foregrounded. The city as a
cultural product and the open fields as a new cultural landscape: these are not
merely theoretical notions. In the future, cultural and ecological qualities will
become decisive commercial factors, because “hard” infrastructure like good
freeway access and powerful telecommunications connections will be avail‑
able pretty much everywhere. Unique, place-specific traits that are not easily
reproducible, such as cultural wealth and landscape beauty, will be among
the most important preconditions for development, because they will become
significant commercial attractions.
Such an interpretation of the landscape where we live raises the following
questions:
1. In the future, how will we deal with the dimension of time in these land‑
scapes? Heritage conservation and historical preservation are indispensable
for maintaining the historical and temporal depth of the city. But how do we
make room for the future? How do we reserve room in which to maneuver,
in which the landscape where we live can renew itself and adapt itself in its
consistent cyclic economy, without constant demolitions large and small?
Who pays for and secures this room to maneuver? What exactly does the
process look like, from the original value of an empty field or urban waste‑
land, to its passing into a state of apparent uselessness, to its once again
becoming valuable? What significance do abandoned spaces have in the
cycle of development as “recharge areas” for nature, and as cultural and
commercial “room to maneuver in” for people?57
2. How will we deal with nature in the future? Nature conservation is indis‑
pensable for maintaining “historical” nature as an object of contemplation,
even in the city. But is the ideal image of the preindustrial cultural landscape
still sufficient as a benchmark? And how far will we get with regulations
in the style of double-entry bookkeeping, which have us polluting here
and paying back there? Must we not—as sketched in the section on ecol‑
ogy—try to sublate the opposition between a benevolent, damage-healing
Mother Nature and the evil, nature-destroying processes of building and
cultivation? Must we not sublate that opposition with new concepts oriented
toward a creatively understood “development ecology,” in order to arrive at
new forms of landscape, which we hope later generations will love and pro‑
tect just as we today protect our old inherited cultural landscape?58 Should
it not be our goal to find and develop a new symbiosis between the built and
the cultural landscape?
3. How will we deal with the plurality of lifestyles and cultures? Cultural plu‑
rality is a positive characteristic of the landscape where we live; how can
we see to it that this ever more dispersed and polycentric landscape does
not disintegrate into jealously guarded districts, partitioned off from one
another and divided by income levels and lifestyles? Can the residential
attractions of the various locations of this landscape be balanced out so that
socioeconomic gaps remain within manageable limits? Can the network of
public spaces, streets and squares, parks and lakes, landscapes and rivers,
be connected in such a way that ordinary urban citizens become curious
about the diversity of the landscape where we live? So that they are eager
to discover its tensions and contrasts, between public and secret, between
order and labyrinth, between high culture and garden gnomes, between
dynamic areas and those that have remained unchanged in human memory,
between officially sanctioned beauty and the discovery of the beautiful in
the ugly? Can the landscape where we live, in all its functional, socioeco‑
nomic, and cultural differentiation, once again be made a legible and livable
commonwealth?59
These questions about the essence of time and development, nature and
culture, differentiation and living together, are all oriented toward the identity
of the landscape where we live: Is it more than a theoretical construct? Can it
be lived as a cohesive habitat, as a sensory experience? Ganser remarks of the
thomas sieverts 59
in-between landscape of the Ruhr: “One must create an orientation and pro‑
duce images that make this coded landscape legible. This could lead to a new
understanding of regional planning.” In other words, can hidden connections
be made visible and bound together, so that citizens have mental images of
the urban region that make it accessible without recourse to maps and signs?
Images that hold ready the wide cultural offerings of the landscape where
we live, as well as employment opportunities and interesting destinations for
excursions?
Could the goals of a new kind of planning and a new kind of metropolitan
culture be to make the cosmos of one’s own city legible with suitable constel‑
lations? To arrange the music of the city in a score, and to develop leitmotifs
that reveal the landscape where we live as a field of experience?
The Cultural and Political Dissolution of the City
Before attempting to answer these questions, the social and political status of
the landscape where we live has to be discussed, because without a cultural
and political basis all attempts to make this landscape available as something
that can be lived and experienced are futile. There have to be good political
and social reasons to aim at a realization of these goals, because the process
of making the landscape where we live both legible and image-able requires a
long view and the bringing together of many areas of policy, including town
planning and agriculture, culture and sports, traffic and the economy. It
would be worthwhile only if we stood to gain more than just useful orienta‑
tion and aesthetic experiences. The big political effort would make sense only
if it could contribute to a new agreement between society and the in-between
landscape. This is an ambitious goal; do the conditions for its realization exist?
The French sociologist Alain Touraine recently declared that today neither
“city” nor “society” exists in the old sense of these terms, remarking that “it is
neither good nor bad; it is simply the case.”60 Though it comes from an entirely
different point of departure, Touraine’s line of thought intersects with my own
considerations, and will therefore be quoted and commented upon in what
follows. According to Touraine:
The social and technical environment in which we live has destroyed the city
as a political institution, in a more radical way than industrial society did. If I
had to sum up the social characteristics of today’s world with a single thought,
I would say without hesitation that its most important characteristic is the sep‑
aration, the division, the drifting apart of two parts of human experience: on
the one hand we have the world of exchange, which today is globalized, which
extends over the entire planet and in consequence is de-socialized; and on the
other hand—as direct consequence and reaction against this—the replace‑
ment of social or political man with private man.
Touraine then asks whether we must simply accept this development or
whether politics must oppose it. His ensuing discussion of “breakdown” and
of the “scattered elements” applies equally well to the spatial problematic of
the landscape where we live as to the social problematic of a society that has
disintegrated into mere brashly competing individuals, a society that has not
yet mastered the transition from “you” through “I” to “we.”
The question—and I call it a “political” question in the noblest sense of the
word—is whether we must accept this breaking apart of city and society or
whether we believe we can take the scattered elements and once again make
them into a kind of unity. This is the question, the difficult, apparently almost
insoluble question, that is before us.
But at the same time he warns of a regression into pseudohistorical forms,
and he underlines the danger that the myth of the historical city will obstruct
our view:
In fact, scarcely have I posed this question when it becomes clear that cer‑
tain things are impossible. To turn back, to once again let Polis-Cities arise, to
once again make politics a priority—all this seems artificial to us. Artificial,
because of the internationalization of the economy, because of the resurgence
of identities [of the “private man”—T. S.], which I have discussed. I say this
all the more clearly because this theme of rebuilding cities, reintegrating the
city, is such a powerful theme today and, in my opinion, it is one of the most
reactionary in contemporary life.
And thus he comes to the decisive problem we have with designing the
landscape where we live. In defining this problem, Touraine concurs with
André Gorz, who developed it in his Critique of Economic Reason—the prob‑
lem of connecting the necessarily alienated labor of the global economy to a
meaningful life.61
Now that I have dismissed the deceptive solution of this neo-urban or neomedieval urban ideology, we must consider which other solutions can really be
found. The problem consists then—to formulate it very generally—not simply
in figuring out how different people can live together, but in figuring out how
one can bring together, on the one hand, this openness, this international‑
thomas sieverts 61
ization, this speed with which technology and other things are developing in
certain areas, and, on the other hand, the diversity and the increasingly narrow
identity-oriented or community-oriented reactions.
And just like Gorz, Touraine sees the starting point for combining glo‑
balization with a full life, not in the collective, but in the experience and the
unfolding of individual life:
I believe that one must state unequivocally that a connection between the open
world of the economy and the fragmented, closed world of cultural identities
can be produced only on the level of the experiences of individual life. By this I
mean to say that each individual, whoever it is, you and I, the technical expert
as much as the unemployed migrant worker, today has to live simultaneously
in a world of technology and markets and with a heritage, a memory, a lan‑
guage, a very specific cultural tradition.
Extending his line of thought, Touraine concerns himself with the extreme
fragmentation and individualization of spheres of life, such as one typically
finds where we live now:
I believe that the solutions we are seeking will begin at the lowest level pos‑
sible. I mean by this, solutions that aim as little as possible at restoring cities,
solutions that instead are aimed at allowing the greatest number of people to
exist in the realm of the possible, simultaneously here and elsewhere.
In this context Touraine speaks in favor of recognizing the dimension of
the fragmentary, the incomplete, and the transitory, which is so typical of the
landscape where we live and is the framework for experiencing and appropri‑
ating it:
Because the city is a complex system, it has to be treated as such, and that
means treating it as something with many loopholes, gaps, free spaces, spaces
for adaptation and transformation. On the level of lived experience, of life
experience, of fundamental individual experience, a connection must be made
between the two dimensions—the participation in the world of technology on
the one side and the participation in a cultural identity on the other side.
Touraine foregrounds the significance of the individual in achieving this
connection between the world of the economy and the personal world of the
family and the group, but isn’t the individual too overburdened for this? Do
we not also need other supporting “intermediary” institutions? A community
politics is required, about which Touraine says equally important things. Per‑
haps the political conclusion that Touraine draws from his line of thought,
namely the anomalous reversal of right and left in politics, is most significant
for our concern with the landscape where we live. He feels impelled
to observe this remarkable reversal of ideologies, which we see in a more gen‑
eral context. What one calls “the left” was traditionally positively disposed
toward the collective and universal. What was called “the right” was generally
equated with the defense of specific historical and cultural interests. Today, in
my opinion, the fronts on the political battlefield are precisely reversed; what
could be called “the right” designates an openness to international markets,
where non-social, non-political mechanisms of regulation have priority. In
contrast, what is now called “the left” is compelled to concentrate on how the
identities of communities and their individual and collective projects can be
combined with this openness to the world. In other words, what is called “the
left” is today forced to grant a growing significance to subjective things, to
memory, to tradition, and to cultural diversity.
That means that in planning the in-between landscape, the pursuit of
cultural and ecological goals, rather than of economic goals (which achieve
themselves anyway), is a genuine position of the left, which can be understood
as connected to the tradition of left politics:
Certainly it will be the local problems, the “urban” problems, that will stand in
the center of the biggest debates and the biggest social and political conflicts,
now and in the decades to come. We must decide whether we want to revive
the urban, social, and political attempts to mediate between communities that
can be intolerant, and a world market that might destroy all differences—or
whether we […] want to accept this growing division.
Touraine again:
I think that there is continuity in the thought of the left, if […] the left sets itself
the goal of finding a way to prevent the complete breakdown and the complete
destruction of our cities. It must make an effort to find ways and means—on
the level of experience of personal life, on the level of the small, local unities
in city neighborhoods, and finally on the level of the state (the region)—to
integrate the personal and collective identities with participation in the world
of markets and technologies.
thomas sieverts 63
These sociological conditions and political positions, presented by Touraine
at the Conference of the Social-Democratic Society for Municipal Politics in
fall of 1995, provide support for my own seven theses, which I present in the
following discussion. Here too what Touraine has said about the level of politi‑
cal decisions is also valid:
What has been said almost jokingly about the nation-state could also be said
about the city: it is too big for the small problems and too small for the big prob‑
lems. What sounds like a joke is in reality a dramatic discovery, which refers to
the scale of the state [in our context, the region—T. S.] for the resolution of big
problems and the scale of the urban district for the little problems.
Theses on the Meaning of the Comprehensibiity of the
Landscapes Where We Live
It is against this social and political background that one must understand
the following seven theses for making the landscape where we live compre‑
hensible, legible, and available. It is a matter of taking the familiar appearance
of the places where we live and work and allowing that familiar appearance to
communicate with the larger urban region—that confusing, unclear region
where we still lack an overview. The in-between landscape where we live could
function as a comprehensible intermediate level between the visually imagin‑
able home and the abstract world market; at this level, city and society could
once again be reconciled.
1. Separate cities are tending to fuse together into large, unified environ‑
ments. Our lives cross city borders and create an integrated work and leisure
market, the vitality and accessibility of which will become essential factors
in interregional competition. To take full advantage of the spatial and func‑
tional distribution of workplaces in a region, we need to connect the distinct
advantages of the different parts of the urban region into a complementary
whole. As it stands now, each part of a region tries to offer all the same
things. We hardly notice the advantage of making each local area a single
component of a larger urban region, in which local identities come into play
as strengths, because we lack a mental image of the urban region.
2. T he consciousness that one is a resident of an entire urban region will
become more meaningful with the advent of certain changes in the con‑
ditions of life, changes that are already apparent today. The old family
structures that provided stability and security are dissolving; more and more
people have no children to care for them in their old age. New ties and new
“home” places are needed for those who must live in precarious conditions.
What was once a life, a career, now comes apart into sections of career and
modules of life, with frequent changes of lifestyle and location (“the flexible
lifestyle”).62 Our old notion of a career disappears; what is asked of us is
lifelong adaptability to niche markets and newly arisen opportunities. Such
adaptability is possible only within a large regional job market. Incomes will
stagnate, or even sink; time spent working for monetary income will be
variously distributed over the course of a life. It will no longer be unusual to
have several jobs simultaneously. Residents of a region will find themselves
intermittently unemployed and intermittently in retraining. Therefore the
accessibility and activities of a region, and its particular educational and
cultural offerings, will be indispensable for the good life.
3. A new relationship to place, one that strengthens identity and provides
support, will also be part of the good life under the new socioeconomic con‑
ditions. The lifelong, meaningful career in a single profession has vanished,
and most jobs have moved into an alienated globalized context; other socio‑
cultural anchors of stability must be created. A “hometown” in an in-between
landscape could be such an anchor, if it enables real sensory perceptions and
political, social, and cultural participation. The transformation of percep‑
tions through the virtual reality of electronic media, in particular television,
as our most important “window on the world,” and the concomitant loss of
reality-experiences, must be countered with the sensory perceptions of the
space where we live, and by the potential to practically, socially, and politi‑
cally shape that space.63
4. Growing ecological problems in garbage removal and wastewater treatment,
and also in energy production and transportation, force us into regional
cooperation. Such cooperation cannot be accomplished on the required
scale if we understand the region only abstractly, only in terms of statistical
indicators and technical infrastructure, only in terms of an instrumental
partnership for dealing with unpleasant matters like garbage and sewage;
rather, cooperation will be accomplished when the urban region is imageable; that is, when we can imagine the entire region as one environment
for living, when we have a picture of it in our minds, when we experience it
with our senses, and, above all, when we connect it to positive images and
experiences.64
5. Urban regions, despite their growing functional interconnectedness, run
the risk of decaying politically, socially, and culturally into mere city frag‑
thomas sieverts 65
ments composed of uniform income groups and lifestyles, especially where
there is a reduction in the transfer of wealth from higher to lower and where
socioeconomic disparities go together with large-scale spatial segregation.
This occurs in the United States, where many communities have for a long
time now begun to bunker down and partition themselves off from socio‑
economically weaker segments of the population; the public space between
partitions has become a no-man’s-land. In a few decades, the portion of
the population in these “self-sufficient” communities in the United States
will grow from 12 to approximately 30 percent; these are communities that
hardly have any need for community services, and therefore pay hardly any
local community taxes.65 They seal themselves off from the greater urban
region. This trend, also noticeable in Europe, must not be accepted.
6. An urban region can unfold its entire potential wealth of hidden beauty,
economic activities, lifestyles, milieus, and cultural offerings, and can
thereby realize the potential of a large population, only if the region is not
just outwardly accessible by a good transportation system, but also inwardly
accessible. The urban region should be a mental image so present that dis‑
tances are a matter of minutes and particular local qualities are bound up
with experiences and memories into a network of images. As we use an
urban region more intensively, the images that were at first mere outlines
gain contour and color.
7. A feeling of belonging together must be fostered, yielding an awareness
that the urban region is more than just an instrumental partnership among
jealously competing townlets. Such an awareness cannot be created theo‑
retically; it must grow with a sense of pride in the region as one’s home
and a lasting curiosity about exploring that region. Interest in one’s own
environment and incentives for intraregional “tourism” must be developed.
But the feeling of belonging together can be developed and can endure only
if there is a politically autonomous, democratically legitimated regional
self-government.
For these reasons, laboring intently on the legibility and comprehensibil‑
ity of the landscape where we live is not just some beautiful but superfluous
cultural exercise. Legibility and comprehensibility are prerequisites for perceiv‑
ing and experiencing the urban region as the space that shapes everyday life.
Legibility and comprehensibility are among the conditions for accomplishing
the difficult task of once again producing an identity of society and space for
everyday life in the landscape where we live. Where we live is at once the place
of the local economy and the unfolding of a wider economic circulation.
†
Work on the Mental Images
Images, which are constantly being transformed as the urban region is built
and rebuilt, allow us to recognize our new task: to see the landscape where we
live as an articulated whole. Such key images do not arise automatically; they
must be shaped. They will be different for everyone, according to experience,
education, inclination, and interests.
Key images are largely mental, pictorial representations. Their content can
relate to various realms of life. These images have considerable formative
power, which they derive from a precise balancing of two inherently contradic‑
tory dimensions: feasibility and desirability. The three essential functions of
these key images, for society and for the individual, can be defined as follows:
orientation, coordination, and motivation. In particular, the close intertwining
of these functions represents the basis for the key images’ inherent ability to
be effective.66
Depending on our attitude toward it, where we live now is also a mirror of
our self-perception and a field for the projection of our wishes and criticisms.
The work of sensitizing the inhabitants to the in-between landscape and its
metaphors, and the work of positively influencing the mental images, is mul‑
tilayered and delightful and unending. Town planning and regional planning
are called to participate in this work, and so are culture and sports; through
new movement trends and through locating sports events in certain areas,
sports can also engage people who are otherwise hardly reachable.
To go about this work in a meaningful way, it is necessary to make the
following things present to ourselves: the process of perception and the way
it is recorded in memory. Having made this much present to ourselves, we
could design graphical aids that would form a “memory framework” for the
mind. We should then ask what use computers could be in making the city
region accessible. Finally, it would be necessary to clarify how public aware‑
ness campaigns should look, if they are to be neither advertisements in the
conventional sense nor oppressive educational programs. thomas sieverts 67
Perception and Memory
The classic perception study for complex city images is still Kevin Lynch’s
The Image of the City, first published in 1960. Since this pathbreaking study
there have certainly been many psychological investigations into the question
of mental maps, but they have had few practical results and have not gone
beyond Lynch’s classic study.67
Lynch’s concepts—paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks—remain
very practical, both for perception and for planning; they have proved them‑
selves. However, if we want to go beyond the concept of mental maps today,
we have to draw on the findings of the psychology of perception in recent
decades.
According to the psychology of perception, the image of a mental map is
much too simple a comparison, because perception is the result of superim‑
positions and of interference between at least two, but usually more, sources
of information. Perception is therefore more intensive and sustained as more
sensory input channels are used, because perception uses different parts of the
brain simultaneously. Rather than a mental map, a comparison with an inner
hologram is more fitting, especially because people can often recognize the
whole in a single detail, just as holograms contain the whole in each part.68
Through intense and repeated perception of the same situation, paths form
in the brain; here the attention—guided by interests and intensified by emo‑
tions—serves as a filter, selecting which sensory impressions will be worked
on by perception.
Perception can proceed at various levels of intensity—from ordinary casual
seeing to objective cognition, and from attentive perception to comparative and
metaphorical interpretations, perhaps even ranging to sympathetic identifica‑
tion, in which deeper levels of the personality are involved. Thus perception
can also be understood as a process, going from the superficial impressions of
short-term memory, through visual concepts that build on one another, to the
depths of long-term memory. For the legibility of the urban region this could
mean building up perceptual concepts of various types and intensities, which
mutually supplement one another.
Perception is more intense and more enduring as more senses are involved.
Where we live now will be all the more legible if—in addition to sights—
stories, tactile experiences, and familiar sounds or smells all play a part in
“encoding” a space.69
For example, my mental image of Hyde Park in London is composed of
the following elements: childhood memories of having Peter Pan (a children’s
story about a boy who is forgotten in Hyde Park and locked in overnight) read
aloud to me; images of English lawns, connected to the smell of cut grass;
traffic noises in the distance, together with the feel and sound of crunching
gravel; people reading, focused inward, while lying on the grass under big
trees; young men playing soccer; strange old trees and heavy iron fences and
gates. All in all, many tightly interwoven strands of various sensory percep‑
tions form a complex arena of memory, colored by the light of that optimistic
mood in which I passed through London and Hyde Park as a young man, on
my way to study in Liverpool.
Despite the entirely different cultural context, one could perhaps recall
here the “song lines” of the Australian aborigines, whose myths and legends
occupy routes that cross the continent. Closer at hand are the literary walking
tours of Berlin, offered by young art historians—“Walk with Franz Biberkopf
through the Scheunenviertel, Prenzlauer Berg, and Alexanderplatz”—tours
in which literary and visual impressions are inseparably linked.70
Perception leads to memorability, if what is perceived merges into a form,
which ideally should possess qualities like exactitude, simplicity, stability,
regularity, symmetry, continuity, and uniformity. Where we live usually lacks
exactly these qualities, and that makes orientation difficult. All the more
important, then, are the few big orientation points and lines present in every
landscape where we live. Or at least such points and lines can be worked on
and strengthened.
Conversely—and here the landscape where we live already has a very
good starting point—a certain vagueness or confusion is required to awaken
curiosity and interest and attention. What makes a place interesting is a simul‑
taneously balanced and tense relationship between memorable order and
labyrinthine confusion.71
The legibility and memorability of an urban region could be compared to
the legibility and memorability of a musical score: “The best way to commit
a work to memory is to analyze it, to grasp its formal context, its sonorous
representations, and its note structure.”72 This comment on the memorability
of a musical work also applies to the urban work.
The landscape where we live can be read as an open text; to be understood
and enjoyed, it requires the reader’s active participation. The urban fields of the
landscape where we live interact like various difficult text fragments, whose
authors are only occasionally identified; there are gaps that the reader must
fill in with his or her own fantasies and their own stories and histories. The
reader can also, depending on the method of reading, interpret the fragments
with different results, according to mood and experience.
Memorability, even of abstract things, is clearly supported by imagining
spatial elements as the anchors and storehouses of experiences, images, and
signs, and here the connection to the theme of the city’s legibility becomes
quite clear.73
thomas sieverts 69
Graphical and Digital Aids; Public Service Announcements
The most effective mental maps are probably the actual structures of graphical
maps. Therefore a well-formed orientation diagram, simplified into a logo, is a
significant aid to legibility and orientation. A classic example is the map of the
London Underground, which had many worthy successors in other cities. This
concept has yet to be reworked for themes other than local transportation.
However, for orientation diagrams to achieve their purpose, reality must
contain sufficiently recognizable and frequently recurring “recognition signs”
to which the diagrams correspond. These recognition signs can in turn have
the quality of graphical marks (for example, signage, instructions) or, even
better, they can be signs in the form of real things (spires, garbage dumps,
industrial buildings, monuments).
In the future, the intelligent use of computers with good graphics programs
and information systems will play an important role in orienting people and
in opening up the cultural wealth of an urban region. All the more, as the
younger generation’s mode of perception is more and more strongly influenced
by dealing with computers and screens. In the future it might be advisable to
join forces with the perceptual mode shaped by computers and televisions if
we want to reach the younger generation with a message that will broaden
their perceptual horizons.
Public awareness campaigns—in the form of posters in regional railway
stations or regular columns in local newspapers, on up to local radio and
television broadcasts—could substantially contribute to familiarity with the
landscape where we live. Here is a large and mostly untilled field, fruitful for
metropolitan cultural work.
Campaigns of this type were prepared for the Emscher Park International
Building Exhibition, for example, in the form of a “Route through Industrial
Culture.” There was also a series of simplified maps with focused messages
intended to make the Ruhr more legible and comprehensible. At the same
time, these were meant to convey simple but striking messages: “Orientation
is easy,” “The axis of the Ruhr is just as important as the axis of the Rhine,”
“The new Emscher valley: after ‘blue skies over the Ruhr,’ now it’s ‘clear
water right here,’” “Work and environment: we’re building the new Emscher
Valley—jobs for the next millennium!” “The Emscher Landscape Park—the
new tranquility and the new wilderness,” “The mythos of coal and steel:
the route of industrial culture,” “Artificial mountains and technical towers:
landmarks in the region,” “Network of innovation—the chain of technology
centers and colleges.”
The essential sayings were summarized in a map image, which strikingly
conveyed the particular form of urbanity in the Ruhr area: the multiplicity of
urban fragments and settlements, interspersed with open spaces.
†
Conceptual Models for Developing the In-Between Landscape
Before we turn to the tools and the arenas for action that regional planning has
for dealing with fully developed landscapes where we live, we should outline
the conceivable models for development. Hanns Adrian, former town planner
of Frankfurt and Hanover and president of the German Academy for Town
Planning and Land Use Planning, has sketched four principal models that
cover the range of possible developments.74
Model 1: The Preserved City
All resources and tools will be deployed to maintain the basic city structure.
The inner city is architecturally striking; it is largely given over to a pedestrian
zone, but ring roads and parking garages make it easily reachable by car. Public
transportation is extensive and of high quality. With major planning efforts
and far-reaching interventions, the development of a dispersed settlement
structure and outlying centers is prevented.
Prevention of dispersed urban growth could be brought about only by dra‑
conian interventions into the autonomy of individuals and communities, into
the real estate market, into the transportation economy, and into our freedom
to choose where to live. Such measures could not be implemented in our free
society or legitimated under constitutional law. At present, only undemocratic
societies can force the city to remain compact.
Model 2: The City of Cooperating Centers
Downtown remains the most important shopping district, although supple‑
mented by specialty shops and shopping centers for the regionally dispersed
settlement. The city center remains multifunctional. It is largely a pedestrian
zone and is accessible by a radial network of public transportation routes. It
remains accessible to automobile traffic, which however can be restricted to the
thomas sieverts 71
necessary minimum. Downtown competitiveness is deliberately developed:
expansions of various expensive stores, targeted city marketing, support for
department stores, addition of integrated malls; finally, downtown is tightly
surrounded by densely inhabited neighborhoods.
This model is the one currently followed by most German cities, strongly
influenced by pressure from endangered downtown retail. As previously men‑
tioned, this kind of development often leads surreptitiously to a hollowing-out
of the historical substance of downtown, and therefore to a loss of the character
that makes downtown culturally irreplaceable as the identity-bearing essence
of the city. A creeping destruction of the historical downtown proceeds, until
historical buildings decay into advertisements and mood-managing façades
for the retail industry.
Model 3: The Depleted City
All around the city are large, high-capacity shopping centers that mostly take
over the task of supplying the region and the city with goods. Downtown can
largely be preserved as a monument, and it retains its attraction for tourists.
City and region become permanently automobile-dependent.
We can see this development particularly in the “new” federal states
(Bundesländern) of the former East Germany; big shopping centers on the
edge of tower-block developments and along the highways complete the desic‑
cation of the historical city centers that was already systematically begun in
the time of the German Democratic Republic. Concerning this, Adrian has
elsewhere remarked:
Above all in the East the lack of civic awareness and the lack of a local civic
capital basis are causes for the spread of “developers and investors.” The cities
become money-machines. More and more, there is no societal connection
between building owners and businessmen, a connection that previously had
such an important regulatory function.
Here it seems a return to the politics of Model 2 is in many cases no longer
possible. Despite all the problems, relieving the city center of its burdens
might give it a chance to maintain its historical character and develop valuable
residential neighborhoods. It is doubtful how and whether the new suburban
shopping centers in the former East Germany can be rationally integrated, in
terms of landscape and urban design, into the kind of in-between landscapes
where we live now—yet this would be a precondition for the rebuilding of the
historical city centers into special residential districts.
Model 4: The City of Artificial Worlds
The region is supplied by a system of specialized, functionally optimized
centers connected by an extensive and perfected network of roads: shopping
centers, office parks, and landscapes are “elevated” to the status of entertain‑
ment centers. The old city core attains the function of this type of “center.”
In accordance with its particular character, suitably managed artificial worlds
arise there. From now on, the historical city consists solely of place-specific
stage settings.
This development is found in a relatively pure form in the United States,
but it has made inroads in Central Europe: shopping centers are augmented
with cinemas and other “entertainment” venues; they stage popular cultural
productions; they link themselves to artificial, experiential worlds after the
manner of Disneyland, with huge leisure parks, with waterslides and palm
trees, with refined technical game-worlds for children and teenagers. These
currently booming developments take up a great deal of land and generate
huge amounts of automobile traffic; it is not yet clear when artificial worlds
will be superseded by other fashions. As Adrian remarks, “The more miserable
the real world, the better are the opportunities for monofunctional artificial
worlds.”
I am convinced that our society’s politics and its tools for spatial planning
are too weak to prevent this type of artificial world. Sometimes single defensive
campaigns have been successful—for example, the proposed construction of
a German version of the West Edmonton Mall was prevented in Oberhausen;
nonetheless, as soon the public’s concentrated ire was exhausted, the New
Oberhausen Center was pushed ahead, an admittedly smaller but still major
shopping center. At present there is not much left but to stubbornly follow
the goal of closely connecting and integrating culture and landscape with
the experiences of everyday life. We have to trust that the wave of artificial
worlds will once again recede. A glance at the United States shows that there
are countermovements afoot, comparable to the European interest in “con‑
centrated deconcentration.” There the planning goals are called “pedestrian
pockets,” with higher density and mixed use as the cores of a transit-oriented
development connected by light-railway systems or only by special roads for
buses or for cars with at least three passengers.75
thomas sieverts 73
Conceptual models and planning concepts are necessary, but the decisive
elements for a more human development of the landscape where we live are
the relationships people have with one another, with the cultural quality of
their city, and with nature and the environment. Unless we socially, culturally,
and economically “cultivate” the landscape where we live, all technical and
economic efforts—I am convinced of this—will remain fruitless. Indispens‑
able for such cultivation is a new political and administrative understanding
of the landscape where we live.
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. David Constantine (Oxford
University Press, 1999), p 171. [Translation modified: D. G.] Quoted in Martin
Warnke, “Natur nach dem Fall der Mauern” [Nature After the Walls Came
Down], Dialektik 2 (1994), Zur Ästhetik des Territoriums [On the Aesthetics of
the Territory].
Translator’s Note: Sieverts’s term Zwischenstadt, literally “between city,” has
no English counterpart. This translation uses several related terms in place of
Zwischenstadt: “where we live now,” “where we live,” “landscape where we live,”
and “in-between landscape.”
David Carrol, Paraesthetics: Foucault Lyotard Derrida (New York: Routledge,
1987), p xiv. Quoted in Susanne Hauser, Abfall und Gestaltung: Aesthetitik aufgegebener Industrieareale [Waste and Design: Aesthetics of abandoned industrial
areas], unpublished manuscript, Berlin, 1996.
See Rainer Mackenson, “Ist Stadtentwicklung planbar?” [Can Urban Develop‑
ment Be Planned?], unpublished lecture on the retirement of Reinhart Breit
(Berlin: Technical University of Berlin, 1996). Andreas Kagermeier, “Jenseits
von Suburbia—Tendenzen der Stadtentwicklung in der Region München
aus Verkehrsgeographischer Sicht” [Beyond Suburbia—Tendencies in Urban
Development in the Munich Region, from the Perspective of Traffic Geogra‑
phy], ed. Reinhard Poesler and Konrad Rögner Mitteilungen der Geographischen
Gesellschaft München [Proceedings of the Geographical Society in Munich],
97: (1994). Bundesforschungsanstalt für Landeskunde und Raumforschung
[Federal Research Institute for Geography and Land-Use Planning], Nachhaltige Stadtentwicklung: Herausforderung an einen resourcenschonenden und
umweltverträglichen Städtebau [Sustainable Urban Development: A Challenge to
Resource-Conserving and Environmentally Friendly Town Planning] (Bonn-Bad
Godesberg: February 1996).
See Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York:
Basic Books, 1996). Fishman, “Die befreite Metropolis: Amerikas Neue Stadt”
[The Liberated Metropolis: America’s New City], Arch + Heft 109/110: (Decem‑
ber 1991). Witold Rybczynski, City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World (New
York: Scribners, 1995). Richard Louw, America II: The Book That Captures Americans in Creating the Future (New York: Penguin, 1985).
6 Examples of plans for major city expansions in Germany and Austria can be
found in Klaus Gudzent and Thomas Sieverts, “Platz für neue Wohnungnen,
städtebäuliche Herausforderung bei Stadterweiterungen der Zukunft” [Room
for New Residences: Town-Planning Challenges in City Expansions of the
Future], Informationsforum für städtebäuliche Entwicklungsmaßnamen in NRW
[Information Forum for Town Planning Developments in North Rhine West‑
phalia] (Düsseldorf: 1995).
7 Olaf Wärneryd, Urban Corridors in an Urbanized Archipelago (Lund: University
of Lund, 1995).
8 See Eckard Ribbeck, “Von der Peripherie zum Zentrum?—Verstädterung in
Asien, Afrika, Lateinamerika” [From Periphery to Center? Urbanization in Asia,
Africa, and Latin America], Deutsches Architektenblatt DAB [German Archi‑
tects Journal] 12/95: 2003. Jürgen Oesterich, Elendsquartiere und Wachstumpole
[Slums and Growth Centers] (Cologne: Deutscher Gemeindeverlag and Kohl‑
hammer Verlag, 1980), especially p 95, “Überleben in ökonomischen Nischen”
[Survival in economic niches], in the section “Hoher grad der Raumnutzung”
[High degree of space utilization].
9 Karl Ganser, Ministerium für Stadtentwicklung, Kultur, und Sport des Landes
Nordrhein Westfalen [Ministry for Urban Development, Culture, and Sports in
North Rhine Westphalia], Memorandum II zu Inhalt und Organisation der Internationalen Bauaustellung Emscher Park [Memorandum II on the Content und
Organisation of the Emscher Park International Building Exhibition ] (Düssel‑
dorf: 1995), p 9.
10 See Peter G. Rowe, Making a Middle Landscape (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1991). Klaus Humpert, Sybille Becker, and Klaus Brenner, “Entwicklung
großstädtischer Agglomerationen” [Development of Urban Agglomerations],
Prozeß und Form natürlicher Konstruktionen [Process and Form of Natural Con‑
structions], ed. Klaus Teichmann and Joachim Wilke (Berlin: Ernst and Son,
1996), p 182.
11 See Frank Lloyd Wright, When Democracy Builds (Chicago: University of Chi‑
cago: 1945). Gerd de Bruyn, Die Diktatur der Philanthropen [The Dictatorship of
the Philanthropists] (Vieweg-Verlag, 1996). Ludwig Hilberseimer, Entwicklung
einer Planungsidee [Development of a Planning Idea] (Berlin: Bauwerkfunda‑
mente, 1963).
12 See Pierre Frankenhauser, “Fraktales Stadtwachstum” [Fractal City Growth],
Arch + Heft 109/110 (December 1991). Humpert, Becker, and Brenner, “Ent‑
wicklung großstädtischer Agglomerationen” (see note 10).
thomas sieverts 75
13 See Mackenson (note 4).
14 See Ribbeck (note 8).
15 See Rainer Lepennies, “Das Ende der Überheblichkeit” [The End of Arrogance],
Die Zeit 48 (November 24, 1995), p 62.
16 See Andreas Feldkeller, Die Zweckentfremdete Stadt: Wider die Zerstörung des
öffentlichen Raums [The City Alienated from its Purpose: Against the Destruction
of Public Space] (Frankfurt and New York, 1995). Dieter Hoftmann-Axthelm,
Die dritte Stadt [The Third City] (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995). Fritz Neumeyer,
“Im Zauberland der Peripherie: Das Verschwinden der Stadt in der Landschaft”
[In the Wonderland of the Periphery: The Disappearance of the City into the
Landscape] in Die verstädterte Landschaft [The Urbanized Landscape], ed. West‑
phalia Arts Association (Munich: Aries, 1995), p 31. Günther Moeves, “Die Stadt,
die Arbeit, und die Entropie” [The City, Work, and Entropy], Jahrbuch fr Architektur (Frankfurt, 1995). Henning Kahmann, “Was geändert werden muß, damit
sich wirklich was ändert” [What Has to Change Before Things Really Change],
unpublished manuscript. Andreas Brandt and Rudolf Böttcher, Bauten und Projekte [Buildings and Projects] (Berlin: Ernst and Son, 1995), especially p 46,
“Projekt für eine Stadt mit 200,000 Einwohnern in Karow und Blankenburg bei
Berlin [Project for a city of 200,000 in Kanow and Blankenburg near Berlin].
17 Planning study for the city of Bonn by Thomas Sieverts.
18 The semi-privatization of the Zeil has long been a topic of public discussion.
Since a design competition in 1970, the idea of putting a roof over the street to
give it the character of a shopping center has been discussed. The suggestion
was made yet again in 1994 (see the Frankfurter Rundschau of November 30,
1994). The association of Zeil retailers, known as “Zeil aktiv,” demands that the
street be kept free of conspicuous drunkards, beggars, and vagabonds, as is the
rule in privatized shopping centers. The city went some way to accommodat‑
ing this demand with a surveillance service that allows it to seize and remove
conspicuous persons; in return, the city expects the cooperation and financial
participation of the retailers (see the Frankfurter Rundschau of June 14 and 15
1996, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of May 25, 1995).
19 See Ulli Hellweg, Magistrate of the City of Kassel and Director of Planning and
Construction, Wie baut man eine Stadt? Wege zur Unterneustadt [How Does One
Build a City?] (Kassel, 1994).
20 Rem Koolhaas, “Generic Cities,” in Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S, M, L, XL (Rot‑
terdam: 010, 1995).
21 This discussion of urbanity began at Edgar Salin’s lecture “Urbanity,” at the 11th
German City Congress, in Augsburg, July 1961. The lecture was published in
Erneuerung unsere Städte [Renewing Our Cities] (Stuttgart and Cologne: Kohl‑
hammer, 1960). Salin emphasized the social, cultural, and political dimensions
of urbanity. The concept came into fashion and acquired a technical meaning;
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
ten years later, Salin protested its misuse as a buzzword: “Urbanity is dead, and it
is sheer fraudulence to pretend that it can be restored while the age of the masses
persists and high-rises and highways are built for the masses… Urbanity is a way
of life; today it can flourish nowhere.” (Salin, “Von Urbanität zur ‘Urbanistik,’”
[From Urbanity to ‘Urbanology’] Kylos, 1970 vol 23). After “urbanity through
density” came “urbanity through role-playing”; for the criticism on this topic see
Werner Durth, Die Inszenierung der Alltagswelt [The Staging of Everyday Life]
(Wiesbaden: Braunschwieg, 1977). On tendencies in the 1980s, see H. Häußer‑
mann and W. Siebel, Neue Urbanität (Frankfurt: 1987) and Richard Sennet, Rise
and Fall of Public Man.
See Susanne Hauser, Urbane Wahrnemungsformen: vom überleben alter Muster
[Urban Forms of Perception: On the Survival of Old Patterns], especially Chap‑
ter 3, “Inszenierung alter Muster und neue Einkaufslust” [Staging Old Patterns
and New Shopping-Lust] in Stadt und Mensch zwischen Chaos und Ordnung [City
and Man Between Chaos and Order], ed. Dirk Roller (Franfurt: Peter Lang Pub‑
lishers, 1996).
Das Elbschwanenbüchlein. Zum Andenken an Johann Rist, kaiserl. Pfalzgrafen zu
Wedel, geb. 8. März 1607, gest. 31. August 1667. Mit Auszügen aus seinen Schriften,
by Albert Rode. [The little book of the Swans of the Elbe; to the Memory of
Johann Rist, Imperial Count Palatine of Wedel, with Excerpts from his Writ‑
ings] (Hamburg: 1907).
See Werner Durth, note 21; see Susanne Hauser, note 22.
See Der öffentliche Raum als Bühne [Public Space as Stage] (Bonn: Friedrich
Ebert Foundation, 1994).
See H. Häußermann and W. Siebel, “Die Festivalisierung der Politik und die
Unsichtbarkeit der Städte” [The Festivalization of Politics and the Invisibil‑
ity of the City], in Arno Brandt et al, Das Expo-Projekt, Weltausstellung und die
Stadt der Zukunft [The Expo-Project, World Exhibition and City of the Future]
(Hannover: 1991). Thomas Sieverts, “Städtebau im Zeichen städtischen Nut‑
zungswandels—Perspektiven für den öffentlichen Raum” [Town Planning in
the Name of Changing Urban Use Patterns—Perspectives for Public Space], in
SIA Schweizer Ingeneure und Architekt, 108th Annual, November 1990. Sieverts,
“Die Gestaltung des öffentlichen Raums” [Designing Public Space] in Die Stadt,
Ort der Gegensätze [The City, Place of Contrasts], in Demokratische Gemeinde, die
Monatsschrift für Kommunalpolitik [the Monthly Magazine of Local Government]
(March 1996).
On the socioeconomic and sociocultural “System Tokyo,” see Michael Wegener,
Urban Planning in Tokyo: a European Perspective (Dortmund: University of Dort‑
mund, no date).
See Charles Alexander, “A City Is Not a Tree,” Architectural Forum (April/May
1965) p 58–62.
thomas sieverts 77
29 See Günther Moeves, note 16.
30 See Ullrich Hatzfeld and Stefan Kruse, “Reale Planung in Traumwelten—
Freizeitgroßanlagen als wachsendes Planungsproblem” [Real Planning in
Dream Worlds—Superbig Liesure Parks as a Growing Planning Problem], in
Planerin SRL-Mitteilungen 3/95, p 22.
31 See Imke Bonin, “Wohn-Dichte Zwei Komma Null” [Residential Density Two
Point Zero], series of papers by the Department of Architecture, vol. 22 (Kassel:
University of Kassel, 1995).
32 See Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random
House, 1961).
33 See Von der Regionalplanung zur Regionalentwicklungsplanung [From Regional
Planning to Regional Development Planning] authored by Empirica, Gesell‑
schaft für Struktur- und Stadtforschung: Jürgen Aring, Ulrich Pfeiffer, Andrea
Opitz, Bernhard Faller [Empirica, Society for Structural and Urban Research:
Aring et al] (Bonn: Gutachten, 1995).
34 Thomas Sieverts, “Von der pärisitären zur symbiotischen Stadt—zu einer neue
Charta des Städtebaus” [From the Parasitic to the Symbiotic City—toward a
New Charter for Town Planning], in Wohn-Stadt, ed. Martin Wentz (Frankfurt:
Campus, 1993), p 29–33.
35 See Katharina Feldhusen, Daniel Gut, and Christian Moczalla, Nulloptionen—
Stadtplanung ohne Bauen, am Beispiel der Wohnungssituation in Frankfurt [Zero
Options—City Planning without Construction, on the Example of the Housing
Situation in Frankfurt] (Department of Architecture, Technical University of
Darmstadt, 1990).
36 See Ribbeck (note 8).
37 See Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm (note 16).
38 See Ludovica Scarpa, Gemeinwohl und lokale Macht, Honoratioren und Armenwesen in der Berliner Luisenvorstadt im 19. Jahrhundert [Commonweal and Local
Power, Local Dignitaries and Charities in the Luisen District of Berlin in the
Nineteenth Century] (Munich, New Providence, London, Paris: Sauer, 1995),
quotation of Hobrecht on social mixing, pp 233 ff.
39 See Jane Jacobs (note 32).
40 See Hatzfeld and Kruse (note 30).
41 See William A. Mitchell, “Recombinant Architecture,” City of Bits: Space, Place,
and the Infobahn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p 46.
42 See Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Frank Herterich, “Differenz und Kommune” [Dif‑
ference and Municipality] in Planungskulturen [Planning Cultures], ed. Martin
Wentz (Frankfurt: Campus, 1992). Frank Herterich, “Planung für eine multikul‑
terelle Stadt?” [Planning for a Multicultural City?] in Risiko Stadt? Perspektiven
der Urbanität [Risk City? Perspectives on Urbanity] ed. Ulrich Schwartz (Ham‑
burg, 1994), p 193. The data basis for both essays is from 1987; more recent data
from 1993 can be found in the Frankfurter Sozialatlas.
43 See Karl Ganser, “Die ökologische, ökonomische und sozialverträgliche Stadt—
eine Utopie?” [The Ecologically, Economically, and Socially Responsible City—a
Utopia?], lecture at the “Building Forum” in Münster, Westphalia, February
1996; publication planned.
44 See Thomas Sieverts (note 34).
45 See Thomas Sieverts, “Neue Aufgaben für den Städtebau im alten Europa—
Voraussetzungen, Prinzipien, Beispiele” [New Tasks for Urban Planning in Old
Europe—Conditions, Principles, Examples], in Zukunftsaufgaben der Stadtplanung, ed. Thomas Sieverts (Düsseldorf: Werner, 1990).
46 See Herbert Sukopp, ed. Stadtökologie: das Beispiel Berlin [City Ecology: The
Example of Berlin] (Berlin: Renner, 1990). Dirk Maxeiner and Michael Miersch,
“Im Dickicht der Städte” [In the Jungle of Cities] in DIE ZEIT no. 18, April 26
1996.
47 See Susanne Hauser, “Repräsentationen der Natur- und Umwelt-modelle” [Rep‑
resentations of Natural and Environmental Models], Zeitschrift für Semiotik, vol.
18, part 1, 1996.
48 See Klaus Neumann and Thomas Sieverts, “Das Meßdorfer Feld: Konzeptio‑
nelle Ansätze für eine langfristige und ökologisch orientierte Sicherung und
Weiterentwicklung” [The Messdorfer Field: Conceptual Entry Points for LongTerm, Ecologically Oriented Conservation and Development], planning experts’
report for the City of Bonn, May 1995.
49 See Hansjörg Küster, Geschichte der Landschaft der Mittel Europa [History of the
Landscape of Central Europe] (Munich: Beck, 1995).
50 See Neumann and Sieverts (note 48).
51 Wilhelm Ripl and Christian Hildman, “Ökosysteme als thermodynamische
Notwendigkeit” [Ecosystem as Theromodynamic Necessity], in O. Fränzle, F.
Müller, and W. Schröder, Handuch der Umweltwissenschaften [Manual of Envi‑
ronmental Sciences] (Landsberg: 1997).
52 See Thomas Sieverts, ed., “Perspektiven künftiger Siedlungsentwicklung”
[Prospects for Future Settlement Development], Technical University of Darm‑
stadt, Papers on Science and Technology, Series 50 (Darmstadt: 1989).
53 See Martin Buchholz, “Biofeedback—Aspekte einer nachhaltigen Stadtentent‑
wicklung” [Biofeedback—Aspects of sustainable urban development],
unpublished manuscript, Technical University of Berlin, Institute of Landscape
Architecture, Berlin, 1995.
54 See Thomas Sieverts, “Chancen des alltäglichen Umbaus—Städtebäuliche
Aspekte der Recycling-Diskussion” [Opportunities for Everday Renovation—
Town Planning Aspects of the Recycling Discussion], Deutsches Architektenblatt
8/1993, p 241.
55 See Neumann and Sieverts (note 48).
thomas sieverts 79
56 See Karl Ganser, note 9.
57 Susanne Hauser, “Garbage, Waste, and Boundaries,” in Jeff Bernard, ed. Welt der
Zeichen, Welt der Ding [World of Signs, World of Things] (Vienna: OGS, 1977), p
73–86.
58 See Karl Ganser, “Landschaftstypen im Emscher Raum: Zur Frage ihrer
Schutzwürdigkeit” [Landscape Types in the Emscher Region: On the Question
of Whether They Are Worth Preserving] in Natur und Landschaft 10 (1995),
Naturschutz in der Industrielandschaft [Nature Conservation in the Industrial
Landscape].
59 See Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1960).
60 Alain Touraine, “Die Stadt—Ein überholter Entwurf?” [The City—An Out‑
moded Design?] in Die Stadt, Ort der Gegensätze [The City, Place of Contrasts]
special edition of Demokratische Gemeinde, die Monatsschrift für Kommunalpolitik
[the Monthly Magazine of Local Government] (March 1996).
61 See André Gorz, Kritik der ökonomischen Vernunft: Sinnfragen am Ende der Arbeitsgesellschaft [Critique of Economic Reason: Essential Questions at the End of
the Employment Society] (Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1989).
62 On the pluralization of lifestyles, see Ulrich Beck, “Jenseits von Stand und
Klasse?” [Beyond Position and Class?] in Kreckel, ed. Soziale Ungleichheiten
[Social Inequalities] (Göttingen, 1983). Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim,
eds. Riskante Freiheiten: Individualisierung in modernen Gesellschaften [Risky Free‑
doms: Individualization in Modern Societies] (Frankfurt: 1994). The concept of
“cobbled-together lives” is discussed by Ronald Hitzler in Kleine Lebenswelten:
Ein Beitrag zum Verstehen von Kultur [Small Life-Worlds: A Contribution to the
Understanding of Culture] (Opladen, 1988).
63 See Richard Sennet, “Etwas ist faul in der Stadt” [Something is rotten in the
city], Die Zeit 5, 1996.
64 See Detlev Ipsen, “Das Überleben der Städte: Ökologische Perspektiven der Leb‑
ensqualität” [The Survival of Cities: Ecological Perspectives on the Quality of
Life], Universitas (January 1996).
65 Evan McKenzie, quoted in Witold Rybcynzki, City Life: Urban Experiences in a
New World (New York: Scribner, 1995), p 182.
66 See Walter Kahlenborn, Meinolf Dierkes, Camilla Krebs-Gnath, Sophie Mützel,
Klaus W. Zimmermann, Berlin: Zukunft aus eigener Kraft, ein Leitbild für den
Wirtschaftsstandort Berlin [Berlin: The Future on its own Power, a Key Image for
Berlin as a Business Location] (Berlin: FAB Publisher, 1995).
67 See Gerhard Schneider, “Kognitive Karten und Kartierungen: Orientierungsbezo‑
gene Umweltpräsentation” [Cognitive Maps and Mapping: Orientation-related
Representation of the Environment], in Kruse, Graumann, and Lantermann
(eds.), Ökologische Psychologie [Ecological Psychology] (Munich: 1990) p 268.
68 See entry on “Perception,” in the Encyclopedia Britannica (Macropedia).
69 See Stephan Willinger, “Die narrative Stadtanalyse—Eine Experimentelle
Planungsmethode” [Narrative Urban Analysis—An Experimental Planning
Method] in Raumplanung vol. 71 (December 1995).
70 Those interested can consult with StattReisen Berlin [Instead of Travel/City
Travel Berlin] (Berlin and Potsdam on foot; city explorations), Malaplaque
Strasse 5, 13347 Berlin-Wedding.
71 See Amos Rappaport and R. Kantor, “Komplexität und Ambivalenz in der
Umweltgestaltung” [Complexity and Ambivalence in Environmental Design],
AIP-Journal (July 1967).
72 See entry on “Musikpsychologie” in the chapter “Gehör” [hearing] in MGG, die
Musik in der Geschichte und Gegenwart [Music Today and in History] (Bärenreiter
und Metzler Verlag, 1995). See also the entry on “Gedächtnis” [memory] in
Riemann Musik-Lexikon, p 319.
73 See note 68.
74 Hanns Adrian, “Stadt und Region, Konzentration oder Dekonzentration?” [City
and Region, Concentration or Deconcentration?] in Informationszentrum Beton
[Information Center Concrete], ed., Stadtstrukturen: Status quo und Modelle für
die Zukunft [City Structures: Status Quo and Models for the Future] (Düsseldorf:
1997).
75 See Peter Calthorpe, The Next American Metropolis (New York: Princeton Archi‑
tectural Press, 1993).
thomas sieverts 81
Section One: Theory
karl marx 83
84 suddenly where we live now
Karl Marx
excerpts from The German Ideology
Marx wrote this in 1847,
early in the formulation of
his theory of history. It is a
foundational thesis, rarely
challenged. His views about
town and country were not
exceptional, but they have
been immensely influential,
as we will see in later selections from Braudel and
Williams.
The greatest division of material and mental labour is
the separation of town and country. The antagonism between
town and country begins with the transition from barbarism to
civilisation, from tribe to State, from locality to nation, and runs
through the whole history of civilisation to the present day.…
The existence of the town implies, at the same time, the
necessity of administration, police, taxes, etc.; in short, of the
municipality, and thus of politics in general. Here first became
manifest the division of the population into two great classes,
which is directly based on the division of labour and on the
instruments of production. The town already is in actual fact the
concentration of the population, of the instruments of production,
of capital, of pleasures, of needs, while the country demonstrates
just the opposite fact, isolation and separation. The antagonism
between town and country can only exist within the framework
of private property. It is the most crass expression of the sub‑
jection of the individual under the division of labour, under a
definite activity forced upon him—a subjection which makes
one man into a restricted town-animal, the other into a restricted
country-animal, and daily creates anew the conflict between their
interests. Labour is here again the chief thing, power over indi‑
viduals, and as long as the latter exists, private property must
exist. The abolition of the antagonism between town and coun‑
try is one of the first conditions of communal life, a condition
karl marx 85
Marx presumes that all
civilizations emerge from
agriculture. He is unfamiliar with indigenous North
American civilizations that
anthropologists will later
describe as “affluent foragers”—principally located on
the North Pacific American coast, where complex
economies, polities, and art
developed without agriculture.
which again depends on a mass of material premises and which
cannot be fulfilled by the mere will, as anyone can see at the
first glance. (These conditions have still to be enumerated.) The
separation of town and country can also be understood as the
separation of capital and landed property, as the beginning of the
existence and development of capital independent of landed prop‑
erty—the beginning of property having its basis only in labour
and exchange.
In the towns which, in the Middle Ages, did not derive readymade from an earlier period but were formed anew by the serfs
who had become free, each man’s own particular labour was
his only property apart from the small capital he brought with
him, consisting almost solely of the most necessary tools of his
craft. The competition of serfs constantly escaping into the town,
the constant war of the country against the towns and thus the
necessity of an organised municipal military force, the bond of
common ownership in a particular kind of labour, the neces‑
sity of common buildings for the sale of their wares at a time
when craftsmen were also traders, and the consequent exclusion
of the unauthorised from these buildings, the conflict among
the interests of the various crafts, the necessity of protecting
their laboriously acquired skill, and the feudal organisation of
the whole of the country: these were the causes of the union of
the workers of each craft in guilds. We have not at this point to
go further into the manifold modifications of the guild-system,
which arise through later historical developments. The flight
of the serfs into the towns went on without interruption right
through the Middle Ages. These serfs, persecuted by their lords
in the country, came separately into the towns, where they found
an organised community, against which they were powerless and
in which they had to subject themselves to the station assigned
to them by the demand for their labour and the interest of their
organised urban competitors. These workers, entering separately,
were never able to attain to any power, since, if their labour was
of the guild type which had to be learned, the guild-masters bent
them to their will and organised them according to their interest;
or if their labour was not such as had to be learned, and therefore
not of the guild type, they became day-labourers and never man‑
aged to organise, remaining an unorganised rabble. The need for
day-labourers in the towns created the rabble.
These towns were true “associations”, called forth by the direct
need, the care of providing for the protection of property, and of
multiplying the means of production and defence of the separate
members. The rabble of these towns was devoid of any power,
composed as it was of individuals strange to one another who
had entered separately, and who stood unorganised over against
an organised power, armed for war, and jealously watching over
them. The journeymen and apprentices were organised in each
craft as it best suited the interest of the masters. The patriarchal
relationship existing between them and their masters gave the
latter a double power—on the one hand because of their influence
on the whole life of the journeymen, and on the other because, for
the journeymen who worked with the same master, it was a real
bond which held them together against the journeymen of other
masters and separated them from these. And finally, the journey‑
men were bound to the existing order by their simple interest
in becoming masters themselves. While, therefore, the rabble
at least carried out revolts against the whole municipal order,
revolts which remained completely ineffective because of their
powerlessness, the journeymen never got further than small acts
of insubordination within separate guilds, such as belong to the
very nature of the guild-system. The great risings of the Middle
Ages all radiated from the country, but equally remained totally
ineffective because of the isolation and consequent crudity of the
peasants.
In the towns, the division of labour between the individual
guilds was as yet [quite naturally derived] and, in the guilds them‑
selves, not at all developed between the individual workers. Every
workman had to be versed in a whole round of tasks, had to be
able to make everything that was to be made with his tools. The
limited commerce and the scanty communication between the
individual towns, the lack of population and the narrow needs
did not allow of a higher division of labour, and therefore every
man who wished to become a master had to be proficient in the
whole of his craft. Thus there is found with medieval craftsmen
an interest in their special work and in proficiency in it, which was
capable of rising to a narrow artistic sense. For this very reason,
however, every medieval craftsman was completely absorbed in
his work, to which he had a contented, slavish relationship, and
to which he was subjected to a far greater extent than the modern
worker, whose work is a matter of indifference to him.
Marx wrote many disparaging things about “the idiocy
of rural life,” though he was
careful never to blame the
victim. It is interesting that as
“the country” became a desirable ideal—the holding tank
of virtues dear to city dwellers,
including nature, rusticity,
and rural innocence (circa
eighteenth and nineteenth
centur ies)— the “suburbs”
emerged as the new home
address for “rural idiocy.” The
suburbs spoil both the city and
the country, so they must be
peopled by hicks and bigots
(or so we are told). Denigration of the suburbs mimics a
long history of urban hostility
to the rural poor (detailed by
Williams in a later selection).
karl marx 87
Capital in these towns was a naturally derived capital, consist‑
ing of a house, the tools of the craft, and the natural, hereditary
customers; and not being realisable, on account of the backward‑
ness of commerce and the lack of circulation, it descended from
father to son. Unlike modern capital, which can be assessed in
money and which may be indifferently invested in this thing or
that, this capital was directly connected with the particular work
of the owner, inseparable from it and to this extent estate capital.
Further Division of Labour
The next extension of the division of labour was the separation
of production and commerce, the formation of a special class of
merchants; a separation which, in the towns bequeathed by a
former period, had been handed down (among other things with
the Jews) and which very soon appeared in the newly formed
ones. With this there was given the possibility of commercial
communications transcending the immediate neighbourhood,
a possibility, the realisation of which depended on the existing
means of communication, the state of public safety in the coun‑
tryside, which was determined by political conditions (during the
whole of the Middle Ages, as is well known, the merchants trav‑
elled in armed caravans), and on the cruder or more advanced
needs (determined by the stage of culture attained) of the region
accessible to intercourse.
With commerce the prerogative of a particular class, with the
extension of trade through the merchants beyond the immediate
surroundings of the town, there immediately appears a recipro‑
cal action between production and commerce. The towns enter
into relations with one another, new tools are brought from one
town into the other, and the separation between production and
commerce soon calls forth a new division of production between
the individual towns, each of which is soon exploiting a predomi‑
nant branch of industry. The local restrictions of earlier times
begin gradually to be broken down.
It depends purely on the extension of commerce whether the
productive forces achieved in a locality, especially inventions,
are lost for later development or not. As long as there exists no
commerce transcending the immediate neighbourhood, every
invention must be made separately in each locality, and mere
chances such as irruptions of barbaric peoples, even ordinary
wars, are sufficient to cause a country with advanced produc‑
tive forces and needs to have to start right over again from the
beginning. In primitive history every invention had to be made
daily anew and in each locality independently. How little highly
developed productive forces are safe from complete destruction,
given even a relatively very extensive commerce, is proved by the
Phoenicians, whose inventions were for the most part lost for a
long time to come through the ousting of this nation from com‑
merce, its conquest by Alexander and its consequent decline.
Likewise, for instance, glass-painting in the Middle Ages. Only
when commerce has become world commerce and has as its basis
large-scale industry, when all nations are drawn into the competi‑
tive struggle, is the permanence of the acquired productive forces
assured.
The Rise of Manufacturing
The immediate consequence of the division of labour between
the various towns was the rise of manufactures, branches of
production which had outgrown the guild-system. Manufactures
first flourished, in Italy and later in Flanders, under the historical
premise of commerce with foreign nations. In other countries,
England and France for example, manufactures were at first
confined to the home market. Besides the premises already
mentioned manufactures depend on an already advanced con‑
centration of population, particularly in the countryside, and of
capital, which began to accumulate in the hands of individuals,
partly in the guilds in spite of the guild regulations, partly among
the merchants.
That labour which from the first presupposed a machine,
even of the crudest sort, soon showed itself the most capable of
development. Weaving, earlier carried on in the country by the
peasants as a secondary occupation to procure their clothing,
was the first labour to receive an impetus and a further develop‑
ment through the extension of commerce. Weaving was the first
and remained the principal manufacture. The rising demand
for clothing materials, consequent on the growth of population,
the growing accumulation and mobilisation of natural capital
through accelerated circulation, the demand for luxuries called
karl marx 89
forth by the latter and favoured generally by the gradual exten‑
sion of commerce, gave weaving a quantitative and qualitative
stimulus, which wrenched it out of the form of production hith‑
erto existing. Alongside the peasants weaving for their own use,
who continued, and still continue, with this sort of work, there
emerged a new class of weavers in the towns, whose fabrics were
destined for the whole home market and usually for foreign mar‑
kets too.
Weaving, an occupation demanding in most cases little skill
and soon splitting up into countless branches, by its whole nature
resisted the trammels of the guild. Weaving was, therefore, car‑
ried on mostly in villages and market-centres without guild
organisation, which gradually became towns, and indeed the
most flourishing towns in each land.
With guild-free manufacture, property relations also quickly
changed. The first advance beyond naturally derived estate capital
was provided by the rise of merchants whose capital was from the
beginning movable, capital in the modern sense as far as one can
speak of it, given the circumstances of those times. The second
advance came with manufacture, which again made mobile a
mass of natural capital, and altogether increased the mass of
movable capital as against that of natural capital.
At the same time, manufacture became a refuge of the peas‑
ants from the guilds which excluded them or paid them badly,
just as earlier the guild-towns had [served] as a refuge for the
peasants from [the oppressive landed nobility].
Simultaneously with the beginning of manufactures there
was a period of vagabondage caused by the abolition of the feudal
bodies of retainers, the disbanding of the swollen armies which
had flocked to serve the kings against their vassals, the improve‑
ment of agriculture, and the transformation of great strips of
tillage into pasture land. From this alone it is clear how this vaga‑
bondage is strictly connected with the disintegration of the feudal
system. As early as the thirteenth century we find isolated epochs
of this kind, but only at the end of the fifteenth and beginning
of the sixteenth does this vagabondage make a general and per‑
manent appearance. These vagabonds, who were so numerous
that, for instance, Henry VIII of England had 72,000 of them
hanged, were only prevailed upon to work with the greatest dif‑
ficulty and through the most extreme necessity, and then only
after long resistance. The rapid rise of manufactures, particularly
in England, absorbed them gradually.
With the advent of manufactures, the various nations entered
into a competitive relationship, the struggle for trade, which was
fought out in wars, protective duties and prohibitions, whereas
earlier the nations, insofar as they were connected at all, had car‑
ried on an inoffensive exchange with each other. Trade had from
now on a political significance.
With the advent of manufacture the relationship between
worker and employer changed. In the guilds the patriarchal rela‑
tionship between journeyman and master continued to exist;
in manufacture its place was taken by the monetary relation
between worker and capitalist—a relationship which in the coun‑
tryside and in small towns retained a patriarchal tinge, but in the
larger, the real manufacturing towns, quite early lost almost all
patriarchal complexion.
Manufacture and the movement of production in general
received an enormous impetus through the extension of com‑
merce which came with the discovery of America and the
sea-route to the East Indies. The new products imported thence,
particularly the masses of gold and silver which came into circu‑
lation and totally changed the position of the classes towards one
another, dealing a hard blow to feudal landed property and to the
workers; the expeditions of adventurers, colonisation; and above
all the extension of markets into a world market, which had now
become possible and was daily becoming more and more a fact,
called forth a new phase of historical development, into which in
general we cannot here enter further. Through the colonisation
of the newly discovered countries the commercial struggle of the
nations amongst one another was given new fuel and accordingly
greater extension and animosity.
†
…The second period began in the middle of the seventeenth cen‑
tury and lasted almost to the end of the eighteenth. Commerce and
navigation had expanded more rapidly than manufacture, which
played a secondary role; the colonies were becoming considerable
consumers; and after long struggles the separate nations shared
out the opening world market among themselves. This period
begins with the Navigation Laws1 and colonial monopolies. The
It is at this point in Marx’s
history that Europeans first
encounter the civilizations of
North Pacific America, and
they are ill-equipped to grasp
the logic and sophistication
they find there. Instead, as
Marx would do, explorers,
karl marx 91
such as James Cook (see later
selection), regard the people
they meet as primitive savages
to whom civilized man must
ultimately bring the blessings of agriculture (which is
to say, an invitation into the
very history that Marx narrates here).
competition of the nations among themselves was excluded as
far as possible by tariffs, prohibitions and treaties; and in the
last resort the competitive struggle was carried on and decided
by wars (especially naval wars). The mightiest maritime nation,
the English, retained preponderance in trade and manufacture.
Here, already, we find concentration in one country.
Manufacture was all the time sheltered by protective duties
in the home market, by monopolies in the colonial market, and
abroad as much as possible by differential duties. The workingup of home-produced material was encouraged (wool and linen
in England, silk in France), the export of home-produced raw
material forbidden (wool in England), and the [working-up] of
imported material neglected or suppressed (cotton in England).
The nation dominant in sea trade and colonial power naturally
secured for itself also the greatest quantitative and qualitative
expansion of manufacture. Manufacture could not be carried
on without protection, since, if the slightest change takes place
in other countries, it can lose its market and be ruined; under
reasonably favourable conditions it may easily be introduced into
a country, but for this very reason can easily be destroyed. At the
same time through the mode in which it is carried on, particu‑
larly in the eighteenth century, in the countryside, it is to such
an extent interwoven with the vital relationships of a great mass
of individuals, that no country dare jeopardise its existence by
permitting free competition. Insofar as it manages to export,
it therefore depends entirely on the extension or restriction of
commerce, and exercises a relatively very small reaction [on the
latter]. Hence its secondary [importance] and the influence of
[the merchants] in the eighteenth century. It was the merchants
and especially the shippers who more than anybody else pressed
for State protection and monopolies; the manufacturers also
demanded and indeed received protection, but all the time were
inferior in political importance to the merchants. The commer‑
cial towns, particularly the maritime towns, became to some
extent civilised and acquired the outlook of the big bourgeoisie,
but in the factory towns an extreme petty-bourgeois outlook per‑
sisted.2 The eighteenth century was the century of trade. Pinto
says this expressly: “Le commerce fait la marotte du siècle”; and:
“Depuis quelque temps il n’est plus question que de commerce, de navgation et de marine.” [“Commerce is the rage of the century.” “For
some time now people have been talking only about commerce,
navigation and the navy.” –Ed.]
This period is also characterised by the cessation of the bans
on the export of gold and silver and the beginning of the trade in
money; by banks, national debts, paper money; by speculation in
stocks and shares and stockjobbing in all articles; by the develop‑
ment of finance in general. Again capital lost a great part of the
natural character which had still clung to it.
Chapter 4:
Most Extensive Division of Labour
Large-Scale Industry
The concentration of trade and manufacture in one country,
England, developing irresistibly in the seventeenth century, grad‑
ually created for this country a relative world market, and thus a
demand for the manufactured products of this country, which
could no longer be met by the industrial productive forces hith‑
erto existing. This demand, outgrowing the productive forces,
was the motive power which, by producing big industry—the
application of elemental forces to industrial ends, machinery and
the most complex division of labour—called into existence the
third period of private ownership since the Middle Ages. There
already existed in England the other pre-conditions of this new
phase: freedom of competition inside the nation, the development
of theoretical mechanics, etc. (Indeed, the science of mechanics
perfected by Newton was altogether the most popular science in
France and England in the eighteenth century.) (Free competi‑
tion inside the nation itself had everywhere to be conquered by a
revolution—1640 and 1688 in England, 1789 in France.)
Competition soon compelled every country that wished to
retain its historical role to protect its manufactures by renewed
customs regulations (the old duties were no longer any good
against big industry) and soon after to introduce big industry
under protective duties. Big industry universalised competition
in spite of these protective measures (it is practical free trade; the
protective duty is only a palliative, a measure of defence within
free trade), established means of communication and the modern
world market, subordinated trade to itself, transformed all capital
karl marx 93
into industrial capital, and thus produced the rapid circulation
(development of the financial system) and the centralisation of
capital. By universal competition it forced all individuals to strain
their energy to the utmost. It destroyed as far as possible ideol‑
ogy, religion, morality, etc. and where it could not do this, made
them into a palpable lie. It produced world history for the first
time, insofar as it made all civilised nations and every individual
member of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on
the whole world, thus destroying the former natural exclusive‑
ness of separate nations. It made natural science subservient to
capital and took from the division of labour the last semblance of
its natural character. It destroyed natural growth in general, as
far as this is possible while labour exists, and resolved all natural
relationships into money relationships. In the place of naturally
grown towns it created the modern, large industrial cities which
have sprung up overnight. Wherever it penetrated, it destroyed
the crafts and all earlier stages of industry. It completed the vic‑
tory of the commercial town over the countryside.
Notes
1 Navigation Laws—a series of Acts passed in England from 1381
onwards to protect English shipping against foreign companies.
The Navigation Laws were modified in the early nineteenth
century and repealed in 1849 except for a reservation regarding
coasting trade, which was revoked in 1854.
2 The movement of capital, although considerably accelerated, still
remained, however, relatively slow. The splitting-up of the world
market into separate parts, each of which was exploited by a par‑
ticular nation, the exclusion of competition among themselves on
the part of the nations, the clumsiness of production itselt and the
fact that finance was only evolving from its early stages, greatly
impeded circulation. The consequence of this was a haggling,
mean and niggardly spirit which still clung to all merchants and
to the whole mode of carrying on trade. Compared with the manu‑
facturers, and above all with the craftsmen, they were certainly big
bourgeois; compared with the merchants and industrialists of the
next period they remain petty bourgeois. Cf. Adam Smith.
Fernand Braudel
excerpt from The Structures of Everyday Life
Towns and Cities
Towns are like electric transformers. They increase tension, accel‑
erate the rhythm of exchange and constantly recharge human life.
They were born of the oldest and most revolutionary division of
labour: between work in the field on the one hand and the activi‑
ties described as urban on the other. ‘The antagonism between
town and country begins with the transition from barbarism to
civilization, from tribe to State, from locality to nation, and runs
through the whole history of civilization to the present day,’ wrote
the young Marx.1
Towns, cities, are turning-points, watersheds of human his‑
tory. When they first appeared, bringing with them the written
word, they opened the door to what we now call history. Their
revival in Europe in the eleventh century marked the beginning
of the continent’s rise to eminence. When they flourished in Italy,
they brought the age of the Renaissance. So it has been since
the city-states, the poleis of ancient Greece, the medinas of the
Muslim conquest, to our own times. All major bursts of growth
are expressed by an urban explosion.
To ask whether the towns were the origin or cause of growth is
as meaningless as asking whether capitalism was responsible for
the economic progress of the eighteenth century or the industrial
revolution. What Georges Gurvitch used to call ‘the reciprocity of
Fernand Braudel (1902–
1985) was a French Marxist
whose meticulously researched
accounts of global events
brought the human sciences
of geography, anthropology,
and economics fully to bear
on the telling of history. He
draws on examples from every
part of the world, so it is interesting to see to see that he is
constrained by Marxist presumptions about town and
country and the primacy of
their opposition. Nevertheless, this thumbnail history
contains more information
than most volumes ten times
its size, delightfully translated
by Siân Reynolds.
fernand braudel 95
perspectives’ is relevant here. Towns generate expansion and are
themselves generated by it. But even when towns do not create
growth from scratch, they undoubtedly channel its course to
their own advantage. And growth can be perceived in the towns
and cities more clearly than anywhere else.
Towns: The Problem of Definition
Braudel establishes certain
parameters for what constitutes a town, as opposed to
countryside. One is its relation to markets: “There can
be no town without a market.”
Another is size, which, crucially, he puts at a very low
number in the hundreds (so
long as other conditions are
met). But the point is made,
and rightly, that urban conditions begin at a very low
threshold of population. Given
Braudel’s parameters, we have
to recognize the existence
of sizable towns in precontact North Pacific America.
Before Europeans arrived,
wide-ranging trade networks
crossed at densely populated
seasonal settlements, such as
those on Wapato, an island at
the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers
(present-day Sauvie Island,
in Oregon). Historian Rick
Ruben says that Wapato in the
1780s was “the most densely
populated area north of
Mexico City.” But what to call
these mutable, seasonal settlements? No matter how densely
Wherever it may be, a town is inseparable from certain realities
and processes, certain regular and recurring features. Where there
is a town, there will be division of labour, and where there is any
marked division of labour, there will be a town. No town is with‑
out its market, and there can be no regional or national markets
without towns. One hears a great deal about the role of the town
in the development and diversification of consumption, but very
little about the extremely important fact that even the humblest
town-dweller must of necessity obtain his food-supply through
the market: the town in other words generalizes the market into a
widespread phenomenon. Now the market provides the essential
dividing-line running through the middle of societies and econo‑
mies—a point to which I shall return later. Wherever there are
towns, there will also be a form of power, protective and coercive,
whatever the shape taken by that power or the social group identi‑
fied with it. And while power may exist independently of towns,
it acquires through them an extra dimension, a different field
of application. Last of all, there can be no door to the rest of the
world, no international trade without towns.
It was in this sense that I wrote ten years ago2 and still main‑
tain today, despite Philip Abrams’ elegant criticism,3 that ‘a town
is always a town’, wherever it is located, in time as well as in
space. I do not mean that all towns are alike. But over and above
their distinctive and original features, they all necessarily speak
the same basic language: common to them all are the continu‑
ous dialogue with their rural surroundings, a prime necessity of
everyday life; the supply of manpower, as indispensable as water
to the mill; their self-consciousness—their desire to be distin‑
guished from the others; their inevitable location at the centre
of communications networks large and small; their relationship
with their suburbs and with other cities. For a town never exists
unaccompanied by other towns: some dominant, others sub‑
ordinate or even enslaved, all are tied to each other forming a
hierarchy, in Europe, in China, or anywhere else.
Minimum Size, Combined Weight
The town, an unusual concentration of people, of houses close
together, often joined wall to wall, is a demographic anomaly.
Not that it is always full of people, a ‘restless sea’ of men, as Ibn
Batuta said admiringly of Cairo, with its 12,000 water-carriers
and thousands of camel-drivers plying for hire. 4 There are some
towns that have barely begun being towns and some villages that
exceed them in numbers of inhabitants. Examples of this are the
enormous villages in Russia, past and present, the country towns
of the Italian Mezzogiorno or the Andalusian south, or the loosely
woven clusters of hamlets in Java, which has remained an ‘island
of villages up to the present time’. But these inflated villages,
even when they were contiguous, were not necessarily destined
to become towns.
For numbers are not everything. The town only exists as a
town in relation to a form of life lower than its own. There are no
exceptions to this rule. No privilege serves as a substitute. There
is no town, no townlet without its villages, its scrap of rural life
attached; no town that does not impose upon its hinterland the
amenities of its market, the use of its shops, its weights and mea‑
sures, its money lenders, its lawyers, even its distractions. It has
to dominate an empire, however tiny, in order to exist.
Varzy, in the present-day département of the Nièvre, barely
numbered two thousand inhabitants at the beginning of the
eighteenth century. But it was well and truly a town, with its
own bourgeoisie. There were so many lawyers there that one
wonders what they found to do—even when surrounded by an
illiterate population who obviously had to resort to the pens of
others. But these lawyers were also landowners. Other members
of the bourgeoisie were masters of ironworks or tanneries, or
wood merchants profiting from the traffic in ‘lost logs’ along the
rivers, sometimes involved in the colossal provisioning of Paris,
and owning forests as far as the distant Barrois.5 Varzy is a typi‑
cal case of a small Western town. There are thousands of similar
examples.
populated they became, they
were quite unlike what Marx,
Braudel, and most Europeans
would call cities. They moved
and changed too swiftly, and
they sprang from a vast trade
economy, rather than from
agricultural markets.
How curious that a town
must “dominate an empire.”
The unadorned boldness of
this claim is typical of Braudel, and maybe it is meant to
provoke our frank recognition
of the imperialist essence of the
town/country split. Williams,
excerpted below, takes up this
theme when he finds the tropes
of town and country in the literature of Britain’s imperial
colonies: the “metropolitan
West” has made a hinterland
of the Third World. But are
there other urban histories?
Is concentrated human settlement always counterposed to
an alien, dominated other?
fernand braudel 97
To make things clear, there ought to be some firm and
indisputable lower limit to mark the minimum size of a town.
Unfortunately it is impossible to reach agreement on this, partic‑
ularly since the limit would change over time. Official statistics
in France define a town as a settlement of at least 2000 inhabit‑
ants (the measurement still in use today)—which is exactly the
size of Varzy in 1700. British statistics prefer the number 5000.
So if we read that in 1801, towns accounted for 25% of the Brit‑
ish population6 we should bear in mind that if towns had been
defined as communities of 2000 inhabitants and over, the per‑
centage would have been 40.
Richard Gascon, thinking primarily of the sixteenth century,
suggests that ‘six hundred households (roughly 2,000 to 2,500
inhabitants) is probably a reasonable lower limit’.7 However, I
am inclined to think this far too high a figure, for the sixteenth
century at least (Gascon may have been over-impressed by the
comparative vitality of the towns around Lyons). In Germany as
a whole in the late middle ages, 3000 places are reckoned to have
been granted the status of cities: their average population was no
more than 400 individuals.8 So the minimum level for ‘urban’
life, in France and no doubt throughout the West, with some
exceptions to confirm the rule, was well below the size of Varzy.
Thus we find that Arcis-sur-Aube in Champagne for instance,
the proud possessor of a salt-depot and an archidiaconate, which
was given permission by Francis I in 1546 to erect city walls, still
only had 228 households (900 inhabitants) at the beginning of
the eighteenth century; Chaource which had a hospital and a
college, numbered 227 households in 1720; Eroy 265; Vendeuvresur-Barse 316 and Pont-sur-Seine 188.9
So urban history has to be extended to cover these small
communities, for little towns, as Spengler observed,10 eventu‑
ally ‘conquer’ the surrounding countryside, penetrating it with
‘urban consciousness’, meanwhile being themselves devoured
and subordinated by agglomerations more populous and more
active. Such towns are thus caught up into urban systems orbit‑
ing regularly round some sun-city. But it would be a mistake
only to count the sun cities—Venice, Florence, Nuremberg,
Lyons, Amsterdam, London, Delhi, Nanking, Osaka. Towns
form hierarchies everywhere, but the tip of the pyramid does
not tell us everything, important though it may be. In China,
urban hierarchies are defined by the suffix added to the name of
a town: fu for a town of the first order, chu for one of the second,
hien for the third, not counting the elementary towns, at a lower
level still, which were built in the poor provinces because of ‘the
necessity of containing half-savage peoples who bear the yoke
of authority with impatience’.11 But it is this lowest network of
elementary towns, in contact with the surrounding villages that
we know least about, in China as elsewhere in the Far East. A
German doctor, travelling in 1690 through a small town on the
way to Yedo (Tokyo), counted 500 houses there (at least 2000
inhabitants) including the suburbs12 —mention of the latter
being proof enough that this was indeed a town. But such obser‑
vations are rare.
It would be best of all if we could evaluate the entire mass
of urban systems, estimate their overall weight, still taking as
our base that minimum limit, the articulation between town
and countryside. Overall figures would tell us more than par‑
ticular statistics: to be able to place on one side of the scales all
the towns, and on the other the total population of an empire, a
nation or an economic region, then to calculate their relationship,
would enable us to give a fairly reliable estimate of the social and
economic structures of the unit under observation.
Or at least it would be fairly reliable if such percentages were
easy to establish and satisfactory in themselves. Those Josef
Kulischer puts forward in his book13 seem over-optimistic and too
high compared to recent calculations. And we can dismiss Can‑
tillon’s estimate altogether: ‘It is generally supposed,’ he writes,
‘that half the inhabitants of a State subsist and have their homes in
the town, the other half in the countryside.’14 Recent calculations
by Marcel Reinhardt conclude that in France in Cantillon’s time,
the urban population was only 16% of the total. And, of course, it
all depends on the base level adopted. If towns are considered to
be settlements of over 400 inhabitants, then 10% of the English
population was living in towns in 1500, and 25% in 1700. But if
5000 is taken as the minimum definition, the figure would only
be 13% in 1700, 16% in 1750, 25% in 1801. It is therefore evident
that all the calculations would have to be repeated using identical
criteria, before one could make a valid comparison of the degree
of urbanization of the different regions of Europe. At present, all
we can do is identify certain particularly low or high levels.
At the bottom of the scale, the lowest urbanization figures
relate to Russia (2.5% in 1630; 3% in 1724; 4% in 1796; 13% in
fernand braudel 99
1897).15 So the figure of 10% for Germany in 1500 is not insignifi‑
cant compared to the Russian figures. The same found percentage
is found in colonial America in 1700, when Boston had 7000
inhabitants, Philadelphia 4000, Newport 2600, Charlestown
1100 and New York 3900. And yet, in 1642, in New York (still
known as New Amsterdam) ‘modern’ Dutch brick was already
replacing wood in house-building, a clear sign of growing pros‑
perity. The urban character of these centres where the population
was still of modest size is clear to see. In 1690, they represented
the degree of urban tension permitted by a total population of
200,000 or so, scattered over a vast area: about 9% of the whole.
In about 1750, of the already dense population of Japan (26 mil‑
lion) 22% were already living in towns.16
At the top of the scale, it seems probable that the 50% mark
was exceeded in Holland (140,180 town-dwellers in 1515, out of a
total population of 274,810, that is 51%; 59% in 1627, and 65% in
1797). According to the 1795 census, even the province of Overi‑
jssel, certainly not in the van of progress, produced a figure of
45.6%.17
What one needs to know in order to interpret this scale of
urbanization is the point (10% perhaps?) at which it attained a
minimum degree of efficiency. And would there not be another
significant landmark at about 50% or 40%, perhaps even lower?
Are there, as Wagemann suggested, certain thresholds, marking
levels at which self-generated transformations would occur?
The Ever-Changing Division of Labour
The essential problem, at the beginning and throughout the life
of towns in Europe and elsewhere, remains the same: the divi‑
sion of labour between countryside and urban centres, a division
that has never been perfectly defined and which has been subject
to constant change. In theory, it is in the towns that one finds
trade, the functions of political, religious and economic control,
and craft activities. But only in theory, for the distinction is always
being challenged from one side or another.
It should not be assumed that this version of the class struggle
was automatically resolved in favour of the town, as the stronger
partner. Nor should it be assumed that the countryside, as we
are usually told, necessarily preceded the towns in time. It is of
course frequently the case that the advance ‘of the rural milieu,
by the progress of production, permits the town to appear’.18 But
the town is not always a secondary development. Jane Jacobs, in
a persuasive book19 argues that the town appears at least simulta‑
neously with rural settlement, if not before it. Thus in the sixth
millennium BC, Jericho and Chatal Yüyük in Asia Minor were
already towns, creating around them countrysides that could be
called advanced or modern. They could do so to the extent, pre‑
sumably, that the surrounding land was an empty uninhabited
space, in which fields could be established virtually anywhere.
This situation may have recurred in Europe in the eleventh cen‑
tury. Closer to our times, we can see it clearly in the New World,
where Europeans built reproductions of their home cities and set
them down literally in the middle of nowhere: their inhabitants,
alone or with the aid of the local population, set about creating
the countryside to supply them. In Buenos Aires, which was
refounded in 1580, the local people were either hostile or (equally
damaging) absent altogether, so the townspeople were obliged, as
they complained, to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows.
They were having to create the countryside to meet the needs
of the town. A very similar process is described by Morris Birk‑
beck, apropos the colonization of the mid-west by the American
pioneers: ‘On any spot where a few settlers cluster together…
some enterprising proprietor finds in his section what he deems
a good scite [sic] for a town, he has it surveyed and laid out in
lots which he sells or offers for sale by auction.… The new town
then assumes the name of its founder:—a store-keeper builds a
little framed store, and sends for a few cases of goods; and then
a tavern starts up, which becomes the residence of a doctor and
a lawyer, and the boarding-house of the storekeeper as well as
the resort of the weary traveller; soon follow a blacksmith and
other handicraftsmen in useful succession: a schoolmaster, who
is also the minister of religion, becomes an important accession
to this rising community.…Where once the neighbourhood …was
clad in “buckskin”, now the men appear at church in good blue
cloth and the women in fine calicoes and straw bonnets.’ Once
the town has got going, ‘culture’ (i.e. agriculture) spreads rapidly
This is a fairly accurate
account of the process that led
to the cities of North Pacific
America, where enterprising
city builders used propaganda, embargo, sabotage, and
threats, as well as enticements, to squash competitors
and stimulate the creation
of a hinterland, or supply
region—an empire that their
land claims could dominate.
That Braudel would call these
regions “empty, uninhabited
space” is both regrettable and
uncharacteristic. Maybe he
was thinking of other parts of
North America (as in Knox
County, Illinois; see Coll
Thrush, excerpted below). As
we will see, in North Pacific
America such spaces had long,
continuous urban histories
well before Euro-Americans
arrived to impose their own
strategies of city-building.
fernand braudel 101
and becomes diversified in the surrounding countryside; and
money flows in.20
The same could be said of Siberia, that other New World: in
1652, Irkutsk was founded before the country districts that would
feed it.
The process had its own momentum: town and countryside
obeyed the rule of ‘reciprocity of perspectives’: mutual cre‑
ation, mutual domination, mutual exploitation according to the
unchanging rules of co-existence.
The countryside surrounding the towns, even in China,
gained from this proximity. In 1645, when Berlin was beginning
to come to life again, the Geheime Rat remarked that ‘the essen‑
tial reason for the very low price of grain today is precisely that all
the cities, with a few exceptions, have been devastated and have
no need of the grain of the plains, but can provide for the needs
of their few inhabitants from within their own territory’. The ‘ter‑
ritory’ referred to was in fact that of the countryside immediately
surrounding the cities, and which they had developed in the last
years of the Thirty Years War.21
True, the process could be reversed: the towns urbanized the
countryside, but the countryside ‘ruralized’ the towns too. From
‘the late sixteenth century,’ writes Richard Gascon, ‘the country‑
side was the abyss that swallowed up urban capital’,22 if only for
the purchase of land, to build farms or countless country houses.
Seventeenth-century Venice turned away from the profits of the
sea and threw all her fortune into the countryside. Every city in
the world has at one time or another seen similar transfers of
wealth, whether London or Lyons, Milan or Leipzig, Algiers or
Istanbul.
In fact town and countryside never separate like oil and water.
They are at the same time separate yet drawn together, divided
yet combined. Even in Islamic countries the town does not ignore
or exclude the countryside, despite the apparently sharp divide
between the two. It develops market-gardening activities around
it. Certain water-channels along urban streets are extended to the
gardens of nearby oases. The same symbiosis occurs in China
where the countryside is fertilized with refuse and rubbish from
the town.
But we need hardly demonstrate what is self-evident. Until very
recently, every town had to have its foodstuffs within easy reach.
An economic historian familiar with the statistics estimates that
in the eleventh century, a town of 3000 inhabitants required, to
survive, the land of some ten villages, or approximately 8.5 square
kilometres, ‘in view of the low yield of agriculture’.23 In fact the
countryside had to support the town if the town was not to live in
a constant state of anxiety with regard to its subsistence. It could
have recourse to long-distance trade only in exceptional circum‑
stances, and only if it was a privileged city like Florence, Bruges,
Venice, Naples, Rome, Peking, Istanbul, Delhi and Mecca.
Moreover, even the large towns continued to engage in rural
activities up to the eighteenth century. They therefore housed
shepherds, gamekeepers, agricultural workers and vine-growers
(even in Paris). Every town generally owned a surrounding area
of gardens and orchards inside and outside its walls, and fields
farther away, sometimes with rotating crops, as in Frankfurt-amMain, Worms, Basle and Munich. In the middle ages, the noise of
the flail could be heard right up to the Rathaus in Ulm, Augsburg
or Nuremberg. Pigs were reared in freedom in the streets. And
the streets were so dirty and muddy that they had to be crossed
on stilts, unless wooden bridges were thrown across from one
side to the other. The main streets of Frankfurt were hurriedly
covered with straw or wood shavings on the eve of the fairs.24 As
late as 1746, in Venice, it was apparently necessary to forbid the
keeping of pigs ‘in the city and in the monasteries’.25
As for the innumerable small towns, they could barely be dis‑
tinguished from country life. The expression ‘rural towns’ has
been used of them. All the same, Weinsberg, Heilbronn, Stutt‑
gart and Esslingen in vine-growing lower Swabia took it upon
themselves to send the wine they produced to the Danube;26 and
wine was an industry in itself. Jerez de la Frontera, near Seville,
stated in answer to an inquiry in 1582 that ‘the town has only its
harvests of wine, corn, oil and meat’, which were enough for its
well-being and to keep its trade and its workers alive.27 Algerian
pirates were able to take Gibraltar by surprise in 1540, because
they knew the customs of the place and chose the time of the
grape harvest. All the inhabitants were outside the walls, sleep‑
ing in their vineyards.28 Towns everywhere guarded their fields
and vineyards jealously. Hundreds of municipal magistratures
every year—in Rothenburg in Bavaria or in Bar-le-Duc, for exam‑
ple—proclaimed the opening of the grape-harvest when the ‘vine
fernand braudel 103
leaves have taken on that yellow hue that proclaims ripeness’. Even
a city like Florence received thousands of barrels every autumn,
and was transformed into an enormous market for new wine.
The inhabitants of the towns often spent only part of their lives
there: at harvest-time, artisans and others left their houses and
trades behind them and went to work in the fields. This was true
of busy, overpopulated Flanders in the sixteenth century. It was
also true of England, even on the eve of its industrial revolution;
and of Florence where the very important Arte della Lana oper‑
ated chiefly in winter in the sixteenth century.29 A diary kept be
Jean Pussot, master-carpenter of Rheims, shows greater interest
in vintages, harvests, the quality of the wine, and corn and bread
prices, than in the events of political or guild life. At the time
of the French Wars of Religion, the people of Rheims and the
people of Epernay were not on the same side and both harvested
their vines under military escort. But our carpenter notes, ‘the
thieves of Epernay took the herd of pigs away from the town [of
Rheims] …they took them to the aforesaid Epernay on Tuesday
the thirtieth day of March 1593’.30 It was not only a question of
knowing who would win, the Leaguers or Henry IV, but of who
would salt and eat the meat. Things had barely changed in 1722,
when a treatise on economy deplores the fact that artisans instead
of peasants were concerning themselves with agriculture in the
small towns and princedoms of Germany. It would be better if
everyone ‘kept in his own station’. Towns would be cleaner and
healthier if they were cleared of livestock and their ‘piles of dung’.
The solution would be ‘to ban all farming in the towns, and to
put it in the hands of those suited to it’.31 Craftsmen would be
able to sell goods to peasants; peasants would be sure of selling
the regular equivalent to townspeople, and everyone would be
better off.
If the town did not completely surrender the monopoly of
crops or stock raising to the countryside, conversely the coun‑
tryside did not give up all its ‘industrial’ activities in favour of
nearby towns. It had its share of them, although they were gener‑
ally those activities the towns were glad enough to leave to them.
In the first place, the villages had never been without craftsmen.
Cartwheels were manufactured and repaired locally in the village
itself by the wheelwright, and ringed with iron by the blacksmith
(the technique spread at the end of the sixteenth century). Every
large village had its shoeing smith. Such activities could still
be seen in France until the beginning of the twentieth century.
Moreover, in Flanders and elsewhere, where the towns had estab‑
lished a sort of industrial monopoly in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, there was a massive exodus of urban industries to the
outskirts of the towns in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in
search of cheaper manpower, outside the protection and hawkeyed supervision of the urban craft guilds. The town lost nothing
thereby, controlling as it did the wretched rural workers outside
its walls and managing them as it wanted. In the seventeenth
century and even more in the next, villages took upon their weak
shoulders a very large burden of craft-working.
The same division was to be found elsewhere, but organized
differently—in Russia, India and China, for example. In Russia,
the greater part of industrial tasks fell upon the villages, which
were self-supporting. Urban agglomerations did not dominate
or disturb them as towns did in the West. There was as yet no
real competition between townsmen and peasants. This is clearly
explained by the low rate of urban growth. There were a few large
cities, despite the ills they were heir to (Moscow was burned
down by the Tartars in 1571 and again by the Poles in 1611, but
seems to have contained no fewer than 40,000 houses in 1636).32
But in a poorly urbanized country, villages had no choice but to
do everything for themselves. In addition, the owners of large
estates, together with their serfs, set up a number of viable indus‑
tries. The long Russian winter is not the only explanation for the
industriousness of the countryside.33
The village in India was similarly self-sufficient. A thriving
community, capable on occasion of moving en bloc to escape
some danger or too heavy oppression, it paid taxes to the town
but only called on it for rare commodities (iron tools, for exam‑
ple). In China, the country craftsman supplemented his hard
life by work in silk or cotton. His low standard of living made
him a formidable competitor for the town craftsman. An English
traveller (1793) registered surprise and delight at the unwonted
sight of peasant women near Peking breeding silk worms and
spinning cotton: ‘which is in general use for both sexes of the
people, but the women are almost the sole weavers throughout
the Empire’.34
fernand braudel 105
The Town and Its Newcomers: Mainly the Poor
Blogs in Portland, Oregon,
where I live, sometimes discuss the suburbs, particularly
Beaverton, a little-visited but
much-derided city bordering Portland. It is the same
booming suburb that every
city has now, the one whose
growth often dwarfs that
of the city itself. Comments
posted from Beaverton often
come with the proviso that “I
only live here because” (a) it’s
cheaper; (b) there’s a job; (c)
comparable housing could not
be found “in the city” (i.e.,
Portland). The light of these
sprawling cities—can they be
called cities?—draws the displaced (often, those rejected,
first, from distant countries
they have fled, and then forced
out of the increasingly expensive city). Like the rural poor
filling seventeenth-century
London, the globally dispossessed now fill the sprawling
suburban settlements reaching out from the center. (As
well, these places draw the
same “high-quality recruits”
Braudel attributes to the seventeenth-century city.)
A town would probably cease to exist without its supply of new
people. It has to attract them. But they often come of their own
accord towards its lights, its real or apparent freedom, and its higher
wages. They come too because they have already been rejected
first by the countryside, then by other towns. The standard stable
partnership is between a poor region with regular emigration
and an active town: such was the relationship between Friuli and
Venice—the Furlani supplied it with its labourers and servants;
Kabylia and Algiers under the corsairs—the mountain-dwell‑
ers came down to dig the gardens in the town and surrounding
countryside; Marseilles and Corsica; the towns of Provence and
the gavots of the Alps; London and the Irish. But every big town
would have many different places of recruitment.
In Paris in 1788:
The people known as common labourers are almost all for‑
eigners [sic]. The Savoyards are decorators, floor polishers and
sawyers: the Auvergnats … almost all water-carriers; the natives
of Limousin are masons; the Lyonnais are generally porters
and chair-carriers; the Normans, stone cutters, pavers and ped‑
lars, menders of crockery, rabbit-skin merchants; the Gascons,
wigmakers or carabins [barbers’ assistants]; the Lorrainers,
travelling shoemakers or cobblers…. The Savoyards live in the
suburbs; they are organised by chambrées [dormitories], each
run by a head, sometimes an old Savoyard who is treasurer and
tutor to the young children until they reach an age to govern
themselves.
The Auvergnat who hawked rabbit skins, buying them indi‑
vidually and reselling them in quantity, travelled around ‘so
overloaded that one looks [in vain] for his head and arms’. And of
course, all these poor people bought their clothes at the secondhand shops on the quai de la Ferraille or the Mégisserie where
everything was bartered. ‘A man [goes into] the shop as black as
a crow and comes out green as a parrot.’35
But the cities did not only take in poor wretches such as these.
They also drew high-quality recruits from the bourgeoisies of
neighbouring or distant towns: rich merchants, masters and
craftsmen (whose services were sometimes fought over), merce‑
naries, ships’ pilots, professors and doctors, engineers, architects,
painters. Thus the points from which apprentices and masters
of its Arte della Lana came to Florence in the sixteenth century
could be marked on the map of northern and central Italy. In
the preceding century, they had come in a steady stream from
the Netherlands.36 The origins of new citizens in a lively town
like Metz,37 for instance, or even Amsterdam (from 1575 to 1614) 38
could equally well be marked on a map. In each case it would dis‑
close a wide area associated with the life of the town concerned.
Such an area might very well coincide with that marked out by
the radius of its commercial relations, consisting of the villages,
towns and markets that accepted its system of measures or money,
or both, or which, failing that, spoke its dialect.
Such constant recruitment was a matter of necessity. Before
the nineteenth century, cities had scarcely any excess of births
over deaths. They were areas of high mortality.39 If they were to
expand, they could not do so unaided. Socially as well, they left
the lowly tasks to new arrivals. Like our over-charged economies
today, the big city needed North Africans or Puerto Ricans in its
service, a proletariat which it quickly used up and had quickly
to renew. ‘The scum of the countryside becomes the scum of
the cities’, wrote Sébastien Mercier of the domestic servants in
Paris—an army 150,000 strong apparently. 40 The existence of
this wretched and lowly proletariat is a feature of any large town.
An average of 20,000 people died in Paris every year, even
after the 1780s. Some 4000 ended their days in the poor-house,
either at the Hôtel-Dieu or the Bicêtre. The dead were ‘sewn up
in sacking’ and buried unceremoniously in the paupers’ grave at
Clamart, which was sprinkled with quick lime. A hand-drawn
cart carried the dead southwards from the Hôtel-Dieu every night.
‘A mud-bespattered priest, a bell, a cross’—such was the only
funeral procession of the poor. Everything about the poor-house
‘is hard and cruel’; 1200 beds for 5000 to 6000 sick people. ‘The
newcomer is bedded down beside a dying man and a corpse.’41
And life was no kinder in its beginnings. Paris had 7000 to
8000 abandoned children out of some 30,000 births around
1780. Depositing these children at the poor-house was an occupa‑
tion in itself. The man carried them on his back ‘in a padded box
which can hold three. They are propped upright in their swad‑
dling clothes, breathing through the top … When [the carrier]
opens his box, he often finds one of them dead; he completes his
fernand braudel 107
journey with the other two, impatient to be rid of the load…. He
immediately sets off once more to start the same task, which is
his livelihood, over again.’42 Many of these abandoned children
came from the provinces. Strange immigrants indeed.
The Self-Consciousness of Towns
Every town is and wants to be a world apart. It is a striking fact
that all or nearly all of them between the fifteenth and eigh‑
teenth centuries had ramparts. They were held in a restrictive
and distinctive geometry, cut off even from their own immediate
surroundings.
The primary reason was security. Protection was only super‑
fluous in a few countries; in the British Isles, for example, there
were practically no urban fortifications. Towns there were thus
spared a lot of useless investment, according to economists. The
old city walls in London had only an administrative function,
although temporary fear on the part of the Parliamentarians in
1643 caused fortifications to be hurriedly built around the town.
Nor were there any fortifications in the Japanese archipelago,
which was also protected by the sea, nor in Venice, an island in
itself. There were no walls in self-confident countries like the
vast Osmanli Empire which had ramparted towns only on its
threatened frontiers—in Hungary facing Europe, in Armenia
facing Persia. Both Erivan (where there was a small force of artil‑
lery) and Erzerum (crowded by its suburbs) were surrounded by
double walls (though not earthworks) in 1694. Everywhere else
the pax turcica led the ancient ramparts to fall into disrepair. They
deteriorated like the walls of abandoned estates, even the splen‑
did ramparts at Istanbul inherited from Byzantium. Opposite,
in Galata, in 1694, ‘the walls [are] half-ruined and the Turks do
not seem to be thinking of rebuilding them’. 43 By 1574 at Philip‑
popoli, on the road to Adrianople, there was ‘no longer even the
appearance of a gate’. 44
No such confidence was to be found anywhere else. Urban
fortification became the general rule across continental Europe
(Russian towns were ramparted to a greater or lesser degree and
depended on a fortress as Moscow depended on the Kremlin),
across colonial America, Persia, India and China. Furetière’s Dictionnaire (1690) defined a town as the ‘home of a large number of
people which is normally enclosed by walls’. For many Western
towns, this ‘ring of stone’ built in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, was the ‘outward sign of a conscious effort for inde‑
pendence and freedom’, which marked urban expansion in the
middle ages. But it was also, in Europe and elsewhere, often the
work of a prince, a protection against an external enemy. 45
In China, only second-rate or declining towns no longer had
or never had had walls. Ramparts were usually impressive, and
so high that they concealed ‘the tops of the houses’ from view.
Towns there
were all built in the same way and in a square [said a traveller
(1639)] with fine brick walls which they cover with the same clay
from which they make porcelain; this hardens so much in the
course of time that it is impossible to break it with a hammer….
The walls are very wide and flanked with towers built in the
ancient style, almost in the same fashion as one sees Roman
fortifications depicted. Two large wide roads generally cut the
town crosswise and they are so straight that, although they run
the whole length of a town, however large it may be, the four
gates are always visible from the crossroads.
The wall of Peking, said the same traveller, is, unlike the
walls of European towns, ‘so wide that twelve horses could gallop
abreast on it at full speed without colliding [not that we should
take his word for it: another traveller describes them as being ‘20
feet wide at the base and about twelve feet wide at the top’. 46] It is
guarded at night as if it were war-time, but by day the gates are
not guarded except by Eunuchs who stay there rather to collect
entrance fees than for the safety of the town.’47 On 17 August
1668 a torrential flood submerged the countryside around the
capital and ‘a quantity of villages and country houses [were car‑
ried away] by the momentum of the water’. The new town thereby
lost a third of its houses, ‘and countless wretched people were
drowned and buried under the ruins’ but the old town escaped.
‘Its gates were promptly closed … and all holes and all cracks were
stuffed with lime and bitumen mixed together.’ Here is proof of
the almost impervious stability of the walls of Chinese towns. 48
It is interesting to note that during these centuries of pax
sinica, when danger no longer threatened the towns from outside,
the walls virtually became a system for supervising the towns‑
Another pleasure of Braudel:
his details. Who knew that
dutiful eunuchs collected tolls
at the gates of Peking? We
need a similar historian of
sprawl.
fernand braudel 109
people themselves. Soldiers and horsemen could be mobilized in
an instant up the wide ramps giving access from within to the top
of the ramparts where they could overlook the whole town. There
is no doubt that the city was firmly controlled by the authorities.
Moreover, every street in both China and Japan had its own gates
and internal jurisdiction. Any incident whatever, any misdeed,
and the gates of the street were closed and the guilty or arrested
person immediately, often bloodily, punished. What made the
system even stricter was that everywhere in China the square
outline of the Tartar town stood alongside the Chinese town and
watched closely over it.
The wall frequently enclosed a portion of fields and gardens
together with the town. The reason was of course the need for
supplies in time of war. There is a place in Castile where ram‑
parts were rapidly constructed in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries around a group of villages at some distance from each
other, with enough space left in between to hold the flocks in
case of emergency. 49 The rule holds wherever, in anticipation
of a siege, ramparts enclosed meadows and gardens, as in Flor‑
ence; or arable land, orchards and vineyards, as in Poitiers. In fact
Poitiers’ walls, even in the seventeenth century, were almost as
extensive as those of Paris, but the town took a long time to grow
into this outsize garment. Similarly, Prague took a long time to
fill up the space left between the houses of the ‘small town’ and
the new ramparts built in the middle of the fourteenth century.
The same applied to Toulouse from 1400; and to Barcelona,
which took two centuries (until about 1550) to reach the ramparts
reconstructed around it in 1359 (the present-day Ramblas now
occupy part of the site). And this was equally true of Milan with
its Spanish-built fortifications.
The scene was the same in China: one town on the Yang-tseKiang ‘has a wall ten miles in circumference, which encloses
hills, mountains and plains uninhabited because the town has
few houses and its inhabitants prefer to live in the very extensive
suburbs’. In the same year, 1696, the upper part of the capital
of Kiang-Si sheltered ‘many fields and gardens, but few inhabit‑
ants’.50
The West had long ensured security at a low cost by a moat
and a perpendicular wall. This did little to interfere with urban
expansion—much less than is usually thought. When the town
needed more space the walls were moved like theatre sets—in
Ghent, Florence, and Strasbourg, for example—and as many
times as was required. Walls were made-to-measure corsets.
Towns grew and made themselves new ones.
But constructed, or reconstructed, walls continued to encircle
towns and to define them. They were boundaries, frontiers, as
well as protection. The towns drove the bulk of their artisanal
trades, particularly their heavy industries, to the periphery, so
much so that the wall was an economic and social dividing line
as well. As the town grew it generally annexed some of its sub‑
urbs and transformed them, pushing activities foreign to city life
a little farther away.
That is why Western towns, which grew up in such a haphaz‑
ard way, little by little, have such complicated street-plans. Their
winding streets and unexpected turnings are quite unlike the
pattern of the Roman town, which still survives in a few cities
descended from the classical period: Turin, Cologne, Coblenz,
Ratisbon. But the Renaissance marked the first development
of deliberate town planning, with the flowering of a series of
supposedly ‘ideal’ geometric plans in chessboard pattern or con‑
centric circles. This was the spirit in which the widespread urban
development in the West remodelled squares and rebuilt districts
acquired from the suburbs. They set down their grid-plans along‑
side the tortuous streets of the medieval town-centres.
This new coherence and rationalization were even better
expressed in the new towns where builders had a free hand. It
is curious how the few examples of grid-plan or chequerboard
Western towns before the fifteenth century correspond to delib‑
erate constructions, built ex nihilo. Aigues-Mortes, a small port
that Saint Louis bought and reconstructed in order to have an
outlet on the Mediterranean, is one example. Another is the
tiny town of Mompazier (in the Dordogne), built by order of the
King of England at the end of the thirteenth century. One of the
squares of the chequerboard corresponds to the church, another
to the market place, surrounded by arcades and with a well in
the centre.51 Other examples are to be found in the terre nuove
of Tuscany in the fourteenth century, Scarperia, San Giovanni
Valdarno, Terranuova Bracciolini and Castelfranco di Sopra.52
But the town planning honours list gets rapidly longer from the
sixteenth century. One could give a long list of the towns built on
a geometric plan, like the new city of Leghorn after 1575, Nancy,
which was reconstructed from 1588, or Charleville after 1608.
Why is the deliberate design
of complexity, or labyrinths
(as in contemporary suburban development), so much
less successful than either
haphazard, accidental complexity (as in older European
cities) or the deliberate use
of the grid (as in the cities of
North America)?
fernand braudel 111
The most extraordinary case was still St Petersburg.… Because
of their late foundation, almost all the towns of the New World
were similarly constructed on a pre-arranged plan. They form
the largest family of grid-plan towns. Those in Spanish America
were particularly characteristic, with their streets cutting the
cuadras at right angles and the two main roads converging on the
Plaza Mayor where stood the cathedral, the prison, and the town
hall—the Cabildo.
The grid or chequerboard plan raises a curious problem,
taking the world as a whole. All the towns in China, Korea, Japan,
peninsular India and colonial America (not to mention Roman
and certain Greek cities) were planned according to the chequer‑
board pattern. Only two civilizations produced large towns with
an irregular maze of streets: Islam (including northern India)
and medieval Europe. One could lose oneself in aesthetic or
psychological speculations as to why such choices were made by
civilizations. The West was certainly not thinking of the Roman
castrum when it laid out its cities in sixteenth-century America.
What it took to the New World was a reflection of modern Europe’s
interest in town planning, an urgent taste for order. It would be
worth while going beyond the numerous examples of this taste to
investigate its living roots.
Towns, Artillery and Carriages in the West
Western towns faced severe problems from the fifteenth century
onwards. Their populations had increased and artillery made
their ancient walls useless. They had to be replaced whatever the
cost, by wide ramparts half sunk in the ground, extended by bas‑
tions, terrepleins, ‘cavaliers’, where loose soil reduced possible
damage from bullets. These ramparts were wider horizontally
and could no longer be moved without enormous expense. And
an empty space in front of these fortified lines was essential to
defence operations; buildings, gardens and trees were therefore
forbidden there. Occasionally the empty space in the requisite
spot had to be re-created by pulling down trees and houses. This
was done in Gdansk (Danzig) in 1520, during the Polish-Teutonic
war and in 1576 during its conflict with King Stefan Batory.
The town’s expansion was thus blocked and more often than
in the past it was condemned to grow vertically. Houses were very
soon being built in Genoa, Paris and Edinburgh with five, six,
eight and even ten storeys. Prices of plots rose incessantly and tall
houses became the general rule everywhere. If London long pre‑
ferred wood to brick one reason was that it made possible lighter,
less thick walls at the time when four- to six-storey houses were
replacing the old buildings, which generally had two. In Paris,
‘it was necessary to restrain the excessive height of houses …
because a few individuals had actually built one house on top
of another. Height was restricted [just before the Revolution] to
seventy feet not including the roof.’53
Having the advantage of being without walls, Venice could
expand in comfort. A few wooden piles sunk in, a few boatloads
of stone, and a new district rose up on the lagoon. Heavy industry
was very soon pushed back to the periphery, knackers and curri‑
ers to the island of Giudecca, the arsenal to the far end of the new
district of Castello, glassworks to the island of Murano as early as
1255. It was a kind of modern ‘zoning’. Meanwhile Venice spread
out its public and private splendour on the Grand Canal, an old
and abnormally deep river valley. Only one bridge, the Rialto,
made of wood and with a drawbridge (until the construction
of the present stone bridge in 1587), linked the bank on which
stood the Fondaco dei Tedeschi (now the central post office) to the
Rialto square. This marked out the vital axis of the town—from
St Mark’s Square to the bridge via the busy street of the Merce‑
ria. It was thus a town with plenty of room to spread itself. But
in the ghetto—a narrow, walled and artificial town—space was
cramped and houses shot upwards five or six storeys high.
When wheeled carriages appeared in large numbers in Europe
in the sixteenth century, they posed urgent problems, and made
severe town surgery necessary. Bramante, who pulled down
the old quarter round St Peter’s in Rome (1506–14), was one of
Baron Haussmann’s first predecessors in history. Towns inevita‑
bly regained a little order, more fresh air and easier circulation,
at least for a time. Pietro di Toledo (1536) chose the same type
of reorganization when he opened out a number of wide streets
through Naples where, as King Ferdinand used to say, ‘the narrow
streets were a danger to the State’. The completion of the short but
grand rectilinear Strada Nuova in Genoa in 1547 was of similar
inspiration, as were the three new thoroughfares ordered by Pope
Sixtus V, which radiated out across Rome from the Piazza del
Popolo. It was no accident that one of them, the Corso, became
fernand braudel 113
The problems of a world that
runs on wheels are long-standing, and remain a principal
challenge in the design of
cities.
the commercial street par excellence of Rome. Carriages and soon
coaches, entered the towns at top speed. John Stow, who observed
the first changes in London prophesied: ‘The world will run on
wheels.’ Thomas Dekker said the same thing in the following
century: ‘In every street in London carts and coaches make such
a thundering as if the world ran upon wheels.’54
Geography and Urban Communications
Saskia Sassen’s description
(see selection below) of the
financial networks of global
cities suggests a new kind of
city that is less tied to geography than ever before. Where,
for example, is New York?
True, the city occupies a specific place on the globe, marked
by borders. But, increasingly,
the cultural life of the city,
even citizenship in it, exists in
a geographically scattered network of shared conversations,
high-speed connections, and
peripatetic work. Some living
within the legal boundary of
New York have no citizenship,
while others living across the
globe have active agency and
live their lives within the cultural and political frame set by
New York. Where is New York,
now that it is everywhere?
Every town grows up in a given place, becomes wedded to it and,
with very few exceptions, never leaves it. The original site may or
may not be a wise choice: its initial advantages and disadvantages
stay with it for ever. A traveller who landed at Bahia (São Salva‑
dor), the then capital of Brazil, in 1684 mentions its splendours,
and the number of slaves, who are ‘treated’, he goes on, ‘with the
utmost barbarity’. He also remarks on the defects of its site: ‘The
roads slope so steeply that if horses were harnessed to carriages
they would not be able to stand upright’, so there was no wheeled
traffic, only beasts of burden and saddle horses. A more serious
disadvantage was the sharp drop that cut off the city proper from
the lower commercial district by the sea, so that it was necessary
to ‘use a sort of crane to bring merchandise up and down from
the port to the town’.55 Nowadays lifts have speeded up the pro‑
cess, but it still has to be done.
Similarly Constantinople, on the Golden Horn, the Sea of
Marmara and the Bosporus, was divided by large expanses of sea
water and consequently had to maintain a population of boatmen
and ferrymen in perpetual employment at the crossings—which
were not always without danger.
But these drawbacks were compensated by important advan‑
tages—if not, they would have been neither accepted nor tolerated.
The advantages were generally those inherent in the location of
the town in relation to neighbouring regions. The Golden Horn
was the only sheltered port in an immense stretch of squally sea.
The vast All Saints’ bay facing Bahia (Salvador) was a miniature
Mediterranean, well sheltered behind its islands and one of the
easiest points on the Brazilian coast for a sailing ship from Europe
to reach. The capital was only moved south to Rio de Janeiro in
1763 because of the development of the Minas Gerais and Goyaz
gold mines.
Of course all these advantages could eventually be nullified.
Malacca had century after century of monopoly; ‘it controlled
all the ships which passed its straits’. Then Singapore appeared
from nowhere one fine day in 1819. A better example still is the
replacement of Seville (which had monopolized trade with the
‘Indies of Castile’ since the beginning of the sixteenth century)
by Cadiz in 1685. This occurred because ships with too great a
draught could no longer pass the bar of San Lucar de Barremeda,
at the mouth of the Guadalquivir. A technical reason was thus
the pretext for a change which, though sensible in some respects,
created golden opportunities for sharp-eyed international smug‑
gling in the huge Bay of Cadiz.
In any case, whether temporary or permanent, these advan‑
tages of location were indispensable to the prosperity of the
towns. Cologne was situated at the meeting point of two separate
shipping routes on the Rhine—one towards the sea, the other
upstream—which met at its quaysides. Ratisbon on the Danube
was a reloading point for ships with too great a draught coming
from Ulm, Augsburg, Austria, Hungary and even Wallachia.
Perhaps no site anywhere in the world was more privileged
for short- and long-distance trade than Canton. The town was
‘thirty leagues from the sea’ but still felt the throb of the tide
on its numerous stretches of water. Sea vessels, junks, or threemasters from Europe could therefore link up there with the small
craft, the sampans, which reached all (or nearly all) of the Chi‑
nese interior using the canals. ‘I have quite often contemplated
the beautiful views of the Rhine and the Meuse in Europe,’ wrote
J-F. Michel of Brabant56 (1753), ‘but these two together are not a
quarter [of what] the river of Canton alone offers for admiration.’
However, Canton owed its fortune in the eighteenth century to
the Manchu empire’s desire to keep European trade as far to the
south as possible. Left to themselves, European merchants would
have preferred to get to Ning Po and the Yangtse-Kiang. They
sensed the future importance of Shanghai and the advantages of
reaching the middle of China.
Geography, combined with the speed, or rather the slowness, of
transport at the time, also accounts for the extraordinary number
of small towns. The 3000 towns of all sizes in fifteenth-century
Germany acted as so many relay-points, four or five hours’ jour‑
ney apart in the south and west of the country, seven or eight
hours apart in the north and east. Such way-stations might be
Canton’s
fortunes
were
considerably increased when
eighteenth- century Euro-American merchants, following
James Cook’s arrival at Nootka,
linked the extensive indigenous
trade networks of North Pacific
America to Canton and thence
to Europe and the American
East Coast. In Nootka, and
all along the coast, they traded
metal, guns, and beads for
otter furs, then swapped the
furs for tea, silk, and porcelain
in Canton, and sold those in
Europe and the East Coast,
buying more metal, guns, and
beads along the way.
fernand braudel 115
No doubt, this multitude of
carts bottlenecked at the city
gates, slowed down by fussy
eunuchs.
Indeed, many good books have
been written on Les Halles in
Paris, and some great ones.
Among them, Emile Zola’s
sprawling, detailed portrait,
le ventre de paris (the fat
and the thin). Like Braudel, Zola was a man awash in
facts and information. But he
located wherever means of transport changed: at ports, between
venuta terrae and venuta maris as the Genoese would say, but also
at points where farm-carts met river-boats or where the ‘packsaddle used on mountain paths met the wagon from the plain’.
Every town was a centre of movement, giving it new impetus,
constantly dispatching goods and people in all directions, and
quickly replacing them with others.
It was this movement in and out of its walls that indicated the
true town. ‘We had a great deal of trouble that day,’ complained
Careri, arriving at Peking in 1697, ‘because of the multitude of
carts, camels, and mares which go to Peking and return from it,
and which is so large that one has difficulty in moving.’57
The town market everywhere offered tangible evidence of
this movement. A traveller remarked in 1693 that Smyrna was
‘nothing but a great bazaar and fair’.58 But every town, wherever it
may be, must primarily be a market. Without a market, a town is
inconceivable. A market, on the contrary, can be situated outside
a village, even on a site on the open road or at a crossroads, with‑
out giving rise to a town. But a town needs to be rooted in and
nourished by the people and land surrounding it.
Daily life within a small radius was provided for by weekly
or daily markets in the town; I use the plural, remembering the
various markets in Venice, for example, listed in Marin Sanudo’s
Cronachetta. There was the great market in the Rialto square,
and near it the specially constructed loggia where the merchants
assembled every morning. The stalls groaned under the weight
of fruit, meat and game. Fish was sold a little farther on. There
was another market in St Mark’s Square. But every district had its
own, in its main square. Supplies came from peasants from sur‑
rounding areas, gardeners from Padua, and boatmen, who even
brought sheep cheese from Lombardy.
A whole book could be written on the Halles in Paris and the
smaller market for game, on the Quai de la Vallée; on the regu‑
lar dawn invasion of the town by bakers from Gonesse; on the
five to six thousand peasants who came in the middle of every
night half-asleep on their carts ‘bringing vegetables, fruit, flow‑
ers’; and the hawkers shouting: ‘Live mackerel! Fresh herrings!
Baked apples!—Oysters! Portugal, Portugal!’ (i.e. oranges). The
ears of the servants on the upper floors were well accustomed
to interpreting the babble, so as not to go down at the wrong
moment. During the Ham Fair, which took place on the Tuesday
of Holy Week, ‘a crowd of peasants from the areas around Paris
gather in the square and in the Rue Neuve-Notre-Dame early in
the morning, equipped with an immense quantity of hams, sau‑
sages and black puddings, which they decorate and crown with
laurels. What a desecration of the crown of Caesar and Voltaire!’
This, of course, is Sébastien Mercier speaking.59 But a whole book
could equally well be written on London and the many markets
which were gradually organized there. A list of these markets fills
over four pages of the guide drawn up by Daniel Defoe and his
successors (A Tour through the Island of Great Britain), which was
reissued for the eighth time in 1775.
The space nearest the town (in Leipzig it was the source of
delicious apples and much-prized asparagus) was only the first of
the numerous circles surrounding it.60 Every town was a meet‑
ing-place for people and goods of all descriptions: each product
linked it to a given area of the surrounding neighbourhood and
sometimes to places far away. Each instance demonstrates how
urban life was connected with such areas which only partly over‑
lapped. Powerful towns were soon, certainly from the fifteenth
century, drawing on regions amazingly far away. They were the
instruments of long-distance relationships reaching out to the
limits of a Weltwirtschaft, a world-economy, which they brought
to life and from which they profited.
All these extensions belong to one family of interrelated
issues. Depending on the period, the town affected spaces that
varied according to its size. It was by turns inflated and emptied
according to the rhythm of its existence. Vietnamese towns were
‘little populated on ordinary days’ in the seventeenth century. But
twice a month on days when the great markets were held they
were the scene of very great animation. At Hanoi, then Ke-cho,
‘the merchants are grouped in different streets according to their
specialities; silk, leather, hats, hemp, iron’. It was impossible to
move for the crowd. Some of these market streets were shared by
people from several villages who ‘had sole privilege to set up shop
there’. Such towns were ‘markets rather than towns’.61 One could
equally call them fairs rather than towns, but town or market or
fair, the result was the same—movements towards concentration,
then dispersion, without which no economic life of any energy
could have been created, either in Vietnam or in the West.
Every town in the world, beginning with the West, has its sub‑
urbs. Just as a strong tree is never without shoots at its foot, so
organized his reports around
character and story, making
novels where another man,
a Braudel, would write history. His later, related novel
la curee (the kill) is one
of the best novels of city planning, depicting the social and
economic engines behind
Baron Haussmann’s “cutting
up” of Paris in the 1870s.
These Vietnamese market
towns are, perhaps, a more fitting analog to the indigenous
settlements of North Pacific
America, than the European cities Braudel described
earlier;… one could equally
call them fairs, rather than
towns.
fernand braudel 117
Thomas Sieverts’s description
of where we live now begins
where this dependency ends.
What we once called “suburbs”
now emerge as a continuous
ground against which the concentration of the centralized
city appears as an anomalous
figure, perpetually in need of
protection or subsidy to retain
its distinction.
towns are never without suburbs. They are the manifestations
of its strength, even if they are wretched fringes, shanty towns.
Shoddy suburbs are better than none at all.
Suburbs housed the poor, artisans, watermen, noisy malodor‑
ous trades, cheap inns, posting-houses, stables for post horses,
porters’ lodgings. Bremen had a face-lift in the seventeenth
century: its houses were constructed in brick, roofed with tiles,
its streets paved, a few wide avenues built. But in the suburbs
around it the houses still had straw roofs.62 To reach the suburbs
was always to take a step downwards, in Bremen, London and
elsewhere.
Triana, a suburb or rather an extension of Seville often men‑
tioned by Cervantes, became the rendezvous for low-lifers, rogues,
prostitutes and dishonest agents of the law. The suburb began on
the right bank of the Guadalquivir, level with the bridge of boats
which barred the way to the upper reaches of the river rather as
London Bridge—on a different scale—barred the Thames. Sea
shipping arriving on the tide at Seville from San Lucar de Bar‑
remeda, Puerto Santa Maria or Cadiz was unable to go beyond
this point. Triana would certainly not have had its violent char‑
acter nor its pleasure gardens beneath their vine arbours if it had
not had Seville by its side—Seville with its foreigners, ‘Flemish’
or otherwise, and its nouveaux riches, the peruleros who returned
there from the New World to enjoy the fortunes they had made. A
census in 1561 counted 1664 houses and 2666 families in Triana
with four people per family—which meant really overcrowded
accommodation and over 10,000 inhabitants, the substance of a
town.63 As dishonest work did not suffice, to support itself, Triana
had its artisans who produced varnished faience tiles—the blue,
green and white azulejos, with their Islamic geometric patterns
(azulejos were exported all over Spain and to the New World). It
also had craft industries producing soap—soft soap, hard soap
and lye. But it was still only a suburb. Careri, who passed through
it in 1697, noted that the town of Triana ‘has nothing notable
except a Carthusian monastery, the Palace and the prisons of the
Inquisition’.64
Urban Hierarchies
Small towns inevitably grew up at a certain distance from large
centres. The speed of transport, which moulded space, laid out a
succession of regular stopping points. Stendhal was surprised at
the relative tolerance large Italian cities showed towards the small
and middling towns. But if they did not destroy these humbler
rivals, whom they certainly persecuted (one thinks of Florence
seizing half-dead Pisa in 1406, or Genoa filling in the port of
Savona in 1525) it was for the excellent reason that they could not:
they needed them. A great city necessarily meant a ring of sec‑
ondary towns round about: one to weave and dye fabrics perhaps,
one to organize haulage, a third to act as a sea port, as Leghorn
was to Florence, for instance (Florence preferred Leghorn to Pisa
which was too far inland and whose natives were hostile); as
Alexandria and Suez were to Cairo; Tripoli and Alexandretta to
Aleppo; Jedda to Mecca.
This phenomenon was particularly marked in Europe, where
small towns were very numerous. Rudolph Häpke65 was the first
to use the striking expression ‘an archipelago of towns’, apropos
of Flanders, to describe how its cities were linked to each other,
and particularly to Bruges, in the fifteenth century (later to Ant‑
werp). ‘The Netherlands,’ as Henri Pirenne remarked, ‘are the
suburb of Antwerp’, a suburb full of active towns. The same was
true on a smaller scale, of the market-towns around Geneva in
the fifteenth century; of the local fairs round Milan at the same
period; the series of ports linked to Marseilles on the Provençal
coast in the sixteenth century, from Martigues on the Etang de
Berre up to Fréjus; or the large urban complex that connected San
Lucar de Barrameda, Puerto de Santa Maria and Cadiz to Seville;
Venice’s ring of urban satellites; Burgos’s links with its outer har‑
bours (notably Bilbao) over which it long exercised control, even
in its decline; London and the Thames and Channel ports; or
finally, the classic example of the Hanseatic ports. At the lowest
level, one could point to Compiègne in 1500, with its single satel‑
lite Pierrefonds; or Senlis, which only had Crépy.66 This detail in
itself tells us a good deal about the status of Compiègne or Senlis.
One could draw a series of diagrams to represent these functional
ties and dependencies: some circular, some linear with intersec‑
tions, some mere points.
Six hundred years later, the
“archipelago of towns” is
called an “MCR” (Mega-City
Region), and Peter Hall and
Kathy Pain are mapping its
exploded shape and reach.
(See their selection, below.)
Do the same relationships—
that is, the domination of
centers over hinterlands—
persist, simply blown up to
a scale where we fail to see
their familiar patterns? If so,
what other processes are like
this? The biological growth of
neural networks?
fernand braudel 119
But these patterns might have only a limited life. If traffic
began to move at faster speeds without changing its favourite
routes, some relay points were bypassed and went out of use.
Sébastien Mercier noted in 1782 ‘that towns of the second and
third rank are imperceptibly becoming depopulated to the ben‑
efit of the capital’.67
François Mauriac tells of an English visitor he welcomed in
south-west France:
He slept at the Lion d’Or hotel in Langon and walked about
the small sleeping town in the night. He told me that nothing
like it exists in England any more. Our provincial life is really a
survival, what continues to exist of a world in the process of dis‑
appearing and which has already disappeared elsewhere. I took
my Englishman to Bazas. What a contrast between this somno‑
lent straggling village and its vast cathedral, evidence of a time
when the capital of the Bazadais was a flourishing bishopric. We
no longer think about that period when every province formed
a world which spoke its own language and built its monuments,
a refined and hierarchical society which was not aware of Paris
and its fashions. Monstrous Paris which fed on this wonderful
material and exhausted it.
The spatial plan of More’s
Utopia is, in this way, very
much like the RhineRuhr of
Northern Germany, the area
where Thomas Sieverts has
worked (and which is discussed in some detail in Hall
and Pain’s selection, below).
In the event Paris was obviously no more to blame than London.
The general movement of economic life alone was responsible.
It deprived the secondary points of the urban network to the
advantage of the main ones. But these major points, in their
turn, formed a network among themselves on the enlarged scale
of the world. And the process began again. Even the capital of
Thomas More’s island of Utopia, Amaurote, was surrounded by
fifty-three cities, an admirable urban network. Each city was less
than twenty-four miles from its neighbours, or less than a day’s
travelling. The whole order would have changed if the speed of
transport had been even slightly increased!
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10 11 12 13 14 I5 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 From ‘The German Ideology’ (1846), in Karl Marx, Pre-capitalist
Economic Formations, ed. Eric Hobsbawm, 1964, p. 127.
In the first edition of this book.
In Towns and societies, ed. Philip Abrams and E. A. Wrigley, 1978,
pp. 9, 17, 24–5.
Voyages d’Ibn Battûta, ed. Vincent Monteil, 1969, I, pp. 67–9.
R. Baron, ‘La bourgeoisie de Varzy au XVIIe siècle’, in Annales de
Bourgogne, art. cit., pp. 161–208, esp. pp. 163–81, 208.
P. Deane, W. A. Cole, British Economic Growth, 1964, pp. 7–8.
R. Gascon, in Histoire économique et sociale de la France, ed. Brau‑
del and Labrousse, II, p. 403.
H. Bechtel, Wirtschaftsstil des deutsches Spätmittelalters. 1350–1500,
1930, pp. 34 ff.
Cahiers de doléances des paroisses du bailliage de Troyes pour les états
généraux de 1614, ed. Yves Durand, 1966, p. 7.
O. SPENGLER, The Decline of the West.
J. B. du Halde, Description geographique, historique, chronologique,
politique et physique de l’Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise,
1785, I, p.3.
E. Kämpfer, op. cit., III, p. 72.
J. Kulischer, op. cit., Italian edn., vol. II, pp. 15–16.
R. Cantillon, op. cit., p. 26; M. Reinhardt, ‘La population des vi
lies …’, in Population, April 1954, 9, p. 287.
J. Kulischer, op.cit.; for Russia, B. T. Urlannis (in Russian, Moscow,
1966) gives a figure of 3.6% (urban population over 500,000),
quoted by V. I. Pavlov in Historical premises for India’s transition to
capitalism, 1978, p. 68.
C. Bridenbauch, Cities in the Wilderness, 1955, pp. 6, II; on Japan,
Prof. Furushima, quoted by T. C. Smith, The Agrarian origins of
modern Japan, 1959, p. 68.
Jan de Vries, The Dutch rural economy in the golden age, 1500–1700,
1974, table, p. 86.
M. Clouscard, L’Être et le code, 1972, p. 165.
Jane Jacobs, The Economy of cities, 1970.
Morris Birbeck, Notes on a Journey in America (1818), facsimile
edn., 1966, pp. 98–9.
F. Lütge, op. cit., p. 349.
R. Gascon, in Histoire économique et sociale de la France, ed. Brau‑
del et Labrousse, II, p. 360.
fernand braudel 121
23 According to W. Abel, reference and discussion in vol. III.
24 Georg Steinhausen, Geschichte der deutschen Kultur, 1904, p. 187.
25 La Civiltà veneziana del Settecento, ed. the Giorgio Cini Founda‑
tion, 1960, p. 257.
26 Reference mislaid.
27 Archivo General de Simancas, Expedientes de hacienda, 157.
28 ‘Saco de Gibraltar’, in Tres Relaciones históricas, ‘Colección de libros
raros o curiosos’, 1889.
29 Medit…, vol. I, p. 267.
30 Jean Pussot, Journalier ou mémoires, 1857, p. 16,.
31 Ernst Ludwig Carl, Traité de la richesse des princes et de leurs états,
1723, II, pp. 193, 195.
32 A. de Mayerberg, op. cit., pp. 220–1.
33 See vol. III.
34 Stauton, op. cit., vol. II, p. 108.
35 L. S. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, op. cit., IX, pp. 167–8; VI, pp. 82–3;
V, p. 282.
36 Medit., vol. I, pp. 341–2.
37 C. E. Perrin, ‘Le droit de bourgeoisie et l’immigration rurale à Metz
au XIIIe siecle’, in Annuaire de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de
la Lorraine, XXX, 1921, p. 569.
38 H. J. Brugmans, Geschiedenis van Amsterdam, 8 vol., 1930–3.
39 See above, chapter I, note 39.
40 Quoted by Hugues de Montbas, La Police parisienne sous Louis
XVI, 1949, p. 183.
41 L. S. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, op. cit., III, pp. 226–7, 232, 239.
42 Ibid., p. 239.
43 G. F. Gemelli Careri, op. cit., I, p. 370.
44 Voyage ... de Pierre Lescalopier, op. cit., p. 32.
45 Hans Mauersberg, Wirtschafts-und Sozialegeschichte Zentraleuropaïscher Städte in neueren Zeit, 1960, p. 82.
46 Voyage de M. de Guignes, op. cit., I, p. 360.
47 J. A. de Mandelslo, op. cit., II, p. 470.
48 P. de Magaillans, op. cit., pp. 17–18.
49 Leopold Torres Balbas, Algunos Aspectos del mudejarismo urbano
medieval, 1954, p. 17.
50 G. F. Gemelli Careri, op. cit., IV, p. 105.
51. P. Lavedan and J. Hugueney, L’Urbanisme au Moyen Age, 1974, pp.
84–5, and fig. 279.
52 Charles Higounet, ‘Les “terre nuove” florentines du XIVe siecle’,
in Studi in onare di Amintore Fanfani, III, 1962, pp. 2–17.
53 L. S. Mercier, op. cit., XI, p. 4.
54 M. T. Jones-Davies, op. cit., I, p. 190.
55 F. Coreal, Relation des voyages aux Indes occidentales, op. cit., I, pp.
152, 155.
56 H. Cordier, ‘La Compagnie prussienne d’Embden au XVIIIe
siècle’, in T’oung Pao, XIX, 1920, p. 241.
57 G. F. Gemelli Careri, op. cit., IV, p. 120.
58 G. F. Gemelli Careri, op. cit., I, p. 230.
59 L. S. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, op. cit., VI, p. 221; V, p. 67; IX, p.
275.
60 J. Savary, Dictionnaire …, op. cit., V, col. 381.
61. Vu Quoc Thuc, in Les Villes …, ed. Société Jean Bodin, 1954–1957,
II, p. 206.
62 Reference mislaid.
63 According to the Padrón de 1561, Archivo General de Simancas,
Expedientes de hacienda, 170.
64 G. F. Gemelli Careri, op. cit., VI, pp. 366–7.
65 Rudolf Håpke, Brügges Entwicklung zum mitteralterlichen Weltmarkt ..., 1908.
66 B. Guenee, Tribunaux et gens de justice dans Ie bailliage de Sen lis …,
op. cit., p. 48.
67 L. S. Mercier, op. cit., III, 1782, p. 124.
fernand braudel 123
Yi-Fu Tuan
excerpt from Topophilia
At the back of the romantic appreciation of nature is the
privilege and wealth of the city. In archaic times man’s enjoy‑
ment of nature was more direct and robust. The evidence of the
Shih Ching suggests that in ancient China there was awareness
of the beauty of earth but not of a countryside as a scene set apart
and antithetical to the city. What we mostly find in this anthol‑
ogy of songs and poems are accounts of rural activities, such as
clearing the grasses and trees, plowing up the land, and building
dikes. These are probably good sketches of agricultural practice
in the middle of the Chou period (ca. 800–500 B.C.) Later, in
the fourth and third centuries B.C., cities of impressive size
were built. The walls of one settlement enclosed an area of some
ten square miles, while another, Lin-tzu, probably housed some
70,000 families. This was also a time of recurrent wars. It might
seem that conditions were such that the court officials should
not mind withdrawal from strife and retirement to the country.
Banishment from the capital ought not be a great hardship. Yet
it was so perceived perhaps because China, even in the Yangtze
basin, still had vast expanses of wild nature that provided little
security and gave no delight. Chu Yuan, who was banished in
303 B.C. for objecting to the war tactics of King Huai, wandered
over the region of Tung-t’ing lake in northern Ho-nan. He found
there “dark and interminable forests, the habitation of apes and
Yi-Fu Tuan (b. 1930) is
a Chinese-born American
geographer who, like Braudel, invigorated his profession
by blurring its boundaries,
letting the study of anthropology and literature enliven his
inquiry into the problems of
living in geographical space.
topophilia, one of his most
widely read books, was written in 1970.
The shih ching is the earliest collection of Chinese
poetry, dating as far back
as 1500 BC (to the Shang
Dynasty, which was not bereft
of great cities: Anyang, on
the banks of the Huan River;
Aodu, in Zhengzhou). To
find a literature depicting
rural life that does not pose
the countryside against the
city is notably at odds with
Braudel’s insistence that such
an antagonism is constitutive
of both. More recently, we also
find the poetry of John Clare,
a seventeenth-century English
worker, whose vivid descriptions of farm labor in rural
life are free of any idealizing
contrasts to city life.
yi-fu tuan 125
monkeys. And mountains, wet with rain mists, so high that the
sun was hidden.”1
Toward the end of the Later Han dynasty (A.D. 25–220), a
type of appreciation for the countryside appeared that eventually
became a cliché of nature sentiment among the gentry. T’ung
Chung-chang (A.D. 180–220) lived in a time of great political
upheavals and rebellions which were to end in the downfall of the
dynasty. He wrote wistfully:
All I ask is good lands and a spacious house, with hills behind
and a flowing stream in front, ringed with ponds or pools, set
about with bamboos and trees, a vegetable garden to the south,
an orchard to the north…. Then with two or three companions
of philosophic bent discuss the Way or study some book … and
so ramble through life at ease, with a cursory glance of Heaven
and Earth and all that lies between, free from the censure of my
fellow-men.2
The scholar-officials who administered the Chinese empire
for some two millennia wavered between city and rural lures.
In the city the scholar could satisfy his political ambition but the
price was submission to the Confucian rigidities and the risk of
censure. In the country the scholar lost the trappings of office
but in compensation he gained the delights of learning, the quiet
pleasures of a life devoted to the understanding of the Way (Tao).
The Chinese gentry class had solid roots in the country. From the
land the cleverer and more successful members moved into the
city where they led the rewarding, though rather uncertain life of
officials. Wolfram Eberhard notes how they sometimes preferred
to live outside the city in a luxurious cottage which they poetically
called a “grasshut.” There they became Taoists in psychological
reaction against a life within the Confucian straitjacket. More
often, they retired temporarily “when the political situation in
the city had become unfavorable or dangerous. When things
changed, our ‘Taoists’ often returned to the city and became
‘Confucianists’ again.”3
In Europe preference for the countryside as ‘against the city
found eloquent literary expression in three periods: the Helle‑
nistic or Alexandrian age of Greece, the Roman Augustan age,
and the period of modern Romanticism which began in the eigh‑
teenth century. Before Alexander’s time a wistful sentiment for
yi-fu tuan 127
The “Middle landscape” of yeoman farmers is seen as threatened by the city
on the one side and by wilderness on the other. In fact this was a time when
both the city and the middle landscape were expanding at the expense of wilderness, thus:
the countryside already existed. Athenians, for instance, felt nos‑
talgia for the simple rural life when they were cut off from their
farms during the protracted Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.).
However, rural idylls were unobtrusive in Hellenic literature. It
took the rise of great cities in the Alexandrian Age to produce a
strong reaction against urban sophistication and a longing for
rusticity. The pastoral poems of Theocritus are redolent of the
peace of the countryside. A poem that records a personal experi‑
ence of a harvest festival describes a scene on the island of Cos in
high summer. Note how much is made of rural sounds:
Many a poplar and elm murmured above our heads, and near at
hand the sacred water from the cave of the Nymphs fell plashing.
On the shady boughs the dusky cicadas were busy with their
chatter, and the tree-frog far off cried in the dense thornbrake.
Larks and finches sang, the dove made moan, and bees flitted
humming above the springs. All things were fragrant of rich
harvest and of fruit time. Pears at our feet and apples at our side
were rolling plentifully, and the branches hung down to the
ground with their burden of sloes. 4
Raymond Williams,
excerpted below, finds the
imagery of the pastoral countryside emerging from city
poets in seventeenth-century
England, in the long wake
of the closure of the commons and the emergence of
wage-labor agriculture. His
study, the country and
the city, shows the social
and ideological imperatives
expressed in this idealization, which go well beyond
Romanticism. He also draws
attention to illuminating
exceptions, such as the work
of John Clare.
Contrasting the splendors of Augustan Rome were the rural
idylls, eloquently described in the poetry of Virgil and Horace.
Virgil’s country was the rich Po plain near Mantua. His poems
evoked images of ancient beeches and dark oaks standing among
the pastures, and of little herds of sheep and goat moving among
them. His bucolics depicted ideally happy life in a beautiful land
but every one of them had sadness mingled with its charm. The
Virgilian Arcadia was threatened by the shadow of imperial
Rome on the one side and by the inhospitable marshes and bare
rocks on the other. Horace found solace and inspiration from his
farm which lay outside of Rome, not far from Tivoli. He retired
to it partly because of some failure in health, and partly because
his taste for seclusion and a simpler life grew with the advancing
years. He praised the country as against the city; he contrasted
the peaceful life in his secluded valley not only with Rome’s pol‑
luted air but with its ostentatious wealth, aggressive business,
and violent pleasures.5
In the course of the eighteenth century the European
cognoscenti deified nature. To philosophers and poets in
particular, nature came to stand for wisdom, spiritual comfort,
yi-fu tuan 129
“Nature” is a rich concept, the
real center of Romanticism,
and quite distinct from “countryside” or “country.” Tuan’s
focus, here, is on images of
nature, and he brings countryside or “rural life” into the
discussion only insofar as they
are venerated as inclusive of or
near to nature. Both nature
and country are set against
“the city” in the literature
Tuan surveys. Williams, in
his widely popular keywords,
gives an excellent thumbnail
sketch of the development of
these two related but distinct
concepts.
and holiness; from it people were supposed to derive religious
enthusiasm, moral goodness, and a mystical understanding of
man and God. Early in the century, praise for the countryside
was more a neo-Augustan pose than any real flowering of inter‑
est in nature. As Samuel Johnson said in 1751, “There is, indeed,
scarce any writer who has not celebrated the happiness of rural
privacy.” The literati of the age were citified because it was in the
city (London, in particular) that all the opportunities, political
and pecuniary, lay. But they would seem to have reacted against
their condition. Neoclassicist poems written in the first half of
the eighteenth century were full of the retirement theme. They
told of the desire to leave the “gay town where guilty pleasure
reigns” for the “humble plains.” Gentlemen withdrew into the
country for its solitude which encouraged study and contempla‑
tion. William Shenstone sought to “haunt this peaceful shade”
where he could be free of the prick of ambition.6 Henry Needler,
as we have already noted, went into the country to read books
rather than nature. To the extent that rural sentiments were
genuine they were often steeped in melancholy. Poets described
how one drifted “from solitude to brooding; to finding mourn‑
ful pleasure in the subdued colors of evening, the darkness and
mystery of night, the unlit churchward, the desolate ruin … the
insignificance of man and the inevitability of death.”7 By the
middle of the eighteenth century, however, there were clear signs
of a more robust appreciation of nature that reached beyond the
countryside to mountains, the desert, and the ocean.
In North America the theme of city corruption and rural virtue
is popular enough to be classified as folklore. It is told repeat‑
edly: first, decadent Europe and prelapsarian America provided
the pleasing antithesis; later, as America took up manufacturing
and was itself rapidly acquiring large cities, the opposition was
perceived to lie between an industrialized and Mammon-seeking
Eastern seaboard and the virtuous, agrarian interior. Thomas Jef‑
ferson had great influence in propagating what Leo Marx calls the
“pastoral ideal.” He was undoubtedly familiar with the literary
pastoral. He could quote Theocritus in Greek; his fondness for
the Latin poets is well known; and as a young man he had read
diligently the poetry of James Thomson, who was one of the first
to show in poetry the finger of God in all operations of nature,
placid and sublime. To Jefferson, “Those who labour in the earth
are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people,
whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial
and genuine virtue.” By contrast, “The mobs of great cities add
just as much to the support of pure government as sores do to the
strength of the human body.”8
In Europe the sentiment for the countryside remained largely
a literary convention—translated from time to time into sub‑
stance through the propagation and design of country estates.
In America the dream of human virtues flourishing in Arcadia
reached the stage of a political program. The third president of the
Republic was willing to subordinate national wealth and power to
an agrarian ideal; and there was no denying that the American
public responded favorably to it. During the nineteenth century
the image of a contented and virtuous rural people became a
dominant emblem of national aspirations. The ideal did not stop,
or even much hinder, the amassing of wealth and devotion to
technological progress that combined to make America into a
great manufacturing nation. Yet it was far from being an empty
rhetoric. The sentiment permeates American culture. One finds
it in the neglect of the cities and in the flight to the suburbs, in
the weekend exodus to the country, and in preservation move‑
ments. Politically it is evident “in the ‘localism’ invoked to oppose
an adequate national system of education, in the power of the
farm block in Congress, in the special economic favor shown to
‘farming’ through government subsidies, and in state electoral
systems that allow the rural population to retain a share of politi‑
cal power grossly out of proportion to its size.” 9
Paradoxically, in Portland,
Oregon, (and elsewhere?) one
finds the veneration of the countryside expressed principally
through dedicated efforts at
city-building. Whether in the
city’s unusual urban growth
boundary, its effort toward
high densities within that
boundary, or the cultivation
of an urban economy that will
support local farms, the city
and the country here stand
hand in hand, two sides of
a single coin. Their common
enemy is sprawl, the hated
suburbs. So, whose coin is this,
and who are all those people,
out in the vastness of sprawl,
spoiling its worth?
Wilderness
The countryside is widely accepted as the antithesis of the city
irrespective of the actual living conditions of these two environ‑
ments. Writers, moralists, politicians, and even social scientists
still tend to view the rural-urban spectrum as a fundamental
dichotomy. Yet, from another perspective it is clear that raw
nature or wilderness, and not the countryside, stands at the
opposite pole of the totally man-made city. The countryside is the
“middle landscape” (Leo Marx’s term). In the agrarian myth it is
the ideal middle world of man poised between the polarities of
city and wilderness. The structuring of environment in binary
opposition is analogous to the structuring of the world we have
yi-fu tuan 131
seen in other traditions: the American middle landscape is the
Indonesian madiapa. But in the Indonesian world, mountain and
sea are timeless polarities, while city and wilderness are shifting
antinomies in the dynamic history of the Occident: in time the
meaning of these two terms may be reversed and in the course of
reversal both the city and the expanding farms (the middle land‑
scape) are perceived as enemies of pristine nature. Let us review
the meaning of wilderness in this framework.
In the Bible the term “wilderness” brings to mind two contra‑
dictory images. On the one hand, it is a place of desolation, the
unsown land frequented by demons; it is condemned by God.
“Their lands become a wilderness… because of [Yahweh’s] wrath
(Jeremiah 25:38).” Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden to
the “cursed ground,” overgrown with thorns and thistles. Christ
was tempted by the devil in the wilderness. All these emphasize
the negative—and dominant—meaning of wilderness in the
Bible. On the other hand, wilderness may serve either as (a) a
place of refuge and contemplation, or more commonly (b) any
place where the Chosen are scattered for a season of discipline or
purgation. Hosea (2:14 ff) recalls the nuptial period in the wilder‑
ness of Sinai. “Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her
into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her.… And there she
shall answer as in the days of her youth, as at the time when she
came out of the land of Egypt.” In Revelations (1:9; 17:3), the Seer
suggests that the wilderness enables the contemplative Christian
to see the Divine more clearly, unencumbered by the world.
The ascetic tradition in Christianity maintained the dual and
opposed meaning of wilderness. John Cassian (d. 435) claimed,
on the one hand, that hermits went into the waste lands to engage
in open combat with the devils; on the other, that in “the free‑
dom of the vast wilderness” they sought to enjoy “that life which
can only be compared to the bliss of angels.” For the ascetics, the
desert was in effect at once the haunt of demons and the realm
of bliss in harmony with the creaturely world. Attitude toward
wild animals was also ambivalent. They were seen both as the
minions of Satan and as the denizens of paradise precariously
restored in the environs of hermit or monk. Early in the history
of Christianity the monk’s cell in the wilderness and the church
in the world were held to be small models of paradise. Their pres‑
ence lent an aura of sanctity to the environs so that something of
the paradisial innocence could be seen about them.10
In America the ambiguity of wilderness was retained. The New
England Puritans believed that they were inaugurating a new age
of the Church in the New World and that this reformed Church
was to blossom like a garden in the protective wilderness. On the
other hand, as John Eliot (d. 1690) put it, the wilderness was the
place “where nothing appeareth but hard labour, wants, and wil‑
derness-temptation.” The writings of Cotton Mather (1663–1728)
showed the same ambivalence toward the waste lands that we can
find in the Old and New Testaments. Mather thought of the wil‑
derness as the empire of Antichrist, filled with frightful hazards,
demons, dragons, and fiery flying serpents. In another mood he
held that the North American wilderness was ordained by Provi‑
dence to be the protective refuge of the reformed Church.
Mather, who could speak seriously of demons and dragons in
the forests, died in 1728. In that year the Virginian squire, Wil‑
liam Byrd, caught sight of the Appalachian Mountains for the
first time. He described the mountains with romantic fervor.
When the fog blocked a view, Byrd lamented “the loss of this wild
Prospect.” And when he had to leave he expressed unwilling‑
ness to part with a scene that “was very wild and very Agreeable.”
While Mather viewed wilderness through somber theological
spectacles, Byrd saw it through the tinted glass of Romanticism,
which was beginning to be popular at this time. Pioneers did
not appreciate wilderness; it was an obstacle to overcome in the
winning of a livelihood and it was a constant threat to that liveli‑
hood. The preachers of the early Colonial period saw wilderness
as the habitation of demons and only rarely as the protective envi‑
ronment of the church. In the course of the eighteenth century,
however, the gap widened between the pioneers, who continued
to see wild nature as obstacle, and literary gentlemen who saw
it through the eyes of the tourist familiar with the writings of
European deistic philosophers and nature-poets.
As population increased and fields and settlements pushed
rapidly westward into the wilderness, Easterners of literary and
artistic bent grew more and more alarmed at the rapid disap‑
pearance of wild nature. John James Audubon, on his travels
in pursuit of bird specimens in the Ohio Valley in the 1820s,
had many opportunities to observe the destruction of the forest.
Thomas Cole, the landscapist, lamented the doom of nature as
“each hill and every valley is become an altar unto Mammon.”
He thought that the wilderness would vanish in a few years. And
The change from the threat of
“the wild” to sublime “wilderness” is a shift of perspective
that happened not just over
time, but within individuals, pioneers of North Pacific
America among them. What
was once hostile and formless,
chaotic and dark, became
a bastion of quietude and
spiritual enrichment. “The
yi-fu tuan 133
wasteland” became “the
cathedral of the woods.” The
alchemy that turned that
leaden threat into gold was a
change of mind, not of material: the woods remained the
same; but people's views of it
changed. Art and literature
changed them. Sprawl today
is described in terms strikingly
similar to early descriptions of
reviled wilderness: singular,
formless, inhuman. So, if our
perception of beauty, of spiritual enrichment, is shaped by
art and writing—and can be
changed—what could make
sprawl more beautiful, more
enriching, and more human?
(Better art and writing.)
Tuan’s “wilderness of the
great sprawling cities” is a
protean image, confirmed by
every journey into those landscapes on foot. In sprawl, we
are faced with vast rivers of
traffic, treacherous jungles of
cars, and a spatial disorientation that defies map, compass,
and even memory. How to
navigate here? How to see it
with open eyes? We await the
naturalists of sprawl, hoping
they can avoid the distortions
of Romantic projection … or
need they court exactly that to
inspire us?
William Cullen Bryant was equally pessimistic. After touring the
Great Lakes region in 1846 he sadly anticipated a future when
wild and lonely woods would be filled with cottages and boarding
houses. Sensitive and eloquent individuals, notably Henry David
Thoreau, called for preservation. This call was to have effect.
Yellowstone National Park (1872) and the Adirondack Forest Pre‑
serve (1885) were the first instances in the world in which large
areas of wilderness were preserved in the public interest.11
By the end of the nineteenth century, a confusion of virtues
were attributed to wilderness in America. It stood for the sublime
and called man to contemplation; in its solitude one drifted into
higher thoughts away from the temptations of Mammon; it has
come to be associated with the frontier and pioneer past, and so
with qualities that were thought to be characteristically Ameri‑
can; and it was an environment that promoted toughness and
virility. The growing appreciation of wilderness, like that of the
countryside, was a response to the real and imagined failings of
city life. But the move toward wilderness was not an extension
of the agrarian ideal. The two ideals are in some respects anti‑
thetical, for it is the expansion of the countryside, rather than of
cities, that poses the immediate threat to wilderness. The values
of the middle region may be captured in three distinct images:
shepherds in a bucolic landscape; the squire in his country estate
reading a book under the elm; and the yeoman in his farm. None
of these overlaps with the values associated with wilderness. The
settled yeoman has little in common with the footloose pioneer,
and the air of indolence which is the characteristic pose of the
retiring scholar is the antithesis of the Rooseveltian cult of viril‑
ity in the wilderness.
People rarely perceive the irony inherent in the idea of preserving the wilderness. “Wilderness” cannot be defined objectively: it
is as much a state of the mind as a description of nature. By the
time we can speak of preserving and protecting wilderness, it has
already lost much of its meaning: for example, the Biblical mean‑
ing of awe and threat and the sense of a sublimity far greater than
the world of man and unencompassable by him. “Wilderness” is
now a symbol of the orderly processes of nature. As a state of the
mind, true wilderness exists only in the great sprawling cities.
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10 11 Robert Payne (ed.), The White Pony: An Anthology of Chinese Poetry
(New York: Mentor Books, 1960), p. 89.
Arthur Waley, “Life Under the Han Dynasty: Notes on Chinese
Civilization in the First and Second Centuries A.D.,” History
Today, 3 (1953), 94.
Wolfram Eberhard, Conquerors and Rulers: Social Forces in Medieval China, 2nd ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1965), p. 45.
Theocritus, “The Harvest Song,” trans. A. S. F. Gow, The Greek
Bucolic Poets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953).
Gilbert Highet, Poets in a Landscape (New York: Knopf, 1957).
George G. Williams, “The Beginnings of Nature Poetry in the
Eighteenth Century,” Studies in Philology, 27 (1930), 583–608.
Cornelis Engelbertus de Haas, Nature and the Country in English
Poetry (Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 1928), p. 150.
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia ... Query 19. For a source book
on rural behavior embracing the history of rural-urban thinking,
see Pitirim A. Sorokin, Carle C. Zimmerman, and Charles J.
Gilpin, Systematic Source Book in Rural Sociology, 3 vols. (Minne‑
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1932).
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford Univer‑
sity Press, 1964), p. 5.
George H. Williams, Paradise and Wilderness in Christian Thought
(New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1967); David Lowenthal, “The American
Scene,” Geographical Review, 58 (1968), 61–88; Robert G. Lucas,
“Wilderness Perception and Use: The Example of the Boundary
Waters Canoe Area,” Natural Resources Journal, 3, No. 3 (1964),
394–411.
yi-fu tuan 135
Raymond Williams
excerpt from The Country and the City
The New Metropolis
In current descriptions of the world, the major industrial societ‑
ies are often described as ‘metropolitan’. At first glance this can
be taken as a simple description of their internal development,
in which the metropolitan cities have become dominant. But
when we look at it more closely, in its real historical development,
we find that what is meant is an extension to the whole world of
that division of functions which in the nineteenth century was a
division of functions within a single state. The ‘metropolitan’ soci‑
eties of Western Europe and North America are the ‘advanced’,
‘developed’, industrialised states; centres of economic, political
and cultural power. In sharp contrast with them, though there
are many intermediate stages, are other societies which are seen
as ‘underdeveloped’: still mainly agricultural or ‘under-indus‑
trialised’. The ‘metropolitan’ states, through a system of trade,
but also through a complex of economic and political controls,
draw food and, more critically, raw materials from these areas of
supply, this effective hinterland, that is also the greater part of the
earth’s surface and that contains the great majority of its peoples.
Thus a model of city and country, in economic and political rela‑
tionships, has gone beyond the boundaries of the nation-state,
and is seen but also challenged as a model of the world.
Raymond Williams (1921–
1988) was a working-class
intellectual who went from
a rural Welsh boyhood to a
career at Cambridge where he
wrote some of the most influential books of cultural criticism
in the English-speaking world.
culture and society and
keywords remain essential
texts of contemporary life.
Williams sought out populist
venues and wrote in a clear,
impassioned style about class
and culture, practicing a variant of Marxist critique that he
called “cultural materialism.”
In the country and the
city, written in 1972, he took
on a history of false concepts
that had afflicted his family
directly, the idealization of the
urban and the rural—Marx’s
protean split between town
and country—and outlined
its full, global implications.
raymond williams 137
Fernand Braudel, writing at
just about the same time as
Williams, implies that Imperialism is actually constitutive
of towns or cities, claiming
that “a town must have an
empire, however small, to
dominate,” or else it is not a
town. (See excerpt, above.)
It is very significant that in its modern forms this began in
England. Much of the real history of city and country, within
England itself, is from an early date a history of the extension
of a dominant model of capitalist development to include other
regions of the world. And this was not, as it is now sometimes
seen, a case of ‘development’ here, ‘failure to develop’ elsewhere.
What was happening in the ‘city’, the ‘metropolitan’ economy,
determined and was determined by what was made to happen in
the ‘country’; first the local hinterland and then the vast regions
beyond it, in other people’s lands. What happened in England
has since been happening ever more widely, in new dependent
relationships between all the industrialised nations and all the
other ‘undeveloped’ but economically important lands. Thus one
of the last models of ‘city and country’ is the system we now know
as imperialism.
European expansion into the rest of the world had already, in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, brought back significant
wealth, which found its way into the internal system. Important
parts of the country-house system, from the sixteenth to the eigh‑
teenth centuries, were built on the profits of that trade. Spices,
sugar, tea, coffee, tobacco, gold and silver: these fed, as mercantile
profits, into an English social order, over and above the profits on
English stock and crops. It was still mainly, at that stage, a profit
of trading: bringing goods from one kind of economy to another,
though often with physical force to back this up. The countryhouses which were the apex of a local system of exploitation then
had many connections to these distant lands. But another process
was already under way: another kind of ‘improvement’. Demand
for these valued and exotic commodities was steadily rising, and
the European societies and their emigrant settlers were beginning
to organise increased production. To do this, in tropical regions,
they began organising ‘labour’: that polite term for the slave trade
from Africa—anything from three million slaves in the seven‑
teenth century to seven million in the eighteenth. The new rural
economy of the tropical plantations—sugar, coffee, cotton—was
built by this trade in flesh, and once again the profits fed back
into the country-house system: not only the profits on the com‑
modities but until the end of the eighteenth century the profits
on slaves. In 1700 fifteen per cent of British commerce was with
the colonies. In 1775 it was as much as a third. In an intricate
process of economic interaction, supported by wars between the
trading nations for control of the areas of supply, an organised
colonial system and the development of an industrial economy
changed the nature of British society.
The unprecedented events of the nineteenth century, in which
Britain became a predominantly industrial and urban society,
with its agriculture declining to marginal status, are inexpli‑
cable and would have been impossible without this colonial
development. There was a massive export of the new industrial
production. Much of the trade of the world was carried and ser‑
viced by Britain, from its dominant position in shipping, banking
and insurance, the new ‘City’ of London. Following these profit‑
able developments, often to the exclusion of others that might
have been possible, the economy by the middle of the nineteenth
century was at the point where its own population could not be
fed from home production. The traditional relationship between
city and country was then thoroughly rebuilt on an international
scale. Distant lands became the rural areas of industrial Britain,
with heavy consequent effects on its own surviving rural areas.
At the same time, the drive for industrial markets and the drive
for raw materials extended the effective society across half the
world. Already in the eighteenth century the most important of
the colonies, in North America, had achieved independence and
were eventually, and even more dramatically, to follow the same
paths. From the 1870s, especially, there was intense competition
between the rising industrial societies, for markets, raw materi‑
als and areas of influence. This was fought out in trade and in
many colonial wars. It produced, in Britain, the formal establish‑
ment of new kinds of political control over the colonial areas: the
British Empire in its political sense. In the twentieth century the
same rivalry was fought out in its European bases, in the First
World War.
The effects of this development on the English imagination
have gone deeper than can easily be traced. All the time, within
it, there was the interaction at home, between country and city,
that we have seen in so many examples. But from at least the midnineteenth century, and with important instances earlier, there
was this larger context within which every idea and every image
was consciously and unconsciously affected. We can see in the
industrial novels of the mid-nineteenth century how the idea of
emigration to the colonies was seized as a solution to the poverty
and overcrowding of the cities. Thousands of the displaced rural
Though he hasn’t enjoyed
the notoriety of a Kipling,
Maugham, or an Orwell, M.
Allerdale Grainger also fed
the English imagination with
his account of logging shows
in British Columbia, the
Empire’s principal outpost
in North Pacific America.
Grainger’s book, woodsmen
of the West, part memoir,
part fiction, follows his labor
amidst the somewhat fey
society of independent “hand
loggers” in the still-rugged
region. It was published to
some acclaim in London in
1908, by Edward Arnold and
Sons, E. M. Forster’s publisher
at the time.
workers had already gone there. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton
ends in Canada, in a mood of rural idyll and escape as powerful
as any of the earlier English images. In Wuthering Heights, in
Great Expectations, in Alton Locke and in many other novels of
the period there is a way out from the struggle within English
society to these distant lands; a way out that is not only the escape
to a new land but as in some of the real history an acquisition
of fortune to return and re-enter the struggle at a higher point.
Alexander Somerville and several of the Tolpuddle Martyrs,
casualties of the crisis of rural society, ended their days over‑
seas. Many of the casualties of the urban crisis, leading Chartists
among them, went the same way. The lands of the Empire were
an idyllic retreat, an escape from debt or shame, or an opportu‑
nity for making a fortune. An expanding middle class found its
regular careers abroad, as war and administration in the distant
lands became more organised. New rural societies entered the
English imagination, under the shadow of political and economic
control: the plantation worlds of Kipling and Maugham and early
Orwell; the trading worlds of Conrad and Joyce Cary.
From about 1880 there was then this dramatic extension of
landscape and social relations. There was also a marked develop‑
ment of the idea of England as ‘home’, in that special sense in
which ‘home’ is a memory and an ideal. Some of the images of
this ‘home’ are of central London: the powerful, the prestigious
and the consuming capital. But many are of an idea of rural Eng‑
land: its green peace contrasted with the tropical or arid places of
actual work; its sense of belonging, of community, idealised by
contrast with the tensions of colonial rule and the isolated alien
settlement. We can pick up the force of this idea in many twen‑
tieth-century images of rural England. The society from which
these people had come was, after all, the most urban and indus‑
trialised in the world, and it was usually in the service of just
these elements that they had gone out. Perhaps this worked only
to deepen the longing and the idealisation. Moreover, in practical
terms, the reward for service, though anticipated more often than
it was gained, was a return to a rural place within this urban and
industrial England: the ‘residential’ rural England, the ‘little place
in the country’; unless the service had been profitable enough to
follow the older movement, to the ‘country house’, the real place.
The birds and trees and rivers of England; the natives speaking,
more or less, one’s own language: these were the terms of many
imagined and actual settlements. The country, now, was a place
to retire to.
It is easy to see this in the generations of colonial officers, civil
servants, plantation managers and traders. But within their own
class these were the least successful. The landed aristocracy had
lost much of its particular identity and its political power in the
course of industrial and imperialist development. But its social
imagery continued to predominate. The network of income from
property and speculation was now not only industrial but impe‑
rial. And as so often before it was fed into a self-consciously rural
mode of display. The country-houses of late George Eliot, of Henry
James and of their etiolated successors are, as we saw, the coun‑
try-houses of capital rather than of land. More significantly and
more ritually than ever before, a rural mode was developed, as a
cultural superstructure, on the profits of industrial and imperial
development. It was a mode of play: an easy realisation of the old
imagery of Penshurst: field sports, fishing, and above all horses;
often a marginal interest in conservation and ‘old country ways’.
Meanwhile there was still, within Britain, a small rural pro‑
letariat, and the farmers, as we have seen, were in increasing
numbers becoming owner-occupiers: adjusting, often with dif‑
ficulty, to the subordinate position of home agriculture, but with
increasing efficiency drawn from the resources of a scientific and
industrial society. In a minor key, some of the old real images
persisted. But they were now at last outnumbered by the new
images, themselves transmuted by their changing functions.
The quiet place to retire to, or the place in which to live in a coun‑
try style: these, now, were the dominant ideas, in the literature as
in the history.
Yet all the time, out of their sight, there was a huge rural pro‑
letariat, in the distant lands. And Orwell, who had seen some of
them, wrote in 1939:
What we always forget is that the overwhelming bulk of the
British proletariat does not live in Britain, but in Asia and
Africa.
This, indeed, had been the developing system. Millions of
slaves; millions of indentured and contracted labourers; mil‑
lions of rural workers kept at wages so low that they could barely
sustain life. Out of these ‘country’ areas there eventually came,
Today, in the United States,
those “displaced from the
‘country’ areas” find their
new homes in sprawl. In Portland, for example, among
documented arrivals, five new
immigrants move to the city’s
suburbs for every one that
moves into the city; adding
the undocumented may well
tip the balance even more
sharply to the “surrounding
area.” The city itself is far
less dynamic or international
than the belt of sprawl around
it. What do we refuse when we
reject the suburbs?
through blood and struggle, movements for political indepen‑
dence. At various stages, to protect such an order, young officers
from the country-houses led other Englishmen, and the expropri‑
ated Irish and Scots and Welsh, to the colonial battles in which
so many died. It is a strange fate. The unemployed man from the
slums of the cities, the superfluous landless worker, the dispos‑
sessed peasant: each of these found employment in killing and
disciplining the rural poor of the subordinated countries.
It is often said now, in a guilty way, that the British people as
a whole benefited from the system of imperialism. If we add up
the figures of the movement of wealth we cannot doubt that this
is true. The rise in the general standard of living depended, in
large part, on the exploitation of millions who were seen only as
backward peoples, as natives. Much of the guilt and hatred and
prejudice bred through those generations was still there when,
ironically, unemployment in the colonies prompted a reverse
migration, and following an ancient pattern the displaced from
the ‘country’ areas came, following the wealth and the stories
of wealth, to the ‘metropolitan’ centre, where they were at once
pushed in, overcrowded, among the indigenous poor, as had hap‑
pened throughout in the development of the cities. Yet we have
always to remember that the total wealth which came back, and
which is still coming back, was not evenly distributed. London
was at one of its peaks as an imperialist city when it created its
desperate centre of poverty and misery in the East End. For wealth
from the Empire, channelled through so few hands, was a criti‑
cal source of the political and economic power which the same
ruling class continued to exercise. The advantages of living in a
developed industrial society, even at the lower ends of the scale,
were of course more widely diffused. Even then, internally, these
workers were directly exploited. But for many of these advantages
British workers had to pay: with blood in repeated wars which
had little or nothing to do with their immediate interests; and in
deeper ways, in confusion, loss of direction, deformation of the
spirit. It is the story of the city and the country in its harshest
form, and now on an unimaginably complex scale.
It is now widely believed in Britain that this system has ended.
But political imperialism was only ever a stage. It was preceded by
economic and trading controls, backed where necessary by force.
It has been effectively succeeded by economic, monetary and
commercial controls which again, at every point that resistance
mounts, are at once supported by political, cultural and military
intervention. The dominant relationships are still, in this sense,
of a city and a country, at the point of maximum exploitation.
What is offered as an idea, to hide this exploitation, is a modern
version of the old idea of ‘improvement’: a scale of human societies
which theoretically culminates in universal industrialisation. All
the ‘country’ will become ‘city’: that is the logic of its development:
a simple linear scale, along which degrees of ‘development’ and
‘underdevelopment’ can be marked. But the reality is quite differ‑
ent. Many of the ‘underdeveloped’ societies have been developed,
precisely, for the needs of the ‘metropolitan’ countries. Peoples
who once practised a subsistence agriculture have been changed,
by economic and political force, to plantation economies, mining
areas, single-crop markets. The setting of prices, on which these
areas specialised to metropolitan needs must try to live, is in the
decisive control of the metropolitan commodity markets. Massive
investment in this kind of supply, and in its kind of economic and
political infrastructure, brings in from these specialised ‘rural’
areas a constant flow of wealth which then further accentuates
the dominating interrelations. It is essentially the same whether
the crop is coffee or copper, rubber or tin, cocoa or cotton or
oil. And what is called ‘aid’, to the poor countries, is with few
exceptions an accentuation of this process: the development of
their economies towards metropolitan needs; the preservation of
markets and spheres of influence; or the continuation of indirect
political control—sustaining a collaborating regime; opposing, if
necessary by military intervention, all developments which would
give these societies an independent and primarily self-directed
development. Much of the history of the world, in the middle
years of the twentieth century, is this decisive relationship and its
turbulent consequences. It is ideologically overlaid by the abstract
idea of ‘development’: a poor country is ‘on its way’ to being a
rich one, just as in industrial Britain, in the nineteenth century,
a poor man could be seen as someone who given the right ideas
and effort was ‘on his way’ to being a rich man, but was for the
time being at a lower stage of this development. But the facts are
that the gap is widening, and that its consequences are so exten‑
sive that they are deciding the history of the world.
Within this vast action, the older images of city and country
seem to fall away. But some are still relevant; the history and the
ideas are relevant. We can still, any day, find rural literature, of
It’s worth asking in what ways
a city region replicates these
relations, with the dominant
metropolitan center organizing its subservient supply
region, including other, rival
urban centers. The fate of
Newark, New Jersey, for example, in its dealings with
New York City shows these
processes at work. Williams’s
analysis suggests that we
inspect these relations for
traces of the Imperial city.
What would a truly polycentric regional authority look
like? Would it be immune
to these patterns? (Hall and
Pain’s analysis of the Polycentric Metropolis explores these
questions, below.)
The same is true—we can
“see the history happening”—
of the best literature coming
out of the sprawl of the contemporary city; for example,
Sherman Alexie’s “What You
Pawn I Will Redeem” (below)
or D. Lee Williams’s brilliant,
forgotten novel of Portland,
Eugene, Seattle, and the
Interstate highway connecting
them, after nirvana. Characters cross through familiar
the most traditional kinds, but we have to go farther and farther
afield for it. We find stories of distant lands, but we can then
recognise in them some of our own traditional experiences. The
local details are different, as is natural among different peoples,
but many of the historical experiences are essentially similar. If
we read Yashar Kemal’s fine novel of the migrant pickers in Ana‑
tolia, The Wind from the Plain, we can see a form of the experience
which so many of our own people shared: a community that has
become available labour for a speculative seasonal enterprise
elsewhere: the hardships of the long walk; the familiar cheating
at the end of it. We can read of the conflict between two kinds of
people, two ways of rural life, in James Ngugi’s The River Between
(1965). There is the village world of Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine (1966), and the riceland of Guyana in Wilson Harris’s The
Far Journey of Oudin (1961). There is the rural life of southern
India in R. K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends (1935), and the rural
conflict of Mulk Raj Anand’s The Village (1939).
Many of these stories include characteristic internal themes:
struggles with landlords; failures of crops and debts; the pen‑
etration of capital into peasant communities. These, in all the
variations of different societies and traditions, are internal ten‑
sions that we can recognise as characteristic forms, often from
very far back in our history. But their most pressing interest, for
us, is when they touch the imperialist and colonial experience.
In Britain itself, within the home islands, the colonial process is
so far back that it is in effect unrecorded, though there are late
consequences of it in the rural literature of Scotland and Wales
and especially of Ireland. It has become part of the long settle‑
ment which is idealised as Old England or the natural economy:
the product of centuries of successive penetration and domina‑
tion. What is important in this modern literature of the colonial
peoples is that we can see the history happening, see it being
made, from the base of an England which, within our own litera‑
ture, has been so differently described.
Thus there are bitterly remembered experiences at the receiv‑
ing end of the process which made the fortunes that were
converted, in England, into country-houses and that style of
life: experiences on the sugar-plantations and in the slave-trade.
There are many direct accounts of this developing process, at its
most organised and expansive stage. We are already familiar with
the work of Englishmen who experienced the tensions of this
process: E. M. Forster’s Passage to India, Orwell’s Burmese Days,
Joyce Cary’s important African novels, Aissa Saved, The African
Witch, Mister Johnson. Characteristically these are liberal ways of
seeing the experience, in the critical and self-questioning genera‑
tion after Kipling. But we have only to go across to the Indian
and African and West Indian writers to get a different and neces‑
sary perspective. The tea plantation is seen from the other side in
Mulk Raj Anand’s Two Leaves and a Bud (1937). Chinua Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart (1958) ends with a white man collecting mate‑
rial for a book on ‘The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the
Lower Niger’, and this ironic challenge is telling because we have
all read such accounts, but now see the process from within a
rural community as the white men—missionaries, district offi‑
cers—arrive with their mercenary soldiers and police. What is
impressive about Things Fall Apart is that as in some English lit‑
erature of rural change, as late as Hardy, the internal tensions of
the society are made clear, so that we can understand the modes
of the penetration which would in any case, in its process of
expansion, have come. The first converts to the alien religion are
the marginal people of the traditional society. The alien law and
religion are bitterly resented and resisted, but the trading-station,
in palm-oil, is welcomed, as an addition to the slash-and-burn
subsistence farming of yams. The strongest man, Okonkwo, is
destroyed in a very complicated process of internal contradictions
and external invasion.
We can see the same complications, at a later stage and in dif‑
ferent societies, in the resistance movements of the country people
against English power, in the Kenya of James Ngugi’s Weep Not,
Child and A Grain of Wheat, or in the Malaya of Han Suyin’s And
The Rain My Drink. What has been officially presented, to Eng‑
lish readers, as savagery followed by terrorism, is seen in its real
terms: so many different rural societies—unidealised, containing
their own tensions—invaded and transformed by an uncompre‑
hending and often brutal alien system. It is significant that the
idealisation of the peasant, in the modem English middle-class
tradition, was not extended, when it might have mattered, to the
peasants, the plantation-workers, the coolies of these occupied
societies. Yet in a new and universal sense this was the penetra‑
tion, transformation and subjugation of ‘the country’ by ‘the city’:
long-established rural communities uprooted and redirected by
the military and economic power of a developing metropolitan
landscapes that, stripped of
their naturalness, suddenly
look strange, even treacherous, so that we say they are
“dreamlike,” i.e., they are
very, very real.
Charles Mudede has speculated that when the imperial
process exhausts itself overseas
it turns back inward, onto the
dispossessed in the unincorporated areas, the old highways,
areas around Pacific Highway South, between Seattle
and Tacoma, Washington.
“This is a monstrous, zombie
form of colonialism,” turned
back onto the only available
territory, which is now, ironically, populated by the same
families that fled from untenable circumstances overseas.
Joining these new immigrants
on Seattle’s Highway 99 are
the refugees from the emptying farmlands of Eastern
Washington and the middle
of the country …“communities
uprooted, transformed by an
uncomprehending and often
brutal alien system.”
imperialism. Nor is this only a process of the past or the recent
past; we have only to read, from South Africa, the writings of
Ezekiel Mphahlele.
But what we then also see is the more complicated secondary
process. In the most general sense, underlying the description of
the imperialist nations as ‘metropolitan’, the image of the coun‑
try penetrated, transformed and subjugated by the city, learning
to fight back in old and new ways, can be seen to hold. But one of
the effects of imperialist dominance was the initiation, within the
dominated societies, of processes which then follow, internally,
the lines of the alien development. An internal history of country
and city occurs, often very dramatically, within the colonial and
neo-colonial societies. This is particularly ironic, since the city, in
Western thought, is now so regularly associated with its own most
modern kinds of development, while in fact, on a world scale, the
most remarkable growth of cities in the twentieth century has
been in the ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘developing’ continents. Within
the industrialised societies, urbanisation has continued, though
in societies like Britain the proportions for some time have
become relatively stable. Indeed there has been some important
movement away from the city in the older sense, as city centres
are cleared for commercial and administrative development; or
as suburbs, new towns and industrial estates are developed in
rural and semi-rural areas as parts of a policy of relative dispersal.
The concentrated city is in the process of being replaced, in the
industrial societies, by what is in effect a transport network: the
conurbation, the city region, the London-Birmingham axis. The
city thus passes into its tertiary development, when it becomes in
effect a province or even a state.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the imperialist process, intensely
overcrowded cities are developing as a direct result of the imposed
economic development and its internal consequences. Begin‑
ning as centres of colonial trade and administration, these cities
have drawn in, as in our own history, the surplus people and the
uprooted labourers of the rural areas. This is a long-term and
continuing process, intensified by rapid rises in general popula‑
tion. Familiar problems of the chaotically expanding city recur,
across the world, in many of the poorest countries. People who
speak of the crisis of cities with London or New York or Los Ange‑
les in mind ought to think also of the deeper crises of Calcutta or
Manila or a hundred other cities across Asia and Africa and Latin
America. A displaced and formerly rural population is moving
and drifting towards the centres of a money economy which is
directed by interests very far from their own. The last image of
the city, in the ex-colonial and neo-colonial world, is the political
capital or the trading port surrounded by the shantytowns, the
barriadas, which often grow at incredible speed. In Peru, as I
write, a few acres of desert have become, in a fortnight, a ‘city’ of
thirty thousand people, and this is only a particular example, in
the long interaction between altered and broken rural communi‑
ties and a process of capitalist agriculture and industrialisation
sometimes internally, more often externally directed.
It is then too late for the rich industrial societies to give warn‑
ings about the consequences of this dramatic process. There is a
false conservationist and reactionary emphasis which would in
effect, as Hardy observed of rural England, have the developing
societies stay as they are, picturesque and poor, for the benefit of
observers. Even when this is more serious, as in the reasonable
emphasis on the full human consequences, it is in bad faith if it
argues that the process should stop at anything like the present
levels of relative advantage and disadvantage. For what has to be
recognised, not only as an historical but as a contemporary fact, is
that the lines of development, in their intended and unintended
consequences, run back to the centres of imperialist economic,
political and military power. The shattered rural societies include
not only the economies of Latin America but the bombed and
burned devastation of Vietnam. Independent development,
which has to be bitterly fought for, then offers the only chance of
any possible growth in the interest of the majority. And while it
is true that if we add up all the developments, or the failures to
develop, the global crisis is terrifying, it is a process that cannot
be stopped in any one of its sectors. The decisive changes, indeed,
if they are to come at all, will have to come from within the ‘met‑
ropolitan’ countries, whose power now distorts the whole process
and makes any genuine system of common interest and control
impossible. Yet when we look at the power and impetus of the
metropolitan drives, often indeed accelerated by their own inter‑
nal crises, we cannot be in any doubt that a different direction,
“… revolutionary change …”
Distinctly unlike the reactionary pundits who yell at sprawl
as if their anger could make it
go away, or the vast majority
of reform-minded planners
who wait prayerfully for a
way to fix it, Williams recognized the truly radical depth
of the city and country dysfunction. The question for
Williams is whether we can
shift our minds sufficiently
to open up new ways of living
here now, or what kind of violence must transpire before
the old ways die.
We will look for the traces of
just such a common history in
the next section.
if it is to be found, will necessarily involve revolutionary change.
The depth of the crisis, and the power of those who continue to
dominate it, are too great for any easier or more congenial way.
Within this now vast mobility, which is the daily history of
our world, literature continues to embody the almost infinitely
varied experiences and interpretations. We can remember our
own early literature of mobility and of the corrupting process of
cities, and see many of its themes reappearing in African, Asian
and West Indian literature, itself written, characteristically, in the
metropolitan languages which are themselves among the con‑
sequences of mobility. We can read of the restless villages of so
many far countries: in Nkem Nwankwo’s Danda, in George Lam‑
ming’s In the Castle of My Skin. A mixed language, learned in the
mobility, comes through in V. S. Reid’s New Day. And Chinua
Achebe, whose Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God showed the
arrival of the alien system in the villages, shows us the compli‑
cated process of educational mobility and new kinds of work in
the city in No Longer at Ease and Man of the People. Yet we have got
so used to thinking of common experiences through the alienat‑
ing screens of foreignness and race that all too often we take the
particularity of these stories as merely exotic. A social process is
happening there, in an initially unfamiliar society, and that is its
importance. But as we gain perspective, from the long history of
the literature of country and city, we see how much, at different
times and in different places, it is a connecting process, in what
has to be seen ultimately as a common history.
Section Two: A Common History
gillette chipps 149
North Pacific America, more or less. (Map adapted from Kenneth M. Ames and
Herbert D. G. Maschner, Peoples of the Northwest Coast.)
Gillette Chipps
Nuu-chah-nulth account of First Contact, 1778
(from BC First Nations Studies Teachers Guide)
I am going to tell you about when the first white man
appeared in Nootka Sound. The Indians were dancing about when
the first white man appeared in Nootka Sound. The Indians were
dancing around the island—they called the schooner an island.
They said there’s an island because big trees on it. Big trees on it.
They say Indian doctors go out there singing a song, find out, try
to find out what it is. Rattling their rattles around the schooner,
go around, all see a lot of white men standing aside, goes on the
other side sees all kinds of white man, too. All different kind of
faces. Pale face white man, they said it was the dog salmon and
oh that’s a spring salmon, I think they said was a Spanish, dark
colour. Maybe it was the same men on the other side when they
go around the other side the same person but different places.
That is what I think myself. So anyway they seen lots of cohoes
aboard this boat. Red-faced men, big nose, and so they said it was
the coho. That was when the first white man appeared in Nootka
Sound in the schooner.
Gillette Chipps is a Nuuchah-nulth tribal member
who told this story in 1978.
“Nuu-chah-nulth” is the
accepted approximation of the
name indigenous people on
the West Coast of Vancouver
Island, British Columbia, give
to themselves. For centuries
they were known as “Nootka,”
because sailors on board British Captain James Cook’s 1778
expedition heard the locals tell
them to “park your boat back
there” (a shout they heard
as “Nootka”), and presumed
“Nootka” was the people’s
name. Cook’s March, 1778
landing is commonly known
as “first contact” (a slippery
myth …)
The appearance of a boat
full of salmon may sound
astonishing, but Alexandra
Harmon (see excerpt below)
points out that the people of
North Pacific America had
been encountering strangers
for thousands of years before
these red-nosed cohoes showed
up. The territory was so thick
gillette chipps 151
with
populous,
separate
groups, and the people were so
mobile, that relating to strangers had become their métier.
Within hours, if not minutes,
of Cook’s arrival, the Nuuchah-nulth were beside the
schooner shouting “ma-kuk,”
their word for “trade.” Trade
was their instant response to
difference.
James Cook
excerpts from Journal of the Third Voyage, March 1778
We no sooner drew near the inlet than we found the coast
to be inhabited and the people came off to the Ships in Canoes
without shewing the least mark of fear or distrust. We had at one
time thirty two Canoes filled with people about us, and a groupe
of ten or a dozen remained along side the Resolution most part of
the night. They seemed to be a mild inoffensive people, shewed
great readiness to part with any thing they had and took whatever
was offered them in exchange, but were more desireous of iron
than any thing else, the use of which they very well knew and had
several tools and instruments that were made of it.
James Cook’s (1728–1779)
three voyages around the
world changed history, stimulating new trade relationships
that shaped Britain’s role as a
world empire in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. His
account of the people he called
“Nootka” and their wealth
of sea otter furs gave rise to
a global trade network that
linked Europe and Asia to
North Pacific America. His
voyages were a kind of R&D
for the world’s largest corporation (England), advancing
their interests against competitors (principally the Spanish
and the Russians, later the
Americans).
Monday 30th. In the Morning I sent three armed boats under the
command of Mr King to look for a harbour for the Ships and soon
after I went my self in a small boat on the same service. On the
NW side of the Arm we were in and not far from the Ship, I found
a pretty snug Cove, and Mr King who returned about Noon found
one still better on the NW side of the Sound; but as it would have
required more time to get to it than the other, it was resolved to
make the nearest serve. But being too late in the day to transport
the Ships thither before night, I ordered the sails to be unbent,
the Topmast to be struck and the Foremast to be unrig’d, in order
to fix a new bib, one of the old ones being decayed. A great many
Canoes filled with the Natives were about the Ships all day, and
james cook 153
The commonplace image of
Indians trading valuable furs
or land for sparkling beads is
apparently inaccurate. They
knew what they wanted, which
was iron and tools. Later they
also traded for beads and buttons and clothing. The tribes
already had their own currency, a long, thin shell called
“haiqua” (dentalium) that
was recognized by scores of
separate nations, up and down
the coast and inland, over
thousands of miles.
a trade commenced betwixt us and them, which was carried
on with the Strictest honisty on boath sides. Their articles were
the Skins of various animals, such as Bears, Wolfs, Foxes, Dear,
Rackoons, Polecats, Martins and in particular the Sea Beaver, the
same as is found on the coast of Kamtchatka. Cloathing made of
these skins and a nother sort made, either of the bark of a tree
or some plant like hemp; Weapons, such as Bows and Arrows,
Spears &ca Fish hooks and Instruments of various kinds, pieces
of carved work and even human sculs and hands, and a variety of
little articles too tedious to mention. For these things they took in
exchange, Knives, chissels, pieces of iron & Tin, Nails, Buttons,
or any kind of metal. Beads they were not fond of and cloth of all
kinds they rejected.
As we will see further on,
the logic of trade was different here and did not
replicate European notions
of ownership. (Also, the Nuuchah-nulth liked to tease their
visitors.) Theft, as Cook saw
it, was constant and rarely a
source of shame. John Jewett,
a captive and guest of the
Nuu-chah-nulth for three
years (1803–1805) gives a
superb, somewhat sympathetic account of these baffling
habits in his white slaves of
the nootka (1815).
Tuesday 31st. The next day the Ships were got into the Cove and
their moored head and stern most of the Moorings being fast to
the shore. We found on heaving up the anchor that notwithstand‑
ing the great depth of water it was let go in, there were rocks
at the bottom which had done some considerable damage to the
Cable, and the hawsers that were carried out to warp the Ship into
the cove got also foul of rocks, so that it appeared that the whole
bottom was strewed with them. As we found the Ship again very
leaky in her upper works, the Caulkers were set to work to caulk
her and repair such other defects as were wanting.
We had the company of the natives all the day, who now laid
aside all manner of restraint, if they ever had any, and came on
board the Ships and mixed with our people with the greatest free‑
dom. And we soon found that they were as light fingered as any
people we had before met with, and were far more dangerous for
with their knives and other cut[ting] instruments of iron, they
would cut a hook from a tackle or any other piece of iron from a
rope, the instant our backs was turned. We lost the Fish-hook, a
large hook between 20 and 30 pound weight, several lesser hooks
and other articles of iron in this manner, and as to our boats they
striped them of every article of iron about them worth carrying
away, though we had always men in them to guard them, but one
fellow would amuse the boat keeper at one end of the boat while
another was puling her to pieces at the other. If we missed a thing
immediately after it was Stolen, we found no difficulty in finding
out the thief, as they were ready enough to impeach one another,
but the thief generally relinquished his prize with reluctancy and
sometimes not without force. As soon as the Ships were securely
Moored, other business was taken in ha[n]d; the observatorys and
Instruments for making observations were set up on a elevated
rock on one side of the Cove close to the Resolution; a party of
men with an officer was sent ashore to cut wood and clear a place
and make conveniences for watering and the Forge was set up to
make the iron work wanting about the foremast, for bisides one
of the bibs being defective the larboard Trestle-tree and one of the
cross-trees was sprung.
A considerable number of the Natives visited us daily and
we every now and then saw new faces. On their first coming
they generally went through a singular ceremony; they would
paddle with all thier strength quite round both Ships, A Chief or
other principal person standing up with a Spear, or some other
Weapon in his hand and speaking, or rather holloaing all the
time, sometimes this person would have his face cover[ed] with
a mask, either that of the human face or some animal, and some
times instead of a weapon would hold in his hand a rattle. After
making the Circuit of the ships they would come along side and
begin to trade without further ceremony. Very often indeed they
would first give us a song in which all joined with a very agreable
harmony.
†
Saturday 18th. On the 18th a party of Strangers in Six or eight
Canoes came into the Cove where they remained looking at us for
some time, then retired without coming along side either ship.
We supposed our old friends would not suffer them, who were
more numerous at this time about us than the strangers. It was
evident that they engrossed us intirely to themselves, or if at any
time they allowed Strangers to trade with us it was always man‑
aged the trade for them in such a manner that the price of their
articles was always kept up while the Value of ours was lessening
daily. We also found that many of the principals of those about us
carried on a trade with their neighbours with the articles they got
from us; as they would frequintly be gone from us four or five days
at a time and then return with a fresh cargo of skins curiosities
&ca and such was the passion for these things among our people
that they always came to a good Market whether they were of any
value or no. But such of them as visited us daily we reaped the
james cook 155
Cook has entered the Nuuchah-nulth longhouse, a vast,
modular shed-structure that
was the common building
type throughout North Pacific
America. Industry transpires
side by side with domestic life.
“People lived in their smoke
houses,” as Ames and Maschner put it (below). The sheds
were also portable. Families
strapped all their siding planks
most benifit from, these, after disposing of all their little trifles,
employed a part of their time in fishing and we always got at least
a part of the fruits of their labour. We also got from these people a
quantity of very good Animal oil which they had reserved in blad‑
ers; in this traffick some would attempt to cheat us by mixing
Water with the oil, once or twice they had the address to impose
upon us whole bladers of water wi[t]hout a drop of Oil in them.
It was always better to put up with these tricks than to quarrel
with them, as our articles of trafick consisted for the most part in
trifles, and yet we were put to our shifts to find these trifles, for
beads and such things of which I had yet some left, were in little
esteem. Nothing would go down with them but metal and brass
was now become their favourate, So that before we left the place,
hardly a bit of brass was left in the Ship, except what was in the
necessary instruments. Whole Suits of cloaths were striped of
every button, Bureaus &ca of their furniture and Copper kettle[s],
Tin canesters, Candle sticks, &ca all went to wreck; so that these
people got a greater middly and variety of things from us than
any other people we had visited.
The next day, being the first fair day we had had for a fortnight
past, we got up the Topmasts and yards and set up the rigging.
And having now got the most of our heavy work out of hand, I
set out early the next morning with [2] boats to take a view of the
Sound. I first went to the West point where I found a large Indian
Village and before it a very Snug harbour in which was from 9
to 4 fathom water and a bottom of fine Sand. The people of this
Village who were numerous and to most of whom I was known,
received me very curtiously, every one pressing me to go in to his
house, or rather appartment for several families live under the
same roof, and there spread a mat for me to sit down upon and
shewed me every other mark of civility.
In most of the houses there were Women at work making
dresses of the bark or plant before mentioned which they
performed in every respect in the same manner as the New
Zealanders. Others were at work opening and Smoke drying Sar‑
dins, a large quantity of these fish were landed while I was there,
divided by Measure amongst several people who carried them up
to the house to be cured. They hang them on small rods at first
about a foot from the fire, afterwards they remove them higher
and higher to make room for others till they get to the roof of the
house; when dryed they are made up into bales and covered with
Mats; thus they are kept till wanting and eat very well, but there
is but little meat upon them. In the same manner they cure Cod
and other large fish, and some are cured in the air without fire.
From this place I proceeded up the West side of the Sound.… A
mile above the second arm was the remains of a Village the logs
or framing of the houses were standing, but the boards that had
composed the sides and roof were wanting. Before this Village
were some large fishing weares, but I saw no one attending them.
These weares were composed of pieces of wicker work made of
small rods some closer than others according to the size of the
fish intended to be caught in them. These pieces of wickerwork
(some of whose superficies are twenty feet by twelve at least) they
fix up edgeways, in 3 or 4 feet water at low water, by strong poles
or pickets fixed firm in the ground. Behind this ruined Village is
a plane of a few acres covered with some of the largest pine trees
I ever saw, whereas the elevated ground on most parts of this side
the Sound was rather naked. From this place I crossed over to the
other side of the Sound passing an Arm of it extending in NNE
to appearence not far. I now found what I had before conjectured,
that the land under which the ships laid was an island and that
there were many small ones laying scatered in the Sound on the
West side of it. Opposite the North end of the large island on the
Continent was an Indian Village at which I landed, the inhabit‑
ants were not so polite as those of the other I had visited; but this
seemed in a great measure if not wholy owing to one Surly chief,
who would not let me enter their houses, following me where
ever I went and several times made signs for me to be gone; the
presents I made him did not induce him to alter his behavour.
Some young women, more polite than their surly Lord, dress’d
themselves in a hurry in their best cloaths, got together and sung
us a song which was far from being harsh or disagreeable. The
day being now far spent, I proceeded for the Ships round the
North end of the large island, meeting in my way several Canoes
laden with Sardins which they had caught some where in the
East corner of the Sound.
together as rafts, piled their
belongings on top, and floated
away to the next seasonal
encampment. The majority of
arriving Europeans reported
finding “abandoned villages”
that were actually just support
posts awaiting the seasonal
arrival of these peripatetic
workers.
Tuesday 21st. The new Mizen mast being finished, got it in and
rigged and set the Carpenters to work to make a new Fore top‑
mast to replace the one carried away some time before.
james cook 157
Here are the puzzling,
multifarious terms of Nuuchah-nulth ownership and
trade in all their intensity.
There was “not a blade of
grass that had not a separate owner.” Yet, when Cook
emptied his pockets of all he
had, the Nuu-chah-nulth told
him to take whatever else he
needed for free. The wealth the
Nuu-chah-nulth accumulated
was never squirreled away.
Wealth was built up in order
to be released in an impressive
flood at what became known
as “the potlatch.” Power came
with the astonishing volume
and value of what they gave
away, dwarfing the power of
rivals in relinquishing wealth.
What kind of economy is this?
And what is ownership when
value is accrued by relinquishing rather than securing it?
Wednesday 22nd. The next Morning we were Visited by a number
of Strangers in twelve or fourteen Canoes; they lay drawn up in a
body a full half hour about two or three hundred yards from the
ships. At first we thought they were afraid to advance nearer, in
this we were misstaken, it was rather to entertain us with a Song
or dance which was perform’d in concert, while two of the Canoes
kept parading between the others and us. After they had finished
their Songs which we heard with admiration, they came along
side the Ships, and then we found that several of our old friends
were among them, who took upon them the intire management
of the trade between us and them very much to the advantage of
the others. Having a few Goats and two or three sheep left I went
in a boat accompaned by Captain Clerke in a nother, to the Village
at the west point of the Sound to get some grass for them, having
seen some at that place. The Inhabitants of this village received
us in the same friendly manner they had d[o]ne before, and the
Moment we landed I sent some to cut grass not thinking that
the Natives could or would have the least objection, but it proved
otherways for the Moment our people began to cut they stoped
them and told them they must Makook for it, that is first buy it.
As soon as I heard of this I went to the place and found about a
dozen men who all laid cla[i]m to some part of the grass which
I purchased of them and as I thought liberty to cut where ever I
pleased, but here again I was misstaken, for the liberal manner
I had paid the first pretended pr[o]prietors brought more upon
me and there was not a blade of grass that had not a seperated
owner, so that I very soon emptied my pockets with purchasing,
and when they found I had nothing more to give they let us cut
where ever we pleased.
Here I must observe that I have no were met with Indians who
had such high notions of every thing the Country produced being
their exclusive property as these; the very wood and water we took
on board they at first wanted us to pay for, and we had certainly
done it, had I been upon the spot when the demands were made;
but as I never happened to be there the workmen took but little
notice of their importunities and at last they ceased applying. But
made a Merit on necessity and frequently afterwards told us they
had given us Wood and Water out of friendship.…
Peter Nabokov
Robert Easton
Peter Nabokov is an anthropologist at UCLA. native
american architecture,
which he wrote with Robert
Easton, came out in 1990.
excerpt from Native American Architecture
In 1778, the world traveler and British Navy captain James
Cook brought his ship Resolution into Nootka Sound, a protected
inlet on Vancouver Island’s wild western shore. As Cook dropped
anchor in a natural harbor he named Friendly Cove, he met a typi‑
cal Northwest Coast village scene: three rows of large cedar-plank
houses lined imposingly above the tide line. Banked walkways
served as “main streets” running in front of the buildings, which
faced a beach strewn with fishing gear and dugout canoes.
Cook climbed a notched-log stairway from the beach to exam‑
ine the most sophisticated wood architecture in North America.
In his journal he recorded that “The height of the sides and ends
of these habitations is seven and eight feet; the back part is higher
than the front, by which means the planks that compose the roof
slant forward; they are laid on loose, and are moved to let out
smoke and admit air or light.” Inside, Cook found that “the whole
might be compared to a long stable, with a double row of stalls,
and a broad passage in the middle.”
Cook had mixed feelings about life inside these voluminous
interiors. They seemed full of “filth and confusion,” yet their
Indian builders clearly had invested them with great symbolic
importance. Cook was struck by the images that decorated many
of the houses: “These are nothing more than the trunks of very
large trees four or five feet high, set up singly or by pairs, at the
upper end of the apartment, with the front carved into a human
The ocean was this region’s
highway, and indigenous people
moved over it in crafts big and
small (from kayaks to dugout
canoes holding, often, many
scores of people). Their trips
often covered many hundreds
of miles. The ocean was a busy
highway, and villages, such
as the one at Nootka, hugged
the shore wherever there was
shelter or a decent beach. The
beach made for easy parking, and the longhouses were
arranged in a strip parallel to
shore.
peter nabokov & robert easton 159
The tribes to the south, whose
highway was the massive
Columbia River, included the
group known as the Atfalati,
a band of the Kalapuya that
lived on the broad, grassy
plain where the sprawl west of
Portland, Oregon, would later
grow. Their dwellings, while
face, the arms and hand cut out upon the sides, and variously
painted, so that the whole is a truly monstrous figure.… When
[the natives] did unveil them, they seemed to speak of them in a
very mysterious manner.”
In his observations of a major Nootka Indian village, Cook
identified key elements of the architectural system that prevailed
for an estimated 75,000 native people who occupied the 1,200mile coastline from the lower Alaskan panhandle in the north
to southern Oregon. For convenience, scholars have grouped the
dozen or more major Northwest Coast tribes by three subregions:
Southern, Central, and Northern. All of these tribes traditionally
constructed wood houses, using massive logs for their post-andbeam frames and split and adzed planks for their walls and roofs.
The house shape, construction details, and symbolic decoration
in each region, however—and sometimes each tribe—displayed
distinguishing characteristics.
Cook had entered the last American Indian world below the
Arctic that was virtually unknown to the white man. The North‑
west Coast was a dramatic environment of thundering surf,
mist-shrouded islands, hidden bays, lofty mountains, and dense
rain forests. In winter, temperatures rarely dropped below 35
degrees. Among the wettest regions on Earth, its annual rain‑
fall averaged more than 80 inches. Its forests, coast, sounds, and
rivers offered its Indians diverse food sources. Extended family
groups owned traditional rights to shellfish beds, salmon-fishing
riverbanks, berry patches, and hunting areas in the valleys. This
freedom from want fostered the development of highly stylized
art forms, which adorned their clothing, tools, ritual parapherna‑
lia, sea craft, and architecture. With it also developed a complex
social organization that placed a premium upon ancestry, status,
prestige, and wealth—all of which were amply displayed in the
architecture.
Each of the subregions produced a singular house type. The
Salish-speaking tribes of the South lived in extremely long, undec‑
orated shed-roofed houses. Large gable-roofed structures framed
around a central rectangular pit were built by such Central tribes
as the Nootka, Bella Coola, and Kwakiutl. In the North, tribes
such as the Tlingit and Tsimshian constructed similar gableroofed, two-beam houses, but the Haida of the Queen Charlotte
Islands devised the unique six-beam house.
Red cedar was the wood most commonly used, either in the
round or split into wide planks. In the most northerly reaches
of Northwest Coast culture, however, yellow cedar, spruce, and
hemlock were more common. But cedar was generally preferred,
for reasons which Haida carver William Reid explained in 1975:
“The wood is soft, but of a wonderful firmness and, in a good
tree, so straight-grained it will split true and clean into forty foot
planks, four inches thick and three feet wide with scarcely a knot.
Across the grain it cuts clean and precise. It is light in weight
and beautiful in color, reddish brown when new, silvery grey
when old. It is permeated with natural oils that make it one of the
longest lasting of all woods, even in the damp of the Northwest
Coast climate ... you can build from the cedar tree the exterior
trappings of one of the world’s great cultures.”
Except that it could not be consumed, cedar was to Northwest
Coast craftsmen almost what the buffalo was to Plains Indians.
Its inner bark was woven into mats, cloth, rope, and ritual cos‑
tumes, and its outer bark shingled the roofs of their houses. Its
wood—composed of thin-walled cells with large spaces between
cells—offered naturally insulating walls. Not surprisingly, most
Northwest Coast tribes also believed the tree was endowed with
spiritual power.
Villages varied in size from large autonomous towns to smaller
communities of fewer than a dozen houses. These coastal settle‑
ments were permanent winter residences, considered home
from about October to May. Usually sited along the curving
beachfronts of sheltering coves, they were protected from winter
winds, stormy surf, and surprise attack. Some tribes also erected
palisades around their villages, or propped their houses on stilts
in hard-to-reach coastal overlooks, to protect against the threat
of unfriendly tribes hunting for slaves or booty. In summer,
families canoed inland on river channels to resettle near favorite
salmon-spawning stretches, berry plots, and groundhog-hunt‑
ing areas. There they erected short-term shelters, often sheathed
with large wall boards they had brought from their winter homes,
lashed between canoes for the trip inland. Individual families
enjoyed inherited rights to fish, hunt, and gather. They netted
and speared up to five kinds of salmon during upstream spawn‑
ing runs. The fish were then smoked in special houses or dried
on huge outdoor racks.
smaller than the nearby Chinook’s (some of which exceeded
450 x 50 feet), were also modular, portable sheds, often quite
plain and unadorned.
The spiritual life of material—
such as wood and fish and
water—which was so central a
concern for indigenous North
Americans, distinguishes their
highway culture from ours.
We routinely dismiss strip
malls and the foods and materials we find there as soulless
tokens of commerce, endowed
with neither the mystery nor
the virtue that, for example,
the Nuu-chah-nulth found in
cedar. So, how did they find
those qualities? And how is it
that we fail to find them in the
stuff of our lives?
To say the longhouses were
“owned” by certain families masks a complex set of
relationships beneath a commonplace of contemporary
life. In fact, there were no
titles or deeds; the houses
had names and stories that
attributed their greatness to
the stewardship of certain
men and their families. Privilege of occupancy extended
first to those families, but the
house itself had an autonomy
and importance that placed
it above those who occupied
it. Nuu-chah-nulth did not
“own” their houses any more
than we “own” our heritage.
But history gave certain families the right and duty to live in
this or that house. The house
at Tashees was Maquina’s,
and so it would be the next
Maquina’s. (Sons or successors often adopted the name of
their forebearer—a fact that
caused much alarm among
later arrivals who found the
legendary chiefs looking preternaturally vigorous for men
in their early hundreds).
From this central obligation
a web of entitlement spread by
family ties, marriage, friendship, and hospitality, so that
the house belonged to many.
Northwest Coast society was ranked into two classes, com‑
moners and nobles, with the aristocratic families dominating the
villages. Slaves stolen from other tribes were considered outside
the social order. The extended-family lineages placed the utmost
value upon inherited or accumulated prestige. Noble families usu‑
ally owned the houses, whose large plank facades and sculpted
posts boastfully announced their social standing. Mythic char‑
acters, considered part of the ancestral heritage of prominent
families or clans, were symbolically depicted in “crests” of highly
stylized faces and body forms on the large facade, the upright
posts in and outside the building, and on interior painted screens.
Arranged marriages between high-ranking families often were
formalized by the ritualized construction of a new house, which
was then decorated with the combined iconographic inheritance
of the occupants.
Considered almost as living entities, most houses were given
proper names; some acquired reputations for their wealth and
prestige. Through the accumulation of crest carvings and other
inherited treasures, the “noble house” continued to strengthen
its history and totemic imagery even though the original build‑
ing might fall into disrepair and be replaced or repaired on the
site. In midwinter, the time of year when house interiors were
converted into sacred spaces during religious festivals, the layer‑
ing of symbols portrayed on them came to life as wooden panels
were erected behind the large fire hearth to separate public and
secret zones, and the buildings became stages for ritual dramas.
These buildings also housed the ostentatious gift-giving ritu‑
als known as “potlatch,” during which family lineages or even
entire tribes competed in dispensing immense quantities of
goods. Such formal events reaffirmed the networks of important
social relations and were also mechanisms by which local chiefs
enhanced their power and reputations. During formal speeches at
these give-aways it seemed as if the houses themselves, rather than
their temporary occupants, were vying for attention and status.
European traders who arrived after Cook soon discovered
how readily Northwest Indians would offer sea otter pelts for
coveted metal. Before Cook’s appearance they had salvaged iron
from shipwrecks washed ashore, but it was probably not essen‑
tial to their carpentry. Experiments by archeologists at Canada’s
Museum of Man in the 1970s suggest that their distinctive art
style could have been achieved using adzes and chisels edged
with clam or mussel shell, along with stone mauls, hardwood or
sheephorn wedges, and bone bores and awls. In Nootka Sound,
Captain Cook examined a typical Indian carpenter’s kit that con‑
tained “[a] maul, chisels, wedges, D-adze, straight adze, simple
drills, grindstones of sandstone for finishing, sharkskin for fine
polishing.…”
Other scholars argue that the blossoming of Northwest Coast
architecture occurred with the proliferation of metal chisels,
axes, nails, and saws. Archeological evidence of the antiquity of
the plank house tradition is meager because the damp climate
rots wood and fiber. Yet excavations in the Skeena River Canyon
on the mainland in British Columbia have uncovered fishing vil‑
lages of rectangular houses that date back nearly 5,000 years.
Moreover, Canadian archeologists working in the present-day
Kwakiutl region near Prince Rupert claim to have found traces of
equally ancient plank house communities.
There is only circumstantial evidence for the origin of North‑
west Coast house forms. Wood houses in Siberia’s Amir region
bear a resemblance to the rectangular plan of Northwest plank
houses, as do traditional Ainu homes from northern Japan.
Closer to home, Alaskan Eskimos just north of Tlingit country
used planks, and their technique of sinking the floors to conserve
warmth was shared by some Northwest Coast builders, who
stepped their rectangular floors in tiers down to the fire pit.
There is no argument, however, that metal tools increased the
quantity of Northwest Coast architectural art. Museums from
New York to Moscow today abound with interior posts, free-stand‑
ing crest poles, house screens and furnishings, and even entire
building facades. It was the interpretive scholarship of Northwest
Coast art launched by ethnographer Franz Boas in the 1880s that
first correlated the tribes’ material culture and social life, contrib‑
uting to the fledgling discipline of anthropology.
These Northwest Coast Indian housing traditions have suffered
from economic change, disease epidemics, the abandonment of
many ancestral villages and suppression of native lifeways insti‑
gated by the Europeans. Yet today, at some native communities
and art centers such as Alert Bay, Skidegate and K’SAN, archi‑
tectural craftsmen still carve totems, adze wallboards, and paint
house facades in traditional fashion.
It’s interesting that the building methods and patterns have
had so little direct expression
in the contemporary architectural style of the region.
I know of no architects consciously drawing on the Salish
longhouse, or its Haida and
Tlingit variants, to fashion a
viable contemporary idiom.
There is no place called “Seattle Harbor.” The building
Nabokov and Easton describe
here was across Puget Sound
in a sheltered bay near Agate
Pass, several miles northwest
of the city’s port facilities at
Harbor Island.
In 1792, Captain George Vancouver explored Elliot Bay, near what
is today Seattle Harbor, then landed in North Bay to examine an
Indian building whose single-pitch shed roof sheltered over six
hundred Dwamish tribespeople. Known to them as Tsu-Suc-Cub,
or the “Old-Man-House,” the structure extended in length more
than 380 yards‚ almost a fifth of a mile.
Its interior was divided lengthwise into eight sections, each
of which housed a clan chieftain and his followers. Each clan
domain was identified by its prominently displayed carved
totem. At the higher, front side of the house, the mighty support
posts stood about 20 feet high. Over 5 feet thick and positioned
about 25 feet apart, they were paired with other posts at the rear
which stood between 5 and 6 feet high. The log beams span‑
ning these uprights and setting the building’s width were just
over 60 feet long.
More than a dozen coastal Salish- and Chemakum-speaking
people‚ tribes such as the Chinook, Tillamook, and Quinault‚
inhabited the bays and islands that extend from Puget Sound in
the south to the Gulf of Georgia in the north. Their shed houses,
commonly hundreds of feet long, were actually a sequence of
post-and-beam modules that were added on whenever new house‑
holds, related through the father’s line, married into the family.
It was customary for the principal leader and his entourage
to live in the central, largest unit‚ a chamber up to 90 feet in
length‚ and the houses might grow in both directions. A family’s
social position thus could be inferred from their proximity to the
middle room, with more important households usually closer to
the main quarters. Compared with the coastal traditions further
north, however, this southern architecture appeared less con‑
cerned with displaying rank and status. The hierarchical order
and societal rules were more flexible, and families would even
change houses on occasion, which would have been unthinkable
further north.
Coastal villages contained some gable-roofed structures and an
occasional large, flat, or mansard-roofed feast house. Most settle‑
ments held from three to five multiple-family houses, usually laid
out in rows with the long side facing the shoreline. Diversity in
the size and design of Salish communities was not unusual, how‑
ever. An entire Squamish hamlet might live beneath a common
roof, yet a Musqueam village described in 1876 contained 76 sep‑
arate buildings arranged in a semicircle. In a Lummi settlement
in Washington the structures were aligned in an L-shape, in
accordance with mythic instructions their culture hero received
to build his house at right angles to the main village.
Some of the best-documented shed houses were found along
the banks of the lower Fraser River. A few tribes on Vancouver
Island are reported to have excavated their floors, but generally the
topsoil was simply scraped level. Front posts often stood 18 feet
high, while rear posts, 40 to 50 feet back, were raised about 10
feet high. Long beams connected them, producing a succession
of parallel post-and-beams that held the lattice of lighter rafters.
Sheathing the building on all sides were the “curtain walls,” com‑
posed of wide split-cedar planks. They overlapped horizontally
and were cinched tightly between pairs of slender uprights with
cedar withes.
Roof boards were also of split cedar, which sometimes was
gouged on one side to overlap like roofing tile. Rocks helped hold
them in place during storms. In marked contrast to the promi‑
nently decorated entryways of northern Indian houses, the shed
house doors were inconspicuously tucked away in one corner of
the main facade and consisted of planks swinging from the tran‑
som on cedar ties. Another door usually was cut out at the rear.
Just inside the entryway, plank barricades were positioned to
block cold drafts, and bark sheets were sometimes fastened to the
walls to provide added insulation. Rush hangings or plank divid‑
ers often partitioned the interior into living chambers, and bark
or rush mats softened the 3-foot-wide sleeping benches that lined
the chamber walls. In the larger buildings each “apartment” had
its own hearth, while occupants of smaller structures used a
common fireplace.
As Charles Jones, a hereditary chief of the Pacheenaht, recalls
from his boyhood, the fire in a traditional house “was built in a
circle of rocks and sand, which would help to retain the heat.” His
home, which sheltered six related families, was built with tightly
overlapping side planks. “When they put this kind of siding on a
house,” he recalls in his autobiography, “they would start at the
bottom of the house and work up, lapping each new plank over
the one below. The walls were up off the ground just a bit, a few
inches or so, so that the hot fire could pull the air in around the
bottom of the house, which would help to keep the dirt floor dry.”
These “bark sheets,” fastened
to the walls for insulation,
were made of beaten and
woven cedar bark, similar in
function to tapestries.
These elegantly designed longhouses, with modular add-ons,
open floor plans, a central fire
pit, adjustable light, ample
storage, and thin gaps between
floor and wall to draw air
to dry the sand, were cheap,
efficient, superbly designed
“machines for living.” This is
high modernism without the
burden of a thousand years
of European history to react
against.
Provisions and tools were stored on racks suspended from the
ceiling or under the sleeping platforms.
When choosing sites for their villages that could be defended,
the coastal Indians exploited natural sea or rock barriers. In the
Puget Sound region, many communities were surrounded by
14-foot-high log palisades piled with rocks that could be used
as ammunition against attacking warriors. Secret tunnels led
beneath some of the house floors into the forest, linking sub‑
terranean hideaways that contained bunks and emergency
provisions.
When the families migrated to upriver fishing camps for
the summer, tribes like the Nanaimo, Cowichan, and Sanetch
stripped their winter houses of their curtain-wall planks. The
villagers transported the dismantled walls lashed between their
canoes and then used them to cover their summer fishing houses.
Captain Vancouver noticed their seminomadic architecture in
1792, when he came upon “skeletons of houses” in what he at
first took to be abandoned villages.
After the establishment of European settlements nearby,
gable-roofed houses became popular with wealthier or more
prestigious Indian families. They were often framed like the old
shed-roof houses but with a gabled superstructure of poles rest‑
ing upon the heavier posts and beams. The Comox and Pentlatch
tribes, reputedly the most accomplished gable house builders,
moderately excavated their house floors and used eight roof posts.
Southern Indian villages freely mixed shed and board-and-bat
walled gable buildings: while the Nanaimo Indians came to use
gable houses exclusively, a village of Sanetch Indians not far away
contained seven large shed houses with one gable house parallel
to them. In some communities, however, the old style shed-roof
domestic form was retained and converted into a festival or “pot‑
latch” house.
Facades were covered with less symbolic artwork than that
found further north. In the mythology of some Salish people, a
“thunder house” owned by supernatural beings is described, but
even such folklore references to architecture are few. One Klal‑
lum house owner perforated his roof boards so that during the
day the ceiling would resemble the night sky, but there is no indi‑
cation this was a common practice. When southern buildings did
exhibit painted or carved house posts, the designs usually repre‑
sented the “spirit guardian” of the head of the household.
A third building type of the Southern region, which in later
years accommodated immense crowds of potlatch guests, was
the mansard or hip-roofed building. The “old potlatch house”
constructed at Whidbey Island shortly after 1800, for example,
had an almost level central roof, steeply pitched eaves on all four
sides, and metal stove pipes sticking through its enormous plank
roof. By 1900, however, most coastal Salish traditional houses of
the shed-, gable-, or hip-roofed variety had been burned or aban‑
doned. Indians were occupying what they called the white man’s
style “Boston houses,” or they lived in shantytowns built of castoff lumber on the outskirts of Seattle, Victoria, and Vancouver.
Kenneth M. Ames
Herbert D. G. Maschner
excerpts from Peoples of the Northwest Coast
This popular survey of the
early history of North Pacific
America was written by an
archaeologist (Ames) and
an anthropologist from the
region. It has the virtues of
being well researched and
clearly written.
The early voyagers along the coast encountered people
who contradicted many of the basic assumptions that Europeans
held about human societies, particularly the ones that linked cul‑
tural complexity with agriculture. As the science of anthropology
developed, the Northwest Coast continued to be an exception to
all the rules; it could not be fitted into most of the classifications
anthropologists devised for cultures and societies. Northwest
Coast peoples were hunter-gatherers, not farmers, yet they had
elites. They had a significant art style. Why? What was special
about the coast? Part of the answer has to do with the coast itself,
as we shall see. But another part of the answer is that anthro‑
pologists and archaeologists really did not know as much as they
thought about hunter-gatherers.
The Northwest Coast
The stereotype of hunter-gatherers has them all living in small,
mobile groups, with few possessions, and dependent on foods in
season. As a consequence they have little or no property, and no
fixed and permanent differences in social power and prestige,
in other words, they have an egalitarian social structure. This
stereotype exists because many hunter-gatherers worldwide do
exhibit these characteristics, though not necessarily closely or
kenneth m. ames & herbert d. g. maschner 169
The settlements of North
Pacific America were, then,
well into the range of what
Braudel classified as urban.
comfortably. The societies of the Northwest Coast differed mark‑
edly from this common stereotype of hunter-gatherers. They were
the most socially complex hunting and gathering societies known
on earth and had social and cultural features, such as social
stratification, that are usually assumed to be attributes of farm‑
ing peoples. Beyond social stratification, Northwest Coast culture
traits include living in large permanent villages and towns (i.e.
being sedentary), full-time specialists, an elaborate and complex
material culture, ownership and control of property, and monu‑
mental architecture. Their human population densities were
among the highest in pre-modern North America, irrespective
of economy. Their towns and villages ranged in size from a few
score to more than a thousand individuals. Some of these towns
stood for several hundred years, requiring enormous effort and
skill to maintain. These societies confound ideas about the devel‑
opment of social complexity during human history and many
of the traits expressed on the Northwest Coast are exactly those
traits widely viewed as the basis for the development of civiliza‑
tion. It has always been assumed by historians, anthropologists,
archaeologists, and others that farming is necessary for these
traits to evolve. The non-farming hunter-gatherer societies of the
Northwest Coast possessed all those traits, and did so for at least
the last 2,500 years if not longer. More recently, archaeologists
have found that other such ‘’complex” hunter-gatherers existed in
the past in many parts of the world.
The discovery of complex hunter-gatherers—also known
as “affluent foragers”—is one of the century’s more important
archaeological breakthroughs, though perhaps one of its more
obscure ones as well. When people think of major archaeological
discoveries they immediately think of tombs, individuals frozen
in glaciers or cities lost beneath jungles. These are single, spec‑
tacular finds, but the discovery of complex hunter-gatherers is the
discovery of an entire form of society, once thought to be unique
to the Northwest Coast, and represents a significant expansion
of our knowledge and awareness of the range of human cultural
and social behavior. It also has enormous implications for our
understanding of how human cultures change and evolve. Brian
Hayden, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University, argues
forcefully, for example, that the first steps leading to the domes‑
tication of plants and animals about 10,000 years ago could only
have been taken by affluent foragers; farming, of course, is the
most significant change in human subsistence in the last million
years. Without the Northwest Coast, and its extensive ethno‑
graphic and archaeological literature, we doubt the concept of
“complex hunter-gatherers” could have been possible, and under‑
standing them very difficult.
Another stereotype of hunter-gatherers is one that Eric Wolf,
a cultural anthropologist, has labeled “people without history”—
people whose societies and cultures are treated as timeless and
unchanging, whose lifeways when the first European explorers
encountered them were pretty much the way they had always
been. It is a simple short step from seeing them this way to
seeing hunter-gatherers as living fossils, as static, surviving
examples of the primitive state of all societies, including modern
industrialized ones. That is wrong. As Wolf argues, modern and
recent hunter-gatherer societies, including those of the North‑
west Coast, are the products of very long histories. A major goal
of this volume is to present that long history. Another aspect of
this stereotype is that hunter-gatherers themselves have no sense
of history, and no histories of their own. This is also wrong. Oral
traditions on the Northwest Coast are rich in historical informa‑
tion central to their societies and their definition of humanness:
A group that could not tell their traditions would be ridiculed
with the remark, “what is your ‘history’?” And if you could not
give it, you were laughed at. “What is your grandfather’s name?
And where is your crest? How do you know your past, where
have you lived? You have no Grandfather. You cannot speak to
me, because I have one. You have no ancestral home. You are like
a wild animal, you have no abode.1
The presumption that these
cultures are without history
carries two meanings: first,
that their situation is static;
second, that they don’t keep
a record of the past. Both
are wrong, as the Ames and
Maschner survey shows in
great detail. The evolution
of these cultures is evident
in the archaeological record,
and the details are confirmed
in the stories many tell about
their past. Yet, even so sympathetic and conscientious an
observer as Braudel held onto
the assumption that without
writing—which Braudel says
comes from towns, which come
from agriculture—there could
be no history. Which means
the history we do have will be
limited to that of agricultural
peoples, leaving us ignorant
of other urban histories, other
patterns and futures.
Northwest societies produced one of the world’s most famous
art styles. The art made power, obligation, and history tangible
and visible. Great artists, some of them titleholders (high-status
individuals), carved and painted house fronts, masks, boxes,
funerary posts, and totem poles, on a commission basis, like the
painters and sculptors of Renaissance Italy, although the artists
of the coast may have been held in higher esteem and enjoyed
broader support. Some of them may also have been more danger‑
ous because of their spirit powers.
The social and economic relationships, art, history, spiritual‑
ity, and world view of Northwest Coast people were expressed in
The potlatch is the most
written-about and discussed
feature of the early history of
North Pacific America. It is
interpreted in such divergent
ways that I have chosen not
to excerpt any one text. For
our purposes it is enough
to know that the potlatch
invested prestige and power
in those who could amass and
give away the greatest bounty
of goods. These gifts made
debts, a web of obligations
that held disparate peoples
together. What kind of an
economy is this? What power
inheres in debt? Different
writers find different answers
(and different questions),
and I recommend reading
Franz Boas’s early reports
of the Kwakwaka’wakw;
George Bataille’s clever if
misinformed interpretation
in the accursed share;
Cole
Harris’s
informed
and informative making
native space; and Christopher Bracken’s acrobatic
deconstruction of Canada’s
attempts to outlaw the practice, the potlatch papers.
many ways, but none were so famous as the potlatch—a feast, a
theatrical performance, a giving away of wealth and a confirma‑
tion of status that has fascinated Westerners since first contact
in the late 18th century. As a ceremony, the potlatch has probably
received more attention from anthropologists and other social sci‑
entists than any other single ceremony in the human repertoire,
and has played a central role in the growth of anthropology and of
social theory generally. Almost every social theory devised in the
last hundred years, from French structuralism to Marxism, has
had to grapple with the potlatch. In November 1894 Franz Boas,
the principal founder of anthropology in North America, observed
and marvelously described a series of potlatches and other cer‑
emonies among the Kwakwaka’wakw (formerly Kwakiutl) of
Fort Rupert, at the northern end of Vancouver Island. Although
other potlatches have been described, Boas’ descriptions remain
at the heart of the non-Native understanding of the institution.
The timing of Boas’ work, given its importance, is ironic. The
Canadian government banned the potlatch in 1885 because
missionaries and Indian agents believed the institution was per‑
nicious. In their view it encouraged idleness, licentiousness, and
thriftlessness, leading the Natives to give away their great wealth
which Westerners thought should be invested in economically
productive ways, and slowing their progress to civilization. This
effort at forced culture change failed, the law was finally dropped
in 1951, and legal potlatching resumed.
The research of Boas and many others, including Native
people such as George Hunt and William Benyon, which began
in the late 19th century and continues today; the detailed observa‑
tions of earlier travelers on the coast, such as Captain Cook, and
the Lewis and Clark expedition, to name only two of the most
famous; and innumerable other sources have produced one of
the largest and richest ethnographic literatures that exists for
any comparable portion of the globe. This literature has attracted
many students of humanity who have the seen the cultures of the
Northwest Coast as a fertile source of insights into human nature
and human culture. Archaeologists depend heavily on it as a
source of information and analogies about other, less well-known
peoples. One of the central goals of Boas’ research was to explain
the societies he studied through their histories, which he recon‑
structed using the cultures he described, their oral traditions,
and their languages. But he made little or no use of archaeology,
since little was then known about the archaeology of the coast at
that time.
Part of the fascination of the coast derives from its great beauty
and environmental richness. When we look at a map of the North‑
west Coast, we tend to see the land masses as the shapes, and the
water as voids between the land. Viewed this way, the Northwest
Coast is the fringe of the North American continent, arcing in a
great curve first south by southeast from Yakutat Bay on Alaska’s
south coast to the western entrance of the Strait of Juan de Fuca,
through which has been drawn the border between the United
States and Canada. Here the coast begins its slow bend back
westward by tending south by southwest. The Northwest Coast
finally feathers out at Cape Mendocino, in northern California.
In this perspective, there are two Northwest Coasts, one north
of the international boundary, and one south. For once, arbitrary
national boundaries actually reflect changes in topography and
geology—though not in culture. The coast north of the 49th par‑
allel is ragged, marked by islands great and small, deep fjords,
twisting sea passages, and broad expanses of shallow water and
pockets of great deeps. South of the border, the land’s end is knife
sharp, notched here and there by bays and estuaries, and serrated
by high headlands. The continent’s very edge glitters with long
white beaches.
But there is another way to look at our map of the Northwest
Coast. We can see the ocean as the substance, and the land as the
void, as in a good navigational chart. Now the Northwest Coast
is the northeast edge of the vast North Pacific Ocean, part of a
coastline that stretches in an enormous crescent from Cape Men‑
docino around to the southernmost tip of Kyushu in the Japanese
Archipelago and the mouth of the Yangtze River on China’s east
coast.
Taking this second perspective makes good sense at the
beginning of a book on the archaeology and history of the Native
people of the Northwest Coast. In their art, frequently it is the
form of the voids defined by carved shapes that actually have sub‑
stance, and in their oral traditions heroes must frequently go on
journeys to the ocean floor, to negotiate with the chiefs of the
In passage to juneau, his
lucid, ranging account of sailing from Seattle to Juneau,
Alaska, Jonathan Raban suggests that this worldview—the
ocean as substance, the land as
a void—was precisely the one
coastal people held. Spending
the majority of their time on or
in the water, Kwakwaka’wakw
and Haida and Tlingit artists
rendered distinctive ovoid patterns that art historians have
read as abstraction, but which
Raban sees as a simple depiction of the shapes light makes
reflected off rippling water.
The land was treacherous and
immobilizing, full of threats
and obstacles; the water was
freedom and mobility and a
bounty of food and necessary
materials. Raban draws a persuasive, vivid picture of lives
in which water was terrain,
and the land was a boundary
marking terra incognita.
sea creatures—salmon, sea mammals, and others—upon which
they depended for food.
The northeast edge of the North Pacific begins in the Gulf of
Alaska, and runs southward, lapping around the myriad islands
of the Alaskan and British Columbia coasts, touching their shores
in thousands of kilometers of rich intertidal habitats, fingering
far into the continent in deep fjords and broad bays. South of
the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the waters meet the land straight on,
except where small bays and estuaries create rich pockets of lit‑
toral and estuarine habitats. The sea is anchored in the south
at Cape Mendocino in California. Both land and sea are roped
together by the great rivers, such as the Stikine, the Skeena, the
Fraser, the Columbia and the Klamath, that drain the continent
and up which the ocean—or the keepers of the game—sent bil‑
lions of salmon on their regular upstream journey to reproduce
and die—and feed the people.
The Northwest Coast culture area is some 2,000 km (1,300 to
1,400 miles) long, in straight-line distance from north to south.
It is actually much longer, since the coastline is so intricate, but
we will use the 2,000 km figure. How long is that? It is roughly
the distance between New York and Cuba, between London and
Istanbul, or Canton in South China and Tokyo. However, there
are other kinds of distances. If one travels in a straight line from
London to Istanbul, all of the languages spoken along the trip,
except Turkish, are members of the Indo-European language
family, while Turkish is a member of the Ural-Altaic language
family. The Northwest Coast was the second most diverse lin‑
guistic area in North America after California. A 19th-century
traveler along the coast passed through the areas of 11 language
families encompassing 39 different languages.
†
Villages and towns
Households were tied together in two basic ways: physically by
sharing the same town, and socially through kin ties (both blood
and marriage). Town size and layout provide information about
how households were tied together and the nature of larger-scale
political, social, and economic tics. Northwest Coast towns typi‑
cally contained a row of plank houses facing out upon some body
of water. Towns were placed with an eye to fresh water, ease of
canoe access, and defense. While not inevitable, the layout of
towns often reflected the relative status of the households within
the town. The largest houses were those of the highest ranked
households; often the highest ranked households lived in the
middle of the house row. If the town had two house rows, the
front row contained households ranking above those of the back
row. On the northern coast, small single-row villages usually con‑
tained only one extended kin group (a group of households linked
genealogically to a single ancestor). Two-row villages generally
contained two or more such kin groups. Thus the layout of towns
and villages expressed the social relationships, particularly the
social status, of the households and extended kin groups living
there. Relative house sizes provide clues about both the relative
status of households and of the political order of the village (the
ranking house chief usually being the ranking village chief).
Town layouts were standardized over much of the coast,
particularly along the northern and central coasts. This stan‑
dardization reflects common elements of Northwest Coast social
organization and intense interaction. Town locations were also
standardized since a rather particular set of geographic condi‑
tions, such as southerly exposure, sand and pebble beaches, and
protection from storms, among a number of other characteris‑
tics, were important when placing a town.2
Sedentism
Sedentism may be one of the most important developments in
human history. At least one archaeologist, Peter Wilson of the
University of Otago, New Zealand, regards it as more important
than the rise of agriculture. 3 Behavioral sedentism is usually
defined as people residing in one place for a long time: several
years, a generation or more. 4 Sedentism is also a set of social
and economic relationships tying people to immobile property.
Modern societies are “sedentary” because, while there may be con‑
siderable personal movement, our social, political and economic
organization is based on permanent places on the landscape.
This is social sedentism.5 Historic Northwest Coast sedentism is
a very distinctive form of both behavioral and social sedentism.
Because the people of the coast
were so mobile—occupying
a true “space of flows” (see
Manuel Castells, below)—
their culture was shaped by
mobility; towns arose at stopping places along the major
transit routes. The longest
journeys were north-south,
along the coast. But, particularly in what is now Canada,
the labyrinth of islands and
passages made for crisscrossing byways, each with their
own roadside towns and
services.
People might move several times a year, but they often moved
the entire town two or three times, taking everything with them.
This was made possible by their ready access to water routes, and
to canoes large enough to freight everything.6 Thus, many North‑
west Coast groups were behaviorally and socially sedentary, while
still retaining some of the advantages of mobility (e.g. access
to fresh resources). Sedentism requires a stable food supply
throughout the year. In most places this means storage.… Stor‑
age and sedentism usually (as in all things human, not always)
go hand-in-hand.
†
… The presence of cemeteries … on the coast during the Early
Pacific may also indicate the existence of some form of seden‑
tism. While there may be one at Namu at the beginning of the
Early Pacific, the cemeteries at Pender Canal and Blue Jackets
Creek date toward the end of the period. Archaeologists generally
regard the presence of cemeteries as evidence for either full or
partial sedentism, or territories.
In summary, after 4400 BC substantial structures were fairly
widespread across southern Cascadia. There was a peak in house
construction around 3500–2800 BC after which houses are quite
rare in the interior for several hundred years. It is not known
whether this break in house construction also occurred on the
coast.
†
…The best-documented Middle Pacific structure on the south
is the large rectangular dwelling at the Palmrose site on the
northern Oregon coast.7 The house seems to have been 20 x 6
m (65.5 x 19.5 ft) in size, considerably larger than any excavated
so far in the north.8 The house appears to have been rebuilt and
reoccupied many times, but in three major phases between 800
BC and AD 300. Its excavators suspect the house may have been
destroyed periodically by large earthquakes along the coast. The
earliest, multi-house village on the southern Coast is located
near Portland, Oregon, and dates to AD 1. It contains rectangular
structures, but their arrangement is not reported.9
Late Pacific period houses and settlements
There are few Late Pacific houses that are more than about 500
years old. After that date, there are a great many excavated struc‑
tures,10 including the famous houses at Ozette. Perhaps the
best-documented house dating to the end of the Middle Pacific
and the beginning of the Late Pacific is the Marpole phase Tual‑
dad Altu house on the Black River, south of Seattle. The house
is about 1,600 years old.11 The house appears to be a shed roof
structure of the kind built in the region during the Early Modern
period. Jim Chatters, the excavator, discovered evidence for some
differences in subsistence pursuits between the east and west
ends of the structure. This is the earliest possible evidence on
the coast for intra-household specialization in production. Unfor‑
tunately, Chatters’ data are weak and he was unable to excavate a
significant portion of the structure.
There may have been significant additions to village organiza‑
tion in the north. Single-row villages were the dominant village
form in the southern Queen Charlotte Islands and southeast
Alaska beginning with the transition to the Late Pacific (AD 300–
500). Large multi-row villages appear in both areas after about
AD 500 but they are quite rare, with single-row villages being the
more common. Additionally, much larger houses—presumably
chief’s houses—appear for the first time in both of these areas,
and perhaps in Prince Rupert Harbor as well, although the data
at present are not definitive. The reader may recall that this is the
same period in which midden burial ends, the wearing of labrets
appears to shift from males to females (indicating a shift from
patrilineality to matrilineality?), and warfare intensifies on the
northern coast.
Discussion
Plank houses appear to have been present, but rare, all along the
coast between 1450 and 800 BC. Given the vagaries of radiocar‑
bon dating, we think these structures probably appeared in a
number of areas of the coast at virtually the same time. These
developments have several implications.
The first implication is technological. The development of
plank houses is clearly part and parcel of the evolution of North‑
west Coast woodworking techniques, including the capability of
making planks from cedars and other trees. Another contempo‑
rary (or slightly earlier innovation) is the kerfed box.… It seems
reasonable to conclude that these structures represent the applica‑
tion of boxmaking skills to the internal post frames we witnessed
in the pithouses of the Early Pacific.
A less obvious technological implication is that these houses
and villages probably indicate the presence of large freight canoes,
which would have been needed to transport the larger volume of
winter stores required by the larger settlements. Larger canoes
would also make it possible to exploit resources at a greater dis‑
tance from the towns and carry them home. Finally, large canoes
would make possible the Northwest Coast’s distinctive form of
sedentism, which involved moving entire towns several times a
year, and in which households owned several house frame across
their territory (although some villages never moved). While we
do not know whether that pattern actually existed in the Middle
Pacific, it is clear from the burial record that groups had longlived ties to particular places.…
The appearance together of plank houses and of linear villages
has social implications. They represent a shift in social organiza‑
tion at at least two levels, the household and the village. At the
household level, the change is highlighted by the possible shift
from round pithouses to square surface structures.
Shifts from round and curvilinear pithouses to rectangular
surface structures have occurred several times in world history,
including in the southwestern USA at about the beginning of
the Late Pacific period in Cascadia; and in China at the end of
the Neolithic, among other places. This shift is usually thought
to indicate the appearance of more formally organized or struc‑
tured households, since square spaces are more easily organized
and formally arranged than round spaces. Rectilinear structures
create more usable interior space; they can also be more easily
packed into high-density communities than can round or cur‑
vilinear dwellings. One need only try to draw a series of circles
and squares on a piece of paper to see this. Square structures can
more easily be expanded than round structures to accommodate
increased household size or more possessions. An increase in
the diameter of a circular house requires enlarging all dimen‑
sions of the structure. Increasing the length of a house does not
necessitate widening it, yet a longer house has more floor space.
Rectangular houses also make it easier to indicate the relative
status of household members. It is easier to segregate or dif‑
ferentiate interior space in a rectangular than a round house.
A rectangular table (or house) has a head and a foot (front and
back), a top and a bottom. Rectangular structures appear on the
coast with linear villages, a form of village layout that could also
easily convey information about the relative status of households
to anyone who knew the code.
While social changes are one set of reasons for house form to
change, functional reasons must also have played a significant
role. Rectangular structures met certain crucial functional needs,
perhaps arising from the storage economy, and from long-term
residence in one place: a sturdy comfortable residence, a dry, spa‑
cious place to work (fix tools, make baskets, butcher and process
foods, etc.), additional space for storage, and the need for a smoke
house and drying shed (the ceilings, roofs and racks within Early
Modern houses were festooned with smoked foods). In short,
people were living in their smoke houses. If the concept of living
in one’s smoke house is difficult to accept, one need only remem‑
ber that many of the world’s farmers live in or above their stock
barns. Differences in status can be one reason to differentiate
the space within a house, specialized activities and behaviors are
another, especially when many activities are restricted to indoors.
Areas can be set off with dividers, or screens, for example, or
separated to different ends of the house. These needs were met
in a single remarkable structure.
These structures may also indicate the existence of house‑
holds with considerable time depth during the Middle Pacific.
The cemetery behind the Boardwalk houses was in use for at
least 700 years. The Palmrose house was erected and re-erected
on the same spot several times over 1,000 years. The Late Pacific
Meier house was in continuous use for 400 years. We do not
expect that the same household necessarily occupied the struc‑
ture throughout this lengthy period, but nothing precludes that
possibility. This is clearly what Tim Ingold meant by social sed‑
entism—people were closely tied to places in the landscape. The
apparent short duration of the Paul Mason village is quite inter‑
esting then—why might the village have been occupied for only
a relatively brief period (less than a century perhaps?).
†
… As with rectangular houses, linear villages permit more houses
(and presumably more people) to be packed into a suitable space
than a scatter or cluster of structures. They also facilitate the
expression of status differentials, as well as other aspects of social
organization. Compact settlements are also more defensible than
are ones in which houses are scattered about. Standardized rules
of village or town layout over a vast region suggest both common
culture as well as participation in a common social network.
The Katz site shows that the principles of village layout applied
regardless of house form.
Why have a common code for signaling the relative status
of households and even extended kin groups? Colin Renfrew, a
British archaeologist, has argued that such similarities over large
distances are the result of intense interaction and the need for a
common yardstick with which to measure relative prestige and
authority among the people participating in the interaction.12
These developments occur at the same time that we see the rise
of the new Middle Pacific elite, and the development of regional
markers for individuals (cranial deformation and the wearing of
labrets). Coast-wide interaction clearly played a fundamental role
in the development of ranking on the coast.
Settlements consisting of a single very large house are a distinc‑
tive feature of the southern coast. The largest recorded dwelling
on the coast was observed by Simon Fraser in 1798 on the lower
Fraser River. The structure was close to 200 m (650 ft) long and
was almost 18 m (60 ft) wide. The potlatch house of Chief Seattle
was over 160 m (525 ft) long. Early Modern Chinookan houses
on the lower Columbia River were commonly 30 m (100 ft) long,
but were frequently 60 to 140 m (200 to 460 ft) in length, and
as much as 14 m (50 ft) wide. Large houses were not restricted
to the southern coast. Mat long houses in the southern interior
were sometimes 120 m (400 ft) long as well. Houses on the
northern coast were never so large. This in part was the result of
how northern plank houses were built. Shed-roof houses (and the
narrow, gable-roofed houses of the Chinook) could be extended
almost infinitely, without requiring large timbers. Long houses
in the interior could also be extended as much as needed. It was
also easier to make the houses smaller, by taking down one end,
whereas northern houses would have to be rebuilt completely.
†
The Northwest Coast as a whole
It is also clear that the whole Northwest Coast was a single inter‑
action sphere during the Pacific period. Some of this interaction
was through exchange of raw and finished products. Copper,
which may have been acquired in southern Alaska, was a wide‑
spread status marker at contact and probably had been so for
more than 2,000 years. The nephrite for celts was located in two
or three quite restricted localities in southwestern British Colum‑
bia and northwestern Washington (near the wonderfully-named
town of Cedro Woolley) on the Skagit River and in the Gulf of
Alaska. Nephrite celts were crucial to northwestern woodwork‑
ing and carpentry and were traded from southeastern Alaska to
Oregon. Dentalium is accessible only on the west coast of Van‑
couver Island, but was traded throughout Cascadia and the high
plains of central North America. Dentalium appears in the inte‑
rior at the beginning of the Pacific period.13
The Northwest Coast participated in exchange linkages that
ultimately included the entire continent. For example, stone clubs
are found from the southern Northwest Coast far into southern
California. Northwest Coast rock art shares features with rock
art found far into the interior. In the north, the trade in eulachon
grease extended well into the northern interior on well-defined
trails. Some of these trails had fortifications to guard crucial
crossroads. Other trade moved up river on the Skeena, where nar‑
rows were defended and tariffs charged.14
One of the major connections between the southern coast,
southern interior, and the rest of North America, was the trade
fair at the Dalles on the Columbia River.15 The Dalles fair was
probably the largest such fair in western North America. It was
supported by the salmon available at what was once the finest
salmon fishery in the world. The Dalles fair was linked to a
trade fair in southwest Idaho, to trade routes extending south
in California, east to Yellowstone, and thence, ultimately, to the
Trade at this scale is clearly
not a necessity. Sufficient food,
materials, and manpower were
close at hand. But throughout the continent, and most
of all along the North Pacific
American coast, mobility and
a predisposition to form bonds
through trade built a network
of exchanges that, over time,
became places and settlements.
Mobile and dynamic, these settlements would fill and empty,
seasonally. They were not
storehouses, but nodes of traffic, their prestige dependent on
what passed through, and not
what remained there. Ames
and Maschner focus on one,
The Dalles, a shallow rapids
on the Lower Columbia River
where inland “horse” tribes met
coastal “canoe” Indians. Further downstream, within ten
miles of the future city of Portland, was Wapato, where the
ocean-going trade met the continental trade coming downriver.
Ironically, this former urban
center is now protected farmland, demarcated by the city
of Portland’s Urban Growth
Boundary. It was emptied of
its considerable population by
the malaria epidemic of 1830.
One history ended, and a new
regime arose.
East Coast. There were three other major centers in the interior
including Kettle Falls on the Columbia, and at the confluence
of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers in British Columbia. Both
were major fishing locations with access to broad regions in the
interior.16 The fourth was located near the eastern end of a major
pass across the Cascade Mountains from Puget Sound.
There is no evidence of such trade centers on the coast, but
trade and exchange must have occurred whenever people gath‑
ered for potlatches, and other ceremonials. It also occurred where
large numbers gathered to harvest resources, as at the mouth of
the Nass for the spring eulachon runs. Trade and exchange were
probably continuous. It is clear from the testimony of the early
European explorers and fur traders that the people of the coast
were expert traders.17
Notes
Intro
1
John Brown, a Gitskan elder, speaking to the ethnographer, Marius
Barbeau, in Kispiox, British Columbia, 1920, quoted in Cove 1987,
49.
Chapter Six (pp. 147-176)
2
3
4
5
Maschner and Stein, 1995.
Wilson 1988.
Ames 1991a reviews the dimensions of sedentism. Definitions
vary, from a minimal definition that some members of the resi‑
dential group live at the settlement for at least one year, to others
demanding that people live there for at least a generation. See
Ames 1991a, Kelly 1992, and Rafferty 1985 for reviews of these
various definitions.
Ingold draws this useful distinction between behavioral and social
sedentism (Ingold 1987, 169). Soffer 1989 suggests that social
sedentism might be the more difficult to establish archaeologi‑
cally, but given the difficulties archaeologists face in establishing
behavioral sedentism (e.g. Edwards 1989b) social sedentism is
actually probably easier to establish.
6 During some seasons of the year, household members might dis‑
perse out to camps to collect particular resources, approximating
the kind of semi-sedentism of many hunter-gatherers, who might
spend one or two seasons in a village, and then disperse for the
rest of the year. Most hunter-gatherers might form large aggrega‑
tions once a year, but on the Northwest Coast, they could move the
aggregation from place to place. Some recent discussions about
Northwest Coast sedentism (e.g. Arnold 1996) misunderstand
this fundamental quality of Northwest Coast residential patterns.
7 An earlier structure, dating to c. 1400 BC, is reported at Yaquinna
Head, on the central Oregon coast (Minor 1991). The feature may
not be a house, however.
8 This structure conforms closely in some of its details—its propor‑
tions, and the reported manner in which its hearths were built—to
very Late Pacific-Early Modern period houses that have been exca‑
vated in this same region (near Portland, Oregon). Settlements in
this area varied from single, large dwellings housing the entire
community to double-row villages of small structures. The Palm‑
rose house, then, indicates considerable continuity with the Early
Modern period.
9 Jermann et al. 1975. The site may also contain pithouses, though
structures in the region had cellars in the Late Pacific, and the cel‑
lars could be mistaken for house pits.
10 The largest sample of excavated plank houses on the Northwest
Coast is for the Late Pacific on the Lower Columbia River where
at least 11 Late Pacific–Early Modern period structures have been
excavated. This is in sharp contrast with many other parts of the
Northwest Coast. However, excavating houses, particularly the
size of some of these, is an extraordinarily time and money con‑
suming process.
11 Chatters 1989b.
12 Renfrew 1986.
13 Galm 1994.
14 Allaire and MacDonald 1971, MacDonald 1984.
15 Teit 1928 contains an excellent discussion of this trade fair.
16 Galm 1994, Hayden and Schulting 1967.
17 Gibson 1992 has perhaps the best discussion of the European
experience in trading along the coast during the fur trade era.
Jim Mockford
excerpts from “Before Lewis and Clark, Lt. Broughton’s
River of Names, The Columbia River Exploration of 1792,”
Oregon Historical Quarterly, Winter 2005
On Tuesday, October 23, 1792, two boats were provisioned
by the men of the British exploring vessel HMS Chatham, at
anchor on the north side of the Columbia River across from a
“remarkable projecting point that obtained the name of Tongue
Point.”1 Lt. William Robert Broughton, commander, was prepar‑
ing to take the boats inland in an expedition that would take him
away from his ship for a week.2 He and Capt. George Vancouver,
commander of the Discovery, had sailed from England in 1791.
For about a year and a half, they had conducted explorations in
tandem across the Pacific, with only a few separations at sea
forced by bad weather and for specific explorations in the San
Juan Islands and the Inside Passage north of Puget Sound. The
two ships were separated once again when the Chatham crossed
the bar of the Columbia River, but Vancouver decided that both
weather and hydrographic conditions at the river’s mouth pre‑
cluded a safe crossing for the larger ship. So, under Vancouver’s
order, Broughton crossed the bar to investigate the Great River of
the West.
Jim Mockford (b. 1954) is an
independent scholar and software engineer in Portland,
Oregon. His interest in sailing ships led him to research
the life of Ranald MacDonald
(1824–1894), a mixed-race
offspring of the 1811 Astoria
expedition (his mother was
Chinook), and the first teacher
of English in Japan. The William Broughton expedition
sailed up the Columbia River
in 1792, past the future site of
Portland, Oregon. They found
a densely populated region,
and made the first EuroAmerican contact at Wapato,
where Atfalati (among many
other tribes) routinely gathered for trade. Thirteen years
later, Lewis and Clark came
through.
†
jim mockford 185
Edward Bell, the Chatham’s
clerk, kept the journal for
the expedition. Bell’s journal
and that of John Sherriff, the
master’s mate, are Mockford’s
principal sources.
Warrior Point and the nearby
settlement of Cathlapotle
were on the north shore of the
Columbia, about seven miles
downriver from Wapato. First
settled in the fifteenth century, Cathlapotle was home to
about nine hundred Chinookan people.
…When Broughton and his men looked easterly from Warrior
Point on October 28 and saw the large Indian village, according
to Bell, “the strangers as seemed to belong to it strongly solicited
the party to proceed thither; and to enforce their request, very
unequivocally represented that if the party persisted in going to
the southward they would have their heads cut off.” Broughton
proceeded south anyway. “The same intreaties, urged by similar
warnings, had before been experienced by Mr. Broughton during
his excursion but having found them to be unnecessary cautions,
he proceeded up that which he considered to be the main branch
of the river.”3 It became clear that the residents of Cathlapotle and
others who had gathered in the waters off Warrior Point did not
wish to trade away their copper swords or their battle-axes made
of iron. 4 Sherriff documented how the meeting changed from
confrontation to trade:
…the Chief after having some conversation with Mr. B. [Brough‑
ton] by signs, as we did not understand their language, in which
conversation I thought he ask’d what we wanted here which was
explain’d in the best manner we could, & likewise shewed him in
the use of our Arms & fir’d a Musquet, which at once astonish’d
& frighted them; after this the Chief spoke a few words to his
followers & they unstrung their Bows & pull’d off their War
Dresses immediately, and everyone was eager to dispose of his
Arms, for our Trinketts.5
No details are given as to just what these “trinkets” were that
made for easy trading, but it is likely that they included such
things as small coinage, buttons, and beads, particularly blue
beads and perhaps even articles of western clothing. These types
of trading items would become part of the fabric of Chinook life
on the Columbia.
†
Broughton and his men have
reached Wapato. They are in
the middle of a densely populated, polycentric urban area
that might have resembled
certain stretches of the Ruhr
Region in twenty-first-century
Later that evening, after trading with the people of Cathlapotle,
Broughton and his men found a sandy beach at Willow Point (on
Sauvie Island) for a campsite. Had Broughton ventured inland,
he would have found that Call’s River (present-day Multnomah
Channel) is the western boundary of the island, but an inland
excursion was unlikely considering that the area was heavily
populated. Broughton’s map shows the location of two villages
not far from his campsite.
The morning of October 29 brought a view of Mount St.
Helens from the river, and the men stopped to take their bear‑
ings from a place Broughton marked “observation station” on his
map. They were about eight miles upstream from Point Warrior.6
The mariners were now accompanied by twenty-five canoes with
some one hundred and fifty people. The explorers ate dinner in
their boats to avoid any danger, but they soon determined that
such precautions were not required because “a trade immediately
commenced, in which the Indians conducted themselves with
the utmost decorum.” It appeared to Bell that there were at least
two “principal chiefs” present and that they were disposed toward
communication. “But, unfortunately for our gentlemen,” Bell
wrote, “a total ignorance of the Indians’ language precluded their
profiting by these friendly intentions.”7
After dinner that afternoon, the British continued on, passing
a river that Broughton named River Mannings (present-day Wil‑
lamette River), which “commanded a most delightful prospect
of the surrounding region.” The location was named Belle Vue
Point.
Germany. That is, nature and
the built environment were
deeply intermixed; ubiquitous,
multimodal transit routes knit
the geographically dispersed
area of settlement into one
(which, beyond Wapato and
the towns within an hour or
two, including Cathlapotle
and a half-dozen others, plausibly stretched from the mouth
of the river to The Dalles, the
shallow rapids that was the
meeting place of inland and
coastal cultures); this centerless metropolis was fueled by
global commerce, even as it
shaped decidedly local places
and spaces. Isn’t this precisely
where we live now—in Thomas
Sieverts’s terms—at much
greater densities, granted, but
in a landscape that manifests
the very same spatial logic?
jim mockford 187
Notes
1
W. K. Lamb, ed., “Lt. Broughton’s Account of Columbia River,” in
Vancouver’s Voyage of Discovery (London: Hakluyt Society, 1984),
748, chap. 3.
2 Broughton’s exploration of the Columbia by boat was reenacted
in 1992 by Douglas Brooks, who constructed a replica of the Chatham’s cutter and trained volunteers to row it upriver from the
mouth of the Columbia to Broughton’s easternmost point. See
Douglas Brooks, “Up The Columbia,” Classic Boat, no.81 (March
1995), 63.
3 Lamb, “Lt. Broughton’s Account,” 756.
4 A sketch of the battle-axe by Edward Bell has been studied by
historians who consider it evidence of the indigenous ColumbiaSnake River trading network that brought goods from the Sioux
Indians across the Rocky Mountains and to the Columbia River.
See, for example, Barry, “Columbia River Exploration,” 153.
5 David, “John Sherriff on the Columbia,” 56.
6 Lamb, “Lt. Broughton’s Account,” 757.
7 Ibid. Such a large gathering of boats was not seen again on the
Columbia until the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1805–1806—
and the centennial commemoration of the expedition—or when
the Rose Festival fleets began calling on Portland each June.
Louis Kenoy
“The Four Myth Ages,” as transcribed by Melville Jacobs
and published in Kalapuya Texts
1. Long ago there were people. There were many people, they filled
this country. There were many people everywhere. There was
nothing of sickness. All the children who were made became
big. So then they accumulated for a long time. Now then five
persons who were hunters went away, one dog accompanied
them. Now they slept five times. When it became dark the dog
left. Then one small girl spoke thus to the dog, “How many
have been killed?” The dog did not speak. Again she spoke like
this to it, “How many were killed?” She spoke to it five times
in that manner, and then the dog spoke thus, “Five have been
killed.”
2.And now the earth turned over. All the people changed into
stars. Then there were no persons on the earth. Only the
girl and the dog lived there. He made her his wife. Then she
became pregnant, she gave birth to one dog and to one human.
And then again indeed she became pregnant, she gave birth to
one human, one dog. Then from there, the people were made.
Again the people multiplied indeed, again the country filled.
Now one man spoke thus, “A great many persons who are
nearby now will arrive here, those who are the new people. It is
better that we be no more in this country.” The headman went
all over. He reached his house. Now then all those people were
Louis Kenoy was said to be
the last living speaker of the
Atfalati dialect of the Kalapuyan language group. He
died in 1936. Before he
died, anthropologists under
the direction of Franz Boas
(who continued to direct
the study of North Pacific
America through the small
academic empire he commanded from Columbia
University, New York)
located Kenoy and interviewed him extensively.
His accounts were used to
amend and extend prior
field research with Kenoy’s
father and other Atfalati
ancestors. The
results
were published under Melville Jacobs’s name in the
1940s, Jacobs being the last
transcriber, and definitive
editor, of these multisource
texts. (See editor’s note, in
endnotes.)
louis kenoy 189
changed into stones. Here in the water are quantities of such
small pebbles. Long ago those were the people.
3. Long ago there was no water. Water was only pulled from trees.
Now all people were again on the earth. The third persons
became many. Now then two women stole one infant, and they
kept it all the time. It became large and dug roots. It turned
into a girl. Then one flint boy found her, and he brought her
to her mother. Then the two women became angry, they stood
and danced, they made rain, and then it rained twenty days.
The earth was completely full, the mountains sank, and then
the people died. Only one boy and one girl were left on the
earth, flint the male. The man put the girl in his armpit, he hid
her. Then the water went back. He saw those two women who
had made the water, and so then he killed them. Flint man
blamed those two women, he took their ashes and blew them
skywards. He made fog. This is what he said, “You are not to
go on the earth, you are to be clouds forever now. When the
clouds become thick it will rain.” Thus no one makes water.
All the persons became beaver, changed to steelhead, changed
to all the kinds of things to live in the water. Formerly they
were persons, from here on now they lived in the sea. Formerly
they were our own people, the Water Being, steelhead, craw‑
fish, salmon trout, mink, land otter, sea otter, seal, the spotted
dogs of the whale, the various things of the water.
4.Three times the duration of the former people, then again
people were made from the girl and the boy. Again they
became many, the land filled up for the fourth time. Now
then in one house poor ones were living, one woman, and one
man. They had one child, a female child. Crow entered their
house, it spoke thus, “Make an arrow, and make a bow!” The
crow spoke like that to the man. When he had completed the
arrow and the bow, then it spoke to him like this, “Hunt in the
woods! Kill deer! Kill elk! Kill black bear! Kill panther! Kill
wild cat! Kill grizzly! Kill that kind of things! Eat the flesh!
Make blankets from its hide, all sorts of things from its hide.
They are good to wear. Make yourselves wealthy people.” That
is what crow said. Now then he told the woman as follows,
“Make sharpen a stick, sharpen the end of a stick, and dig a
hole. Get these camas, and get these potatoes, and get wild
carrots, all the edible things in the ground so that they may be
eaten. You will be well off. Give me the child, I will take care
of it. Bring me the child, I will take care of it.” Now then the
woman spoke as follows, “What will you do to it if you keep it?”
“It will rest on my wings.” “It might fall.” The crow spoke thus,
“It could not ever fall.” “Please try it.” So now he lay it on top of
his wings, he flew aloft, he flew down, he fluttered about high
above. The infant never fell. “All right then,” so the woman
said. Then now the woman dug. And they stayed all the time at
the house. Their food supply increased, and so they were well
off. They lived for one year.
5. Now then crow found a rock, a small rock. He threw it into the
fire. The child was playing, the rock burst, the rock cracked
to pieces, it hit the child’s belly. Now then she became preg‑
nant. Maybe two moons, and she was about to give birth, she
bore a male child. When she bore she was only one year. He
talked within five days when he was an infant, in ten days he
was walking, in fifteen days he was hunting birds outside, in
twenty days he had killed a pheasant, in twenty-five days he had
killed a fawn, in thirty days he had killed a large deer, and then
in thirty-five days he had killed a small elk, in forty days he had
killed a large elk.
6. Now then he spoke thus to his grandmother, “I am dying for
water.” That is what he told his grandmother. The woman
spoke as follows, “There is no water.” Now then the child said
thus, “What has caused it to be said that there is no water?”
The woman spoke as follows, “Always there has been no water.
When the people were made there was always no water.” The
child spoke thus, “It is not good for there to be no water here.
That is how assuredly the new people will arrive, it will be
good for water to be had. How could you have waited to drink
water?” The woman said as follows, “We have peeled the trees,
there where we suck them the water flows out.” The child
spoke thus, “That way is no good. I will look for water.” The
child spoke as follows, “Do you see the sun standing here?”
“Yes,” was what the woman said. “Do you see the moon? There
is where I will get water. If there is none there, I will go to
the sun. Maybe they are keeping the water.” “Very well,” so
the woman said. Now then he went along, he arrived at the
louis kenoy 191
house of the moon. The moon spoke like this, “Where do you
come from?” The child spoke as follows, “I am merely going
along. I am looking for water.” The moon said thus, “I have
no water. The sun keeps the water.” The moon said as follows,
“The sun is contrary. The sun has a child. Go to it there. I will
give you grass that has a nice scent. The sun’s child will smell
it, and will give you water.” “Very well. Give me my grass.”
Now then he was given it. He reached the house of the sun. He
saw the sun’s female child. “Oh,” she said to him, “You smell
very much.” “Certainly!” said the child, “I do smell. Well then
give me water.” So then she took a wooden bucket, she went to
fetch water from the next place. The child said as follows, “Let
us both go!” So then they went together to the next place. The
child saw the water. A lake appeared. A canoe stood there, two
paddles were lying in it. The child said as follows, “Oh, a fine
canoe!” The sun’s child said this to him, “Get into it. Let us
play.” “All right.” The girl said, “Turn around the other way:”
So then the child got into it, he put the paddles into the water.
He spoke thus, “Now let us go. Let us go all over.” He spoke
like that to the water. The water moved along, it went all over,
the water was started. First it became the ocean, and then it
made streams, and then it made all the creeks, and now all the
waters were finished. “Now I have completed all the waters.”
That was what he said. “Now the water is fine. When the new
people have arrived, there will be lots of water. They will not be
poor in water.” And so we are still living here now.
Notes
Editor’s Notes
The story of Louis Kenoy tells us much about the tiny, sclerotic passage through
which living indigenous cultures had to pass to enter into the discourse of
anthropology and thence into Western history. All we know of Atfalati oral
history has come to us through five people: Albert Gatschet, who in 1877 spent
three days at the Grand Ronde reservation and spoke with five Atfalati (whom
he names as Peter Kinai, Yatchkawa, Emmy, Enimdi, and Kemkid); Leo
Frachtenberg, who visited the Grand Ronde for several days in 1914 to speak
with Peter Kinai’s son, Louis Kenoy, and check the accuracy of Gatschet’s four
hundred or so pages of transcriptions; Jaime de Angulo and Nancy Freeland,
who in 1928–29 interviewed Louis Kenoy (they were told he was the only
remaining native speaker of the language); and Melville Jacobs, who had first
alerted de Angulo and Freeland to Kenoy, and later worked with Kenoy to make
a definitive collection of all of these transcriptions, which he then published as
Kalapuya Texts (“Kalapuya” being the name given to the larger group of indig‑
enous people in the Willamette Valley whose languages shared a grammar and
a great deal of vocabulary).
The narrowest passage in this pipeline is the dialogue between Louis
Kenoy and Melville Jacobs. Everything we know of the Atfalati and the stories
they told has been filtered through that meeting.
Here is Jacobs, writing to Franz Boas about Kenoy in 1928: “Louis Kenoy
… of White Swan, Yakima and elsewhere, is the last man to speak Yamhill and
Tualatin [a common transliteration of Atfalati], and he speaks both. He is a
vigorous healthy man in his sixties, employed as sheep herder in the Yakima
region. However, he is an occasional devotee of bootleg whiskey, and consider‑
ing the nature of that beverage about Yakima, I fear for his longevity.”
Boas took the warning to heart and wrote to a colleague “[Kenoy] drinks a
good deal and he may disappear.” Boas asked that two amateur ethnographers
Jaime de Angulo (who was also an unusually talented writer) and Nancy Free‑
land be sent north from Berkeley to interview Kenoy. By the time his colleague
agreed and telegrammed de Angulo and Freeland, the rumored drinking prob‑
lem had grown. Freeland, quoted in Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz’s marvelous book,
Rolling In Ditches With Shamans (which is my source for most of this account),
recalled: “reports had come in to Boas … that there was only one man left alive
who spoke the language, and that he was an acute alcoholic, ready to go out
at any time. It was extremely urgent that this man be found and his speech
recorded for posterity, before the last Kalapuya liver collapsed entirely. Jaime
set out that very day, or perhaps early the next morning, for Washington in
the Model A. We expected that he would be gone for quite a time, probably
engaged in taking dictation from the deathbed. But he showed up after a very
few days. He had the Kalapuya with him. The Kalapuya’s name was Konoi. He
was no more than barely middle-aged—a pleasant, rather quiet individual, and
obviously healthy. As for alcohol I remember he never touched it.… He was
an educated man and spent a lot of time poring through our anthropological
library. Sitting of a morning, with his glasses on, reading the SF Chronicle, in
his dark suit and vest, he looked a bit like a member of the Berkeley Chamber
of Commerce.”
In addition to the surprise of his good health and habits, Kenoy also
mentioned that his younger sister was a fluent speaker of Atfalati, but neither
Freeland nor de Angulo (nor any other ethnographer) went to speak with her.
Jacobs and Boas both regarded de Angulo’s work skeptically (in Boas’s words,
“he hears more than there actually is”) but they felt the interview was urgent.
Jacobs discouraged the publication of de Angulo and Freeland’s materials,
arguing that his own work, covering all of the Kalapuyan dialects, was the best
form in which to convey the Atfalati grammar and stories. Ultimately that is
what happened; Freeland and de Angulo passed their notes on to Jacobs and he
louis kenoy 193
drew on them for his Kalapuya Texts.
Jacobs wasn’t entirely happy with Kenoy (whom he called Kenoyer) either.
He wrote to Boas “he is terribly slow. He must think a full minute before he
answers any question. As a compensation, however, he is the best dictator I have
seen; he dictates slowly, word by word, without ever repeating himself or losing
the thread of the sentence.” The biggest obstacle, for Jacobs, was Gatschet’s
1877 transcriptions. In Kalapuya Texts he writes: “The Gatschet texts are of the
most inferior linguistic quality honeycombed with phonetic, grammatical, and
translational errors and gaucheries, the number of which it has been my vain
effort to reduce to a passable minimum.… It is extremely regrettable that Dr.
Gatschet recorded so few myths in Tualatin, with so many informants avail‑
able, because when Dr. Frachtenberg [the 1914 visitor] and the rest of us tried
our hand at Tualatin there was only Louis Kenoyer left, and he seemed quite
unable to give us myth motifs. All that we will ever have of Tualatin mythology
will survive in the handful of wretched text dictations in the following pages.”
Thus, the Atfalati’s Beaverton—as best as we can know it.
Alexandra Harmon
excerpts from Indians in the Making
According to local folklore, Europeans at first seemed so
different from known humans that Indians supposed them to be
animals or creatures from myth times, but this judgment was
probably neither universal nor long in vogue. A history of con‑
tacts with strange people gave natives of the Puget Sound basin a
conceptual basis to explain the King George men and to formu‑
late strategies for dealing with them. Vancouver found Indians
who had never seen Europeans yet were ready to trade; and by the
1820s, natives plainly recognized the King George men as fellow
humans, candidates for incorporation into the regional network
of human relations.1
Strongly attracted to each other yet repelled by each other’s
alien appearance and behavior, wanting to communicate yet ham‑
pered by language and etiquette differences, King George men
and natives of the Puget Sound region had to work cautiously
toward a mutual understanding of the bases for intercourse.
The conventions that eventually governed their relations—gift
exchanges and hospitality rituals, marriage alliances, broker
services provided by prominent native men—resembled con‑
ventions of the fur trade elsewhere in North America.2 Yet the
local practices were not simply HBC imports. They developed
from a complex interplay of introduced and indigenous customs,
conflicting expectations and complementary goals. The divide
between alien societies was bridged in stages by trial and error,
Alexandra Harmon (b. 1945)
is a lawyer who worked for
Indian tribes in Washington State for fourteen years.
Harmon’s legal work led her
to ask what constituted a
tribe and how such entities
came into being. The result
was her incisive history of
the early “middle ground”
between indigenous people
and Euro-American settlers,
indians in the making.
The book, published in 1998,
outlines the accommodations,
step by step, that inscribed
indigenous people into the
American legal system, retroactively giving them “tribes”
and “chiefs” so that someone
could be made to sign legally
binding agreements—treaties.
“King George Men” was the
region’s categorical term for
Englishmen and other whites
who worked for Britain’s global
trading concern, the Hudson’s
Bay Company (HBC). Americans were called “Bostons.”
alexandra harmon 195
In 1828, a group of Klallam
Indians kidnapped a white
woman at the coastal town
of Dungeness. Four Klallams
were killed in “retaliation” by
Britons freeing the hostage.
Harmon discusses this incident at length, as an example
of the hazards of trial-anderror communications. In the
case at Dungeness, terrible
miscalculations were made
on both sides about signals
meant to show a desire for
compromise or resolution.
The North Pacific American
middle ground, shaped, as
Harmon puts it, “in stages,
by trial and error,” flourished
for nearly forty years from the
1780s to the 1820s. Euro-American ships came and went.
Indigenous groups kept on
with their peripatetic trading
lives. No lasting settlements
were born. Beyond the reach
of nations (no sovereignty
was recognized over this terrain until the mid-nineteenth
century), Euro-American and
indigenous peoples improvised
multifarious, mutually beneficial relationships that did not
answer to any overriding institution. Not until the 1820s,
when the British Hudson’s Bay
Company brought its North
American fur trading operations over the mountains to the
Pacific coast, did a rigorous
institutional framework begin
to mold those relationships in
as people on both sides signaled their intentions and desires,
observed the reactions they got, and modified their signs and
behavior to elicit other reactions. Information about this process
is essential to discovering how the fur trade affected indigenous
people’s conceptions of themselves.
†
…The prospect of advantageous trade gave native people and
Britons alike such a strong incentive for peaceful relations that
they devoted considerable effort to averting conflict. Evidently,
they were usually able to convince each other of their benevolent
intentions. The violence at Dungeness in 1828 was exceptional:
two decades would pass before armed King George men and
natives clashed again in the Puget Sound region.3
When HBC established a south Sound post in the spring of
1833, people in the vicinity seemed so accommodating that the
traders did not hurry to fortify their structures, although they
tried as always to project an intimidating image. William Fraser
Tolmie, a young doctor new to the Pacific Northwest, initially
kept five guns at his bedside for fear of Indian mayhem. He soon
concluded that he could relax. Not long after he and McDonald
set up shop near the mouth of the Nisqually River, seemingly
friendly Indians were streaming in from all corners of the region.
On many days the waterfront bustled with activity so benign that
Tolmie compared it to a country fair. In July, when the traders
relocated from the beach to the prairie above, two dozen men
from several indigenous communities helped to carry goods up
the hill, and the Britons rewarded them with tobacco and ammu‑
nition. By August Tolmie dared to make a several-day hike into
the Cascade Mountains with only native men for company. In
his journal he referred to the fellow hikers who gave him veni‑
son, dried cockles, berries, and clothing as “my Indians” and “my
companions.” “Cannot call them my attendants,” he added. 4
While Tolmie and his associates credited themselves with
showing Indians that they had more to gain from amicable
relations than from robbery or murder, native people likely enter‑
tained comparable self-congratulatory thoughts about their effect
on King George men. But neither Indians nor King George men
made a favorable impression by mechanically counterbalancing
displays of power and offers to trade. Members of both groups
also worked at ascertaining and catering to each other’s desires
and expectations.
To obtain beaver and other furs, King George men not only
had to appear well-intentioned but also had to provide what native
people wanted from them. It was clear that Indians wanted
some British manufactures and that many Indians were willing
to gather pelts in order to obtain the desired articles. But this
appetite for trade had conditions and limits that Hudson’s Bay
personnel needed to discover. Indigenous people appraised both
company merchandise and King George men’s conduct accord‑
ing to their own values.
From the outset the patrons of Forts Langley and Nisqually
would trade only for particular types of merchandise. On one
occasion McDonald noted that the Snohomish would accept noth‑
ing but blankets. On another, a man with six beaver demanded
shells or, failing shells, blankets of a specific kind. When the
man learned that neither shells nor the stipulated blankets were
available, he took his skins back and said he would wait. Natives
were also disappointed with the first wares McDonald offered at
Nisqually. They were less interested in the guns he had stocked
than in blankets, textiles, molasses, and rum. They ignored the
conspicuously displayed, printed shirts.34
Indigenous people also showed that they wanted relations with
King George men to involve more than commercial trade. This
they did in part by annoying Tolmie and his colleagues “with
importunities for presents, before commencing to barter.” Early
visitors to Fort Nisqually questioned McDonald’s failure to bestow
special clothing on their chief men. Trade proceeded smoothly if
such people received gifts. Some Indians also expected ceremo‑
nious hospitality, including invitations to eat and smoke with
the King George men, and showed no interest in trading until
granted these courtesies.6
The Indians’ expectations could not have surprised Hudson’s
Bay. Elsewhere in America, gifts and hospitable gestures had
become standard fur trade procedure because indigenous people
insisted on it. When company personnel saw that similar notions
of propriety prevailed in the Puget Sound area, they initiated
service of its needs.
HBC began building forts
on the coast in 1824. By 1850
they had built two dozen of
them, a string of franchise
locations at which indigenous
and Euro-American alike
could find food, tools, jobs,
shelter, and, ultimately, a lifetime of debt. These permanent
forts would displace indigenous
trade settlements, particularly
in the wake of malaria epidemics in the 1830s that took a
huge toll on local populations.
And the various relationships
of trade would be tailored to
fit the conventions of a global
corporation. HBC’s governor-in-chief, George Simpson,
standardized and optimized
practices that, before, had been
improvised locally.
Harmon draws a distinction
between the European “mercantile or capitalist model”
and the indigenous belief that
trade “created, symbolized,
and followed from particular social relations.” She is
describing the gap that EuroAmericans crossed to make
trade with locals, here, in the
nineteenth century, but she
might as well be describing
the gap that today’s “old economy” business leaders cross
when they enter the new world
of Internet commerce. This
new market is not seen as a
kind of Darwinian jungle, but
as a social network. Trade follows from social relationships.
The bounty of free services
online is very much like a
kind of virtual potlatch, where
things of great value are given
away to draw desired partners
into an enduring network of
exchange.
many encounters with gratuities, received the most reliable native
traders with considerable ceremony, and entertained presumed
chiefs with food, drink, and tobacco.7
These HBC practices, first adopted to suit other peoples, were
congenial to inhabitants of the Northwest because they did not
conduct trade with a mercantile or capitalist model in mind.
Merchants of nineteenth-century Europe tended to conceive of
trade as an impersonal exchange of equivalents. In their emerg‑
ing market economy, the connection between commerce and
the social significance of the money generated by commerce had
become relatively remote.8 For the people who brought pelts to
Forts Nisqually and Langley, on the other hand, economic activity
created, symbolized, and followed from particular social relations.
Acquiring precious items was desirable primarily because the
items represented desirable personal relationships and afforded
the means to establish more such relationships. To indigenous
people, social ties were the real indicators of a person’s worth.9
Commerce with King George men was an exciting avenue to
prestige in local societies. Prestige followed from the ability to
acquire property but also from ritually redistributing rather than
accumulating property. The valuables people obtained in barter
attested to their powers, especially if they had traveled and taken
significant risks to make the exchanges. When they subsequently
sponsored ceremonies where they gave away their acquisitions,
native traders also earned coveted reputations for generosity and
nobility. In addition, the fact that wealthy, apparently powerful
foreigners wanted to associate with them enhanced their social
standing.10
Indigenous people’s skill at communicating what they wanted
from King George men prompted McDonald to describe them
as practiced traders with a keen eye for their own advantage and
a shrewd sense of how to secure it. Again and again he grum‑
bled that troublesome Indian customers subjected him to long
harangues about company prices. They also insisted by their
actions on helping to define the ground rules of commerce. Their
tactics were varied. Two months after natives began bringing
beaver to Nisqually, many decided to withhold their skins because
the company had hiked its prices. The impasse continued for
months.11 Fort Nisqually staff also witnessed many dramas such
as the one a man named Babyar staged when Tolmie refused to
pay more than the standard rate for his best beaver. Babyar threw
his blankets over the counter and rushed into the back room to
repossess the skins he had already traded. Tolmie, by his own
account,
collared and bundled him out—he went to the door and called
in his people who were lurking round the house, I now backed
by Rendall stood firm, at same time endeavouring by soft words
to pacify the savage, which was affected & he at once gave the
beaver at the usual barter, his brother who shortly before had
gone out in dudgeon now traded without trouble—we taking the
precaution of locking them in—our weakness is apparent to the
rascals & they take advantage of it.12
Although the British traders claimed several small triumphs
of this kind, the vulnerability that Tolmie acknowledged con‑
strained them to make concessions in turn. Until the 1840s,
employees at regional HBC posts were few and handicapped by
unfamiliarity with the country. Not only would they fail in busi‑
ness if they alienated the people around them; they would also
go hungry. They needed Indians to supply food as well as skins.
After a theft drove McDonald to forbid local people from landing
at Fort Langley, he confessed in the official journal, “[T]he want
of fresh provisions will compel us to concede a little in regard to
this restriction & indulge them with some familiarity of inter‑
course that they before enjoyed.”13
Hudson’s Bay personnel adjusted to the exigencies of their
situation and the desires of their new clientele. They altered
their inventories, paid natives for fish and game, and accepted
trade items valued solely or primarily by other natives, such as
baskets, rush mats, and strings of shells. Both consciously and
unwittingly, company traders also enabled their establishments
to serve the social ends that prompted Indians to trade. For
example, they tolerated people who came empty-handed, merely
to pay social calls.14
To facilitate and simplify the process of accommodating each
other’s desires, natives and foreigners relied on intermediaries,
such as members of the local elite. It was HBC policy to seek
out indigenous men whose interests appeared to dovetail with
the company’s and to deal with local communities through those
individuals as much as possible. McLoughlin therefore instructed
his employees “to operate on the hopes and fear of the Native
Dependence on local people for
food—a tie that had helped
forge the area’s tight-knit,
ever-evolving relations—was
anathema to George Simpson’s
vision of a well-run company.
Principally in the 1830s, the
HBC invested considerable
labor and money to increase
agricultural capacity at their
settlements: first, to provide
subsistence for their employees; and, second, to sell their
surplus to Russian forts that
had been buying food from
the HBC’s American competitors. Simpson reasoned that
he could both turn a profit on
the sales to the Russians and
cut off an important source
of American funds. He was
right on both counts. The door
had been opened to agricultural development. James R.
Gibson, the Canadian geographer, has chronicled the rise
of agriculture in the decade
that followed Simpson’s directives in impressive detail in
his farming the frontier: the agricultural
opening of the oregon
country 1786–1846. By the
late 1840s, HBC was shipping an annual average of ten
thousand bushels of wheat,
fifty thousand pounds of flour,
and thirty thousand pounds of
beef to the Russian settlement
at Sitka. More far-reaching,
the company had spawned a
generation of retirees who could
only survive in the region—
and pay their considerable
debts to the HBC—by settling
to farm, which they did principally in the fertile Willamette
Valley. These were the seeds of
a new history, a new pattern of
settlement that would flower
with the arrival of American
farmers and city builders in
the 1850s.
Chiefs by a system of distinctive rewards, bestowed on such as
succeed in preserving the peace, and inducing their followers, to
visit the Fort … with the furs in their possession.”15
At Fort Langley McDonald promptly set about identifying and
cultivating the goodwill of influential individuals; he called them
“friends” in his journal. Candidates usually nominated them‑
selves, indicating by their behavior that special treatment was
appropriate for people of their caliber. Within weeks McDonald
had many “friends,” including some he identified as Klallam,
Snohomish, Skagit, and Suquamish chiefs. When Fort Nisqually
opened, several of these men journeyed south, where they received
the respectful reception they obviously expected.16
In Fort Nisqually’s early years, visitors who could count on spe‑
cial attention included Waskalatchy, the mediator at Dungeness
in 1828. Also known to King George men as “the Frenchman,”
Waskalatchy communicated his interest in good relations by
emulating European dress and grooming, even sprouting a bushy
beard. Another assiduously courted person was Tslalakum, usu‑
ally identified in company records as a chief of the Suquamish.
(Journal keepers spelled his name many ways, including Chil‑
ialucum.) Like Waskalatchy, Tslalakum acted as if he deserved
special recognition, but he also solicited good relations with King
George men by behaving in ways he must have thought consis‑
tent with their sensibilities.
Tolmie met Tslalakum a week after arriving at Nisqually.
Advised not to interpret Tslalakum’s possession of the late Alexan‑
der McKenzie’s gun as evidence of hostility, Tolmie accompanied
the chief to his Whidbey Island residence.17 Afterward Tolmie
wrote:
This man’s lodge presented a greater appearance of plenty than
any yet seen—he is a chief of some note & well disposed towards
the whites, displaying more hospitality than any other of the
Indians met with on our journey, for he requested us to eat,
on entering, while the others generally bargained for payment
before giving what we asked.18
By a gesture that Tolmie interpreted as hospitality, Tslalakum
helped to bridge the cultural distance between natives and
newcomers. At the same time, he probably confirmed for his
countrymen that he had valuable powers to amass surplus food
and to command attention from wealthy foreigners.
Despite lingering apprehensions on both sides, the symbiotic
relationship between Tslalakum and King George men flour‑
ished. At Nisqually a few weeks later, Tolmie gave Tslalakum a
capote and trousers “as a reward for his services and general good
conduct. Told him to visit the Klalums, and invite the Chief hither
to trade their skins which he promised to undertake.” During the
next decade Tslalakum often undertook services the company
needed and rewarded: carrying letters from post to post, offering
protection from vengeful Klallams, relaying King George men’s
words to native people. In 1838 he even presented Fort Nisqually’s
chief officer with potatoes—a food that Hudson’s Bay had intro‑
duced—grown by his own people.19
Already rich enough to be known in several communities,
eager to increase his wealth through reciprocal relations with
other rich men, and willing to innovate, Tslalakum epitomizes
the natives HBC preferred to deal with. The resulting friend‑
ship enhanced the standing of both Tslalakum and the company
gentlemen in local society. Even as the foreigners’ association
with the native man suggested their high estimation of him, it
confirmed that the foreigners ranked with the local elite.
Besides men like Waskalatchy and Tslalakum, the intermediar‑
ies between HBC and local communities included native women
on intimate terms with King George men. Many women became
traders’ consorts, often by arrangements they regarded as mar‑
riage. In their villages nearly everyone aspired to find a spouse
outside the village, and the reasons to marry native outsiders also
served as reasons to marry King George men. Intercommunity
marriages could ease tensions, expand families’ resources, and
enhance status, as Frank Allen’s ancestors knew. King George
men, strange and suspect as they were, had access to desirable
resources; and anyone whose close relative married one of them
expected to benefit materially and socially as a result.20
By Tolmie’s account, several local men saw him as a desir‑
able in-law. In his first two months at Nisqually, he respectfully
declined offers from three “chiefs” who” courted [his] alliance”
for their daughters or sisters. Tolmie declared himself untempted
by native women’s “blandishments,” but he understood why one
handsome, charming upper-class woman had “made the round
When Slalakum, a Suquamish, ingratiated himself
to the HBC factor at Fort
Nisqually by offering potatoes,
he distinguished himself from
other indigenous neighbors.
Few of them ever took to farming, a fact much reported on
and bemoaned by HBC factors
across the region. It had never
been customary to invest so
much work and time in order
to get food, especially when
sufficient food was already on
offer. HBC men complained
that indigenous neighbors did
not stick around to tend their
fields, nor were they reliable
come harvest time. The same
complaint, interestingly, was
lodged by many of the missionaries who came and were
disappointed by local indifference to their teachings. Jason
Lee, among the most dogged
of the Methodist missionaries,
blamed the peripatetic habits
of locals for keeping them from
the word of God. “We can’t get
them to come to the church.
Rather we should try to go to
them, but that would mean
abandoning our farms and
our families, so frequently and
far do they travel.”
of many of the gentlemen.” “While living with the whites,” he
wrote, “she was looked on as a personage of importance & pos‑
sessing great influence among the Indians.”21
Some company gentlemen succumbed to native women’s
“blandishments” or to proposals from the women’s fathers more
readily than Tolmie did, often with an expectation of collateral
benefits. In order to maximize his economic and political lever‑
age, McDonald was eager to create ties that would give local people
a family interest in the company’s fortunes. Early in his tenure at
Fort Langley, he reported, “We have thought it good policy in Mr.
Yale to form a family connection with them and accordingly he
has now the Chiefs [sic] daughter after making them all liberal
presents.…” 22
McDonald and Yale did not devise this policy. As other histo‑
rians have documented, it was standard practice for gentlemen at
HBC’s American outposts to further their business objectives by
marrying or consorting with indigenous women. Lower-ranking
employees also cohabited with local women, although records of
their arrangements are scarcer. Sprinkled through the Langley
and Nisqually journals are incidental references to laborers with
wives from surrounding populations. No doubt some laborers
had briefer sexual encounters that no one recorded, including
exploitative ones.23
As Hudson’s Bay men and local people cohabited, traded,
and tried to indulge each other’s desires without forfeiting their
own, they cleared and gradually expanded a figurative arena for
their joint activities—a cultural space where people from dis‑
similar societies could serve their separate interests by observing
common, specialized rules. Richard White has coined the term
“middle ground” to describe a comparable culture of relations
that developed in the Great Lakes region in the seventeenth cen‑
tury.24
†
Harmon posits that the centralizing power of the HBC
forts might have drawn
formerly
separate indigenous groups to form an
“enlarged regional network,”
but accounts of trade before
HBC’s rise to power sug-
… Potentially the most subversive side effect of the fur trade,
because of the new perspectives it gave people on themselves and
their societies, was an enlarged regional network of intercom‑
munity relations. Many formerly separate peoples converged on
HBC forts, where they had occasion to initiate or expand rela‑
tions with each other. Inevitably, the various villagers compared
themselves to the people they met. Thus, their new and more
frequent encounters with outsiders would have made them more
conscious both of what they had in common with other peoples
and of the traits that set them apart.
Following a day of brisk trade at Fort Nisqually, Tolmie could
usually see a string of campfires along the beach. Congregated
around the separate fires were groups of people he called Cowlitz,
Klallams, Puyallups, Skagits, Suquamish, Snohomish, Twanas,
and “petty Indians of the house.” At times, HBC officers claimed
to see no characteristics except language differentiating the
named groups. After listing ten major “communities” in the
Nisqually district, James Douglas told his superiors, “Under this
variety of names we find no traces of national difference, and
identity of language proves, beyond a doubt that they are, with
the exceptions of [three groups], one and the same people.…”
Yet residents of the different communities mistrusted and even
waged war against each other, as Douglas lamented. He attrib‑
uted the friction to specious tribal distinctions, but he was aware
that clashes occurred within as well as across the “imaginary
lines of demarcation which divide[d] the inhabitants of one petty
stream, from the people living upon another.25
Before foreign traders appeared on Puget Sound, there were
probably few, if any, occasions for large-scale, nonviolent gath‑
erings of people who were complete strangers to each other.
Hudson’s Bay Company changed that. Visitors to Forts Langley
and Nisqually found themselves camping near people from all
corners of the district. On August 23, 1833, for example, Heron
estimated the multitude around Fort Nisqually at eight hun‑
dred souls. They belonged, he thought, to eight tribes. Many
times after that the fort’s log noted the simultaneous presence
of peoples from widely separated territories. On one day in 1835
Indians arrived from Spokane country, three hundred miles to
the east, and from the Clackamas and John Day Rivers, south of
the Columbia.26
gest it was more accurately a
revised regional network—
not discernibly larger or more
far-reaching, but significantly
shifted in its patterns. New
groups crossed paths at new
places. A network of formally
identical, institutionally patterned settlements became the
magnetic centers organizing
this shifting, dynamic world.
They displaced an enduring
(if continually flushed-out
and renewed) network of settlements. Now the history that
Marx narrated would finally
arrive.
†
… As HBC posts attracted throngs of people, they became venues
for intertribal diplomacy that often had little or no relation to the
fur trade itself. Natives traveled to the forts not only to barter with
King George men but also to arrange the ransoms of captured
As HBC brought the myriad
relations of trade more firmly
within their sphere, the social
chaos around them began
to resolve into a clear set
of dichotomies—town and
farm, civilized and wild,
white and Indian. The fertile middle ground (literally
embodied in a sizable population of Métis—mixed-race
children of indigenous and
Euro-American
heritage)
disappeared behind a new set
of categories. Now the Métis
themselves would become
unacceptable bastard children
from “country marriages,”
to be shunned from the HBC
settlements when more (and
more proper) English families
arrived to take up farming.
The Americans were no better.
The divide was not between
British and American habits,
but between the culture and
economy of the fur trade, now
dying, and the rising wave of
agriculture. Farms brought
a new history, a European
history that demanded the
separation of separate things:
white from Indian, nature
from man, country from city.
relatives or to negotiate alliances with other village groups. It may
even be that some visits to the HBC store were incidental to such
maneuvering.27
At times, company officers watched with amused detachment
the complex interactions going on around them. They knew,
however, that Indians expected them to preserve peace among
sojourners at their doorstep. Native visitors often asked for assur‑
ances that they would not be molested. So the King George men
did accept a degree of responsibility for relations among their
customers. Although they usually did not grant requests to camp
inside company compounds, they otherwise assumed the role
played by native hosts at intercommunity gatherings: they tried
to ease tensions and ensure safety among those who gathered at
their behest. Activated more by a desire to preserve conditions
needed for commerce than by a hope of earning their halos, King
George men counseled and cajoled people to avoid conflict, inter‑
vened to prevent acts of retribution, and encouraged diplomatic
missions. Their efforts—especially the goodwill purchased with
their merchandise—sometimes promoted new alliances between
indigenous groups.28
Parochial and divided as native villagers seemed, HBC offi‑
cers lumped them all in a single category and told them so. When
Heron preached to congregations composed of people from vari‑
ous settlements, he addressed them either as Indians or by the
Chinook jargon word “siwash.”29 In the face of their diversity and
mutual suspicion, these labels urged them to consider that there
were only two kinds of people: Indians (siwash) and others.
But did this classificatory scheme make sense to the sundry
people? Probably not in the way that it does to twentieth-century
Americans.
Although indigenous people did distinguish King George
men from everyone else in the region, most of what they saw and
knew in the 1830s gave lie to the idea that “Indians” constituted a
single, contrasting category.
Notes
1
Collins, Valley of the Spirits, 31; Albert Reagan, “Some Notes on
the Lummi-Nooksack Indians” (1934), UW Special Collections;
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Samuel Hancock, The Narrative of Samuel Hancock, 1845–1860
(New York: McBride & Company, 1927), 169–70; Clarence Bagley,
“Traditions of Vancouver’s Appearance,” in Indian Myths of the
Northwest (Seattle: Lowman & Hanford, 1930), 102–3; Vancou‑
ver, Voyage of Discovery, 546; Ram Raj Prasad Singh, “Aboriginal
Economic System of the Olympic Peninsula Indians, Western
Washington” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1956), 150.
Rich, “Trade Habits”; Arthur J. Ray, Indians in the Fur Trade: Their
Role as Trappers, Hunters, and Middlemen in the Lands Southwest
of Hudson Bay, 1610–1870 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1974).
Fisher, Contact and Conflict, 38–40.
Tolmie, Physician and Fur Trader, 211, 209, 204, 207–8, 219,
230–32; “Occurrences at Nisqually House,” in Works Progress
Administration [WPA], Told by the Pioneers (Washington Pioneers
Project, 1937), vol. I, 10, 15; Clarence B. Bagley, ed. “Journal of
Occurrences at Nisqually House,” Washington Historical Quarterly 6 (1915): 188–89, 191. To prevent “pilfering,” HBC eventually
installed pickets to connect the buildings and cover openings.
WPA, “Occurrences at Nisqually House,” 19–20, 41–42, 50.
Hudson’s Bay, “Journal ... Kept at Fort Langley,” October 3, 1827,
and June 25, 1828; Puget Sound Agricultural Company [PSAC],
“Journal of Occurrences at Nisqually House,” UW Manuscripts,
June 13, June 16, and September 27, 1833.
Tolmie, Physician and Fur Trader, 209, 215; Bagley, Washington
Historical Quarterly 6: 192; PSAC, “Journal,” June 13, 16, 21, and
24, 1833, July 5 and August 5, 1833.
PSAC, “Journal,” August 5 and October 26, 1834, January 1 and
February 19, 1835; Bagley, Washington Historical Quarterly 7: 162;
Tolmie, Physician and Fur Trader, 239, 241; Ray, Indians in the Fur
Trade, 65–67, 137, 139; Chance, “Influences of Hudson’s Bay Com‑
pany,” 91; Norton, “Women and Resources.”
Karl Polanyi, “Our Obsolete Market Mentality,” in Primitive,
Archaic, and Modern Economies, ed. George Dalton (Garden City,
N.Y.: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1968), 26–37; Nicolas Peterson
and Toshio Matsuyama, eds., Cash, Commoditisation and Changing Foragers (Osaka, Japan: National Museum of Ethnology, Senri
Ethnological Studies, 1991), 2–5.
Gunther, “Klallam Ethnography,” 213; Barbara Lane, “Politi‑
cal and Economic Aspects of Indian-White Culture Contact in
Western Washington in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” report for
10
11
12
13
14
15
45
16
17
18
United States Justice Department, May 1973, 10; Smith, PuyallupNisqually, 146. Similar observations about tribal peoples elsewhere
include Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 26–27,
211; Gudeman, Economics as Culture; Kan, Symbolic Immortality,
209; Sahlins, Historical Metaphors, 31, 44.
Gunther, “Klallam Ethnography,” 213, 261; Smith, PuyallupNisqually, 48, 108, 138, 144–45; Stern, Lummi Indians, 71; Suttles,
Coast Salish Essays, 15–25; T. T. Waterman, “Notes on the Ethnology
of the Indians of Puget Sound [1921],” Museum of the American
Indian, Indian Notes and Monographs: Miscellaneous Series, No. 59
(1973), 76.
Hudson’s Bay, “Journal … Kept at Fort Langley,” August 20 and
October 3, 1827; PSAC, “Journal,” June 13, August 15, 21, 22, 2729, September 27, and October 4, 1833.
Tolmie, Physician and Fur Trader, 215; PSAC, “Journal,” August 6
and 23, December 9, 1833. Babyar’s name also appears as Babil‑
lard in various journals.
Hudson’s Bay, “Journal … Kept at Fort Langley,” September 2,
1827. The first crew at Nisqually had only six “effective” men.
Tolmie, Physician and Fur Trader, 209; cLoughlin to McDonald,
June 17, 1829, in Letters … Written at Fort Vancouver, 12; PSAC,
“Journal,” June 16, 1833, May 29 and June 10, 1835.
Tolmie, Physician and Fur Trader, 215, 220, 234; PSAC, “Journal,”
June 21, July 27, September 27, November 15, 1833, September
7, 1834, January 11, 18, 29, and February 18, 1835; Hudson’s Bay,
“Journal … Kept at Fort Langley,” October 2, 1827; Excerpts from
Fort Nisqually Indian Blotters, in Helen Norton, “The Economy
and Ecology of the Snohomish Tribe of Indians 1792–1865,” report
for Snohomish Tribe of Indians, 1990, Appendix 67–81.
McLoughlin, McLoughlin’s Fort Vancouver Letters, 260.
Hudson’s Bay, “Journal … Kept at Fort Langley,” August 25, Sep‑
tember 20, October 1, 3, and 8, 1827, May 11 and July 10, 1828. The
traders also cultivated some women’s goodwill. Tolmie, Physician
and Fur Trader, 215; PSAC, “Journal,” February 15, 1837.
Possession of the gun was more likely a sign of Tslalakum’s par‑
ticipation in a ceremonial network than of complicity in murder.
Tolmie, Physician and Fur Trader, 201.
PSAC, “Journal,” June 21, 1833, October 4, 1833, September 23,
1835, March 15, 1836, and December 1, 1838; Tolmie Physician and
Fur Trader, 219.
19 Smith, Puyallup-Nisqually, 153; Wayne Suttles, “Post Contact
Culture Change among the Lummi Indians,” British Columbia
Historical Quarterly 18 (1954): 47. For a general discussion of
exogamy as a means of creating political alliances, see Clastres,
Society Against the State, 52.
20 Tolmie, Physician and Fur Trader, 201.
21 Hudson’s Bay, “Journal … Kept at Fort Langley,” November 13,
1828. Tolmie later married the daughter of John Work, whose wife
was an Indian. Elliott, “Journal of John Work,” editor’s preface;
Victor J. Farrar, ed., “Diary of Colonel and Mrs. I. N. Ebey,” Washington Historical Quarterly 7 (1916): 320-21.
22 Jennifer S. H. Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country (Vancouver: University of British Columbia
Press, 1980); Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties; McLoughlin, Letters …
Written at Fort Vancouver, 185; Hudson’s Bay, “Journal … Kept at
Fort Langley,” November, 1828; PSAC, “Journal,” July 10, 1834,
October 22, 1836, July 22, 1850, August 19, 1851; Tolmie, Physician
and Fur Trader, 238.
23 White, Middle Ground.
24 Tolmie, Physician and Fur Trader, 204, 207-8; PSAC, “Journal,”
June 22, July 27, and August 3, 1833; McLoughlin, McLoughlin’s
Fort Vancouver Letters, 260. Discussion of intercommunity antag‑
onisms include Elmendorf, Structures of Twana Culture, 289;
Smith, Puyallup-Nisqually, 153, 161; Stern, Lummi Indians, 97, 99;
Gunther, “Klallam Ethnography,” 266; Suttles, Coas Salish Essays,
210, 220-21.
25 PSAC, “Journal,” August 23, 1833, September 23, 1835; Tolmie ,
Physician and Fur Trader, 223.
26 The Langley journal mentions ransoms on August 10 and Sep‑
tember 7, 1827.
27 PSAC, “Journal,” January 30, April 5, August 9, 11, and 13, Sep‑
tember 23, 1835, January 9, 1836, January 15, February 15 and 19,
1837; Hudson’s Bay, “Journal … Kept at Fort Langley,” August 10
and 25, November 15, 1827, May 8, 1828; Bagley, Washington Historical Quarterly Quarterly 7 (1916): 161; Chance, “Influences of
Hudson’s Bay Company,” 87; Kane, Wanderings of an Artist, 166.
28 HBC journal entries do not use the term “Indians” for company
personnel who were from eastern indigenous societies such as the
Iroquois. “Indians” refers to local people.
Indigenous settlement in Western Oregon. (Map: Harold Mackey,
The Kalapuyans: A Source Book on the Indians of the Willamette Valley)
Robert L. Benson
excerpts from “The Glittering Plain,” in Land of Tuality
At the end of the west, ringed round by outliers of
America’s last mountains, the Coast range, lies a sheltered plain
of fertile soil. Mainly it is open land. Under its spectacular sun‑
sets that glass a thousand miles of open ocean, its grassy stretches
gleam. In the month of May they glisten with the sky-blue flowers
of the wild hyacinth, the camas plant. It is a shining country.
Distance and the bulge of the earth and range on range of
desert mountains hid this valley from the sight of the pioneers,
but not from their mind’s eye. In their imagination it glittered as a
beacon, luring them across half a continent of waste and wrack.
The journey could only be made in the sunny months of the
year. One whole season of planting and tilling and harvest would
have to be forgone. For farmers, this was not a light decision to
take, but they took it.
In the States, the free farmer must choose between harsh cli‑
mate and the pervasive presence of plantation slavery. Here on
the far frontier lay a valley in free soil with a mild climate. All the
travelers’ accounts said so, though the latitude was that of Mon‑
treal. Warm winds, it seemed, came off the western ocean.
And this distant country, though explored by Americans,
seemed likely to fall into the grasp of the House of Hanover, the
villains of every American school history. A British company, the
Hudson’s Bay Company, thinking only of furs and profit, ruled
Now we arrive at Beaverton,
where the fractured, incomplete transition from a long
history of centerless metropolitan settlement to the distinct
pleasures and problems of
city and countryside will take
place. Beaverton is in Tuality,
which became Washington
County. Robert L. Benson was
an amateur historian who
gave us Washington County’s
most detailed record of its
past. Benson is Tuality’s Fernand Braudel. His papers are
largely in the possession of the
Washington County Historical Society, which published
this essay in 1978.
Tuality in 1842 had the biggest “white” population in
the region outside of the
HBC forts, but very few were
farmers. (James R. Gibson’s account puts the white
population of this seven - hundred - square-mile plain at
approximately 400 people;
nearby Frenchman’s Prairie had fewer than 200; the
embryo town of Oregon City,
with fewer than 100 people,
was much smaller but clustered as a town.) The new
robert l. benson 209
settlers of Tuality, principally
ex–fur trappers and Métis,
mixed easily with the remaining Atfalati (disease reduced
them from thousands to a few
hundred by the mid-1830s)
in a life little different from
the one they had known for
decades. Some whites raised
cattle, and some wheat was
grown, but the rest was hunting, trapping, and foraging.
All that would change within
a decade.
The twin lures of fertile farmland and a chance to wrest
territory away from England
were used in propaganda that
spread across the American
states in the Midwest and
East. In pamphlets and stump
speeches, Hall J. Kelly and
Senator Thomas Hart Benton
stirred broad interest in the
Oregon Territory by describing
it as a kind of Eden.
the land with a despotic sway. Already their servants had taken
up a good share of the best land.
So, lured by the glint of free land in a free country, and not
unmoved by patriotism too, the covered-wagon people set out,
spring after spring, to lay down a year of their lives (and in some
cases all their lives) for a chance at a new start.
Fall after fall, the remnants straggled in, to look at this final
valley, till it, claim it, own it, and stay.
Geography
†
…On its east side, Tuality is walled in by the Tualatin mountains,
a spur from the Coast range. Official markers of boundaries have
seen to it that most of these hills lie within Multnomah county.
In the same way, the bounding ridge on the south, the Chehalem
mountains, falls mostly to Yamhill county. On the north, some
Tuality waters rise in Columbia county. Westward it is Washington
county that is the aggressor. Some heads of the Tillamook county
rivers, the Nehalem, Trask, and Wilson, have been ensnared by
the senior county.
Washington county is, in fact, one of only five counties in
Oregon which have no river, no mountain divide, and no seacoast
as part of their official limits. At first, things were different. Tual‑
ity District, the original local government to which we trace, was
bounded on the south by the Yamhill River, east by the lower Wil‑
lamette and a line due north from its mouth, north by Russian
America, and west by the Pacific ocean.
That was on July 5, 1843, when the new Provisional Govern‑
ment of Oregon marked out its first four districts, Tuality, Yam
Hill, Champooick, and Clackamus. In 1844, Tuality lost its
coastal frontage to the new district of Clatsop, and soon thereafter
its trans-Columbia lands went to the county of Vancouver. (The
term District was replaced by County in December of 1845.)
By 1845, Tuality had also lost the north half of the Yamhill
drainage, and the Chehalem too, as the line was made to start
near La Butte or Butteville on the Willamette and follow the
watersheds westward.
The county of Tuality, or Twality, Tualatin, Fallatine, Fwalitz, to
mention some of the many spellings, was renamed Washington
by the territorial legislature in 1849. There are 32 other Wash‑
ington counties in the United States. (To return to the matter of
spelling: usage seems to have settled upon “Tuality” as the cor‑
rect form of the old county name, so we use that form. The river,
the mountains, and the valley are all “Tualatin.”)
†
…The names Tuality and Tualatin derive from the local Indians’
name for themselves, Atfalati, sometimes written Atbalati. You
accent the second syllable, with broad a as in water or far. We are
told that the meaning is “slow and lazy,” having reference to the
sluggish and winding Tualatin river.
Our best source on the Tualatin is Melville Jacobs’ Kalapuya
Texts (Seattle, 1945). The Texts do not support any such mean‑
ing as “slow and lazy.” The word seems to be only the Indians’
word for themselves, “we people,” “insiders.” We also find the
word Kutpalatin (GuDBalaDin) in the Texts, meaning grownups, adults.
I have also seen the name
of the Atfalati (Benson tells
us to “accent the second syllable, with broad a as in
water or far”) rendered in
early accounts as “Quality
Indians.”
†
…The climate of this part of Oregon has been described as mild
and salubrious, but such a description presupposes a taste for
misty, rainy, and cloudy weather. From October to June, distur‑
bances move in from the vast Pacific in a steady succession of
varieties of bad weather. Storms that are funneled inland by the
gorge of the Nestucca, driven by southwest gales, are called “Nes‑
tuckers.” They send new Oregonians fleeing to ticket offices and
other escapes. A Nestucker can dump an inch of rain in an hour,
and has been known to bring four inches of rain in a day.
Gentler disturbances that move in from the west, up the val‑
leys of the Wilson and Trask, are known as “Traskers.” They
bother the natives no more than the famous showers of Paris
trouble Parisians. Intervals between Nestuckers and Traskers are
not long enough, or numerous enough, to receive nicknames.
They are referred to, somewhat nervously, as “nice spells.” In
August a nice spell sometimes prolongs itself for several days
and is then called a “drouth.” The pitchy evergreen forest that
surrounds Tuality then dries out, and pictures of serious-looking
bears inform everybody that “only you can prevent forest fires.”
†
Indians
Tuality’s plants and animals set the table for the daily subsistence
of her human inhabitants, the Tualatin Indians. This was a mild
and unwarlike nation, getting along without much friction with
the neighboring nations of early Oregon. These neighbors were
the speakers of Clackamas in the Portland-Oregon City area, of
Santiam from Champoeg to Eugene, and of Tillamook on the
coast. The cantankerous Clatskanie were in a different category.
Their hand was against everybody, and their neighbors had little
to do with them. The Clatskanie held the upper Nehalem.
We have called these peoples nations, but this is loose usage.
Government they had none, or almost none. Speakers of each
language had a fairly well-defined territory, but there was con‑
siderable visiting and intermarrying. Languages were difficult
to learn and in most cases quite different from one another.
Communication was kept up by use of the Chinook Jargon, a
simplified trade language which all Oregon Indians and many
pioneers knew and spoke.
The Tualatin language was broken into two dialects. Tuala‑
tin proper was spoken in Washington county, in the Chehalem
valley, and on the North Yamhill. The Yamhill dialect began at
McMinnville and extended well south into Polk county.
In winter the Tualatins had well-built cabins in their winter
towns. These clustered about Wapato lake and Gaston, with outli‑
ers at Glencoe, Hillsboro, Beaverton, Lafayette, and Forest Grove.
When good weather returned, the villagers set out on their rounds
throughout the valley, to harvest the berries, bulbs, roots, and
seeds that the native plants provided as the year revolved.
Season after season the Indians would return to favorite spots
to camp. Some of these spots had names which have come down
to us. Cha-takuin, place of big trees, at the Five Oaks on East
Tualatin Plain, is in the midst of camas beds and acorns. Chatamnei and Cha-kinduefti, beside waterfowl marshes at Bethany
and Mountaindale, are famous as supplying the bulk of two
notable collections of artifacts, the VanDomelen and Buehler col‑
lections.
Chapokele was probably the name of the village site in Patton
valley. A spring supplied water for a sauna. There are house pits
in a sheltered cove. Not far away are some notable petroglyphs,
the only ones in northwestern Oregon.
A few fragments of Indian trails are still known. In May and
October, magnificent runs of salmon came up the Columbia and
Willamette to Willamette falls. Authorities differ as to whether
salmon could jump the falls in early times. If there were fish
above the falls, they were few. The Tualatin people had trails they
used when visiting the falls area. Speakers of Clackamas looked
on them as foreigners and resented their nerve in coming to take
Clackamas fish. In reality there were plenty of fish for all, and
fights occurred seldom.
Mrs. Thomas Roe of Gaston reports a tradition that the Tual‑
atins also visited the headwaters of the Trask, a fine steelhead
stream.
At the time his century-old farm was honored with a plaque by
Tualatin Valley Heritage, Inc., Frank Fanno pointed out a stretch
of the Plains-Falls Indian trail. An old map by the Surveyor Gen‑
eral shows bits of a trail from Tualatin-speaking Chehalem via
Parrett’s and Pete’s mountains to Willamette falls. Mary Good‑
all, in Oregon’s Iron Dream, mentions a walking-trail in the Lake
Oswego area, with a lake crossing by rafts midway of the lake.
This would have been used seldom by the Clackamas speak‑
ers (who had canoes and preferred the open river), but often by
Tualatins. They dug bulbs in the swamps and ponds north of
downtown Portland.
In a different class are the two raiding-trails which have come
down to us with white men’s names: the Jason Lee and the Logie.
The missionary, Jason Lee, on his journey of reconnaissance to
select a site for his mission, landed at Scappose bay and was pro‑
vided with horses and a guide up the old Indian trail south. This
later became the famous St. Helens-Hillsborough territorial road
as far as the Centerville area. The ford across the Tualatin, just
east of Dilley, was also a point on this trail, and it is known as
Jason Lee ford in the missionary’s honor.
From here, the trail rose steeply, then descended. One mapper
shows it as following the Chehalem spine to about the present
Highway 219, then descending by drastic slopes to Newberg.
It seems more likely that the route climbed the shoulder of the
mountain only, then descended by the traditional Lafayette road
to the heads of the Chehalem, following down that creek to New‑
berg and French Prairie.
The other Indian raiding trail, the Logie, came up from the
shore of Multnomah channel opposite Fort Williams, which
was later a Hudson’s Bay farm managed by Alexander Logie, a
Scotsman. Logie improved the trail to bear company traffic to all
points south. The Logie and Lee trails met at Panaxtin village
(Glencoe), but there are traditions which extend the Logie trail
far up into the Corvallis and Long Tom countries and down into
the Umpqua.
Though Indian Oregon was, in the main, a land of peace, this
did not stop the wealthy chiefs in the Columbia River towns from
sending out slave-raiding parties to prey on the poor and weak
villages up the valley. River chiefs formed the habit of grub-stak‑
ing foreign Indians, the Klickitats who spoke Sahaptin. Klickitat
headquarters were near Lyle in Washington, but more and more
often, after they secured plenty of horses, they were to be found
west of the Cascades. Backed by rich river magnates, they raided
from Roseburg to Centralia.
When the Indian towns that spoke Clackamas were all but
wiped out by the horrible malaria epidemic of 1829–1830, Klicki‑
tats decided to go into the raiding business on their own. They
robbed and kidnapped until well into the pioneer period. At last
they got some of their own medicine. An angry band of Indians
and settlers, led by Charles Cowaniah, a Hawaiian or Sandwich
Islander who had settled at Helvetia among his white friends, fell
upon the Klickitat camp in a hollow behind Helvetia.
The Klickitats sprang to horse and got away, shooting Cowani‑
ah’s horse beneath him in one last burst. At Whitehead gap, on
Logie trail just south of the Multnomah-Washington line, they
stopped for a moment to bury their choicest loot. What this was,
or whether they ever returned for it, we do not know. Nor can I
find the official account with which I hoped to footnote this old
tradition.
†
The Mountain Men
First Whites to settle on the plain of Tuality were a group of
Mountain Men, rugged beaver trappers and Indian traders of the
Rocky Mountains. For years they had led the hazardous life of the
mountains, surviving fights with hostile tribes and savage ani‑
mals, and little they had to show for all their toil. By 1840 it was
clear that the great days of the fur trade were over. Beaver hats
were going out of style. Thoughts of the Mountain Men turned
to the Whillammet, where frost bit seldom, snow was rare, and
limitless prairies lay ready for the plow.
December 15, 1840, saw “Doctor” Robert Newell, “Major”
Joseph L. Meek, Courtney Walker, William Doughty, and Caleb
Wilkins in camp near Oregon City with their Indian wives and
children. (Newell, Meek, and Wilkins had married three sisters,
members of the Nezperce tribe); By Christmas they were estab‑
lished in leaking leather tents on the East Tualatin Plain, where
they staked out their claims. About this time two other Moun‑
tain Men, “Squire” George Wood Ebbert and Joseph Gale, settled
nearby.
Lieutenant Charles Wilkes
excerpts from Narrative of the United States
Exploring Expedition, 1841
Our gentleman, when they left Vancouver, proceeded by
the way of the Hudson’s Bay Company farm on Multunomah or
Wapauto Island, which is near the place where Captain Wyeth had
erected his fort. They then crossed the river and went toward the
Faulitz Plains, passing on their route a large grazing farm belong‑
ing to the Company, and those of many settlers. From these they
were supplied with fresh horses. They found the country beautiful
and the land rich. Their route lay over hills and through prairies.
The hills were wooded with large pines and a thick undergrowth
of rose-bushes, Rubus, Dogwood, and Hazel. The prairies were
covered with variegated flowers, and abounded in Nuttallia, Col‑
umbines, Larkspurs, and bulbous-rooted plants, which added to
the beauty, as well as to the novelty of the scenery.
From the delay of the party in the Willamette Valley, they
became well acquainted with the various characters of the people
who were settled there. They generally consist of those who have
been hunters in the mountains, and were still full of the reckless‑
ness of that kind of life. Many of them, although they have taken
farms and built log houses, cannot be classed among the perma‑
nent settlers, as they are ever ready to sell out and resume their
old occupation, when an opportunity offers. Our party found
them, with one or two exceptions, well disposed.
Lieutenant Charles Wilkes
(1798–1877) led the United
States Exploring Expedition’s
survey of parts of North
Pacific America in the 1830s
and early 1840s. In September 1841, he put George
Foster Emmons in charge of
a journey from HBC’s Fort
Vancouver (across the river
from Wapato) to Northern
California. Early in the trip,
the party traversed the Tualatin Plain (which Wilkes
renders here as “Faulitz
Plains”).
lt. charles wilkes 217
All our party experienced the same kind treatment and good
fare that I have spoken of, and nothing seemed to be wanting in
the way of substantial comforts.
†
What early Tuality settlers
called “a farm” does not pass
muster with the discerning
Wilkes. “He does not cultivate
anything,” Wilkes remarks,
giving us a last glimpse of extrapper, Métis society before
the flood of real farmers arrives
to transform this country.
…On the 7th, the party made their final move, and after traveling
only six miles, encamped near Turner’s, known as the Mis‑
sion butcher. He owns a farm, in the acceptation of the word in
Oregon, having a log-hut, an Indian woman to reside in it, and
an undefined quantity of land. The hut contains no furniture to
sit or lie upon, and only the few articles most needed in cooking.
He does not cultivate anything, but supports himself by killing
cattle semi-weekly for upwards of thirteen years he has led the
sort of life he now does. He furnished our party with fresh beef
of his own stock, refusing to receive pay, and seemed very much
incensed that the mission should have charged for what had been
obtained from them.
Paul Bourke and Donald DeBats
excerpts from Washington County: Politics and
Community in Antebellum America
Although many of the white settlements in the Pacific
Northwest grew out of protracted conflict between invading white
migrants and native peoples, the valley of the Tualatin River in
the territory of Oregon was not directly part of this violent his‑
tory of white usurpation of the land. Some of the early settlers
enlisted in volunteer companies recruited locally for the uncertain
skirmishes known as the Cayuse War and the Yakima War, and
the more remote Rogue River War to the south, but the Indian
wars of the 1840s and 1850s did not cross the boundaries of what
would become Washington County. The destruction of the local
tribes was instead the result of disease, which had demoralized
and scattered the Tualatin Valley Indians a decade before signifi‑
cant numbers of white settlers appeared. Even though the Native
Americans were small in number by the 1850s, the centurieslong shaping of the environment by the indigenous peoples, the
impact on the white settlers of an imagined tribal menace, the
reports of violent Indian wars in surrounding areas, and the pres‑
ence of many transitional families (half-Indian, half-white) gave
Native American culture a peculiar centrality in the history of
the county.1
The historical explanation for the virtual absence of Native
Americans in the county was the epidemic of 1833, which has
generally been accepted as malaria, and which had a dispropor‑
tionately heavy effect in the Willamette Valley. In his classic study
The most detailed account of
Tuality’s transformation from
ex–fur trapper retirement
home to the farming hinterland known as Washington
County comes, strangely, from
a pair of Australian academics. In 1995, Paul Bourke
and Donald DeBats took
Washington County as the
exemplary case in their study
of Antebellum America. In
the course of depicting that
larger political landscape,
they drew a detailed portrait
of the residents of Washington
County, their politics, economy, and relationships.
paul bourke & donald de bats 219
Sauvie’s Island is the name
later given to Wapato, after a
Scottish farmer who set up a
dairy there for the HBC.
of the epidemic, Sherborne Cook assembled a vast body of con‑
temporary comment and reminiscence by white observers of the
devastating effects of malaria on the native population. The people
inhabiting Sauvie’s Island, for example, were rendered virtually
extinct within a few years; as Nathaniel Wyeth noted, “a mortal‑
ity has carried off to a man its inhabitants and there is nothing
to attest that they ever existed except their decaying houses, their
graves and unburied bones of which there are heaps.” Dr. John
Townsend, a member of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural
Science and of the American Philosophical Society, observed in
the mid-1830s that
the Indians of the Columbia were once a numerous and powerful
people; the shore of the river, for scores of miles, was lined with
their villages …The spot where once stood the thickly peopled
village … is now only indicated by a heap of indistinguishable
ruins. The depopulation here [near Fort Vancouver] has been
truly fearful. A gentleman told that only four years ago as he
wandered near what had formerly been a thickly populated vil‑
lage he counted no less than sixteen dead, men and women,
lying unburied and festering in the sun in front of their habitats.
Within the houses all were sick; not one escaped the contagion;
upwards of a hundred individuals, men, women and children
were writhing in agony on the floors of the houses, with no one
to render them any assistance. Some were in the dying struggle
and clenching with the convulsive grasp of death; their disease
worn companions shrieked and howled in the last sharp agony.
Probably there does not now exist one where five years ago there
were a hundred Indians.2
David Douglas, writing from the Columbia in October 1830,
provided a further striking account of the impact of an earlier
epidemic:
A dreadfully fatal intermittent fever broke out in the lower parts
of this river about eleven weeks ago, which has depopulated the
country. Villages, which had afforded from one to two hundred
effective warriors are totally gone; not a soul remains! The houses
are empty, and flocks of famished dogs are howling about, while
the dead bodies lie strewed in every direction on the sands of the
river. I am one of the very few persons among the Hudson [sic]
Bay Company’s people that have stood it, and sometimes I think
even I have got a great shake, and can hardly consider myself out
of danger, as the weather is yet very hot.3
Especially affected was the Tualatin tribe, and the larger fed‑
eration to which they belonged, the Calapooya. By the time of
significant white settlement a decade later, neither retained more
than a tiny fraction of its former strength and neither was capable
of resisting white intrusion. John McLoughlin, Chief Factor at
the Hudson’s Bay Company outpost at Fort Vancouver, estimated
that disease wiped out about 90 percent of the original Native
American population in the area, a figure sustained by other con‑
temporary accounts. William Slacum, in Oregon as part of a U.S.
Navy survey and diplomatic effort, estimated in 1837 that only
twelve hundred “natives” remained in the Willamette; five to six
thousand, he argued, had died in the waves of epidemic diseases.
Cook, reviewing all available evidence more than a century later,
more conservatively estimated that the death rate from the dis‑
ease in the Willamette Valley was 75 percent. 4
The Calapooya had nevertheless left an indelible mark on
the landscape and subsequent culture of the valley. Peter Boag’s
study has brought out the unusual status of Calapooya culture as
a blend of what anthropologists classify as “primitive river phase”
and “grassland” cultures—a combination facilitated by the Wil‑
lamette’s abundance both of streams and rivers and of extensive
prairies. The Calapooya’s reliance on plants, vegetables, and, to a
lesser extent, game required an environmental regime in which
fire was used seasonally to encourage crop growth (especially
their staple, the camas plant) and to create clear hunting areas.
As Boag observes, in burning the Willamette Valley the Cala‑
pooya altered the environment, preventing the development of
dense forest and allowing for the characteristic mixture, much
remarked on by both visitors and settlers, of grassland and prai‑
rie. Thick forests survived, especially in the northern Willamette,
embracing the Tualatin Valley, but they were broken by areas of
superb agricultural potential.5
The powerful environmental legacy of Native America was
juxtaposed with the virtual invisibility of indigenous people in
the Tualatin Valley as white settlement expanded in the 1840s.
Occasional complaints were made about alleged Indian misbe‑
havior in and around Forest Grove, as when William Geiger wrote
The impact of disease on
indigenous populations was
decisive, especially in North
Pacific America, which had
not seen any pitched, widespread military conflicts
between white and Indian.
But it is also often exaggerated, telling an apocalyptic
story that many want to hear.
It’s not that anyone desired
this scale of suffering, but
even firsthand observers, such
as John Townsend and David
Douglas, were predisposed to
see radical change here, observing a sharp break between the
disappearing indigenous past
and the rapidly approaching
future of farms and cities. The
“disappearance of the Indian”
helped to clear the stage for a
new history.
Historians are in broad
disagreement about the real
extent and impact of the
epidemics. Robin Fisher, in
his excellent account contact and conflict, puts
the percentage of mortalities at more than 50 but less
than 70 percent, well below
most accounts, and he argues
that the epidemics were not a
rupture in the course of indigenous history, so much as one
of many ways that indigenous
social and cultural coherence
were in steep decline. More to
the point, Coll Thrush (in his
native seattle, excerpted
below) reminds us that, no
matter how severe the impact,
stories about the disappearance of the Indian always
obscure the real fact of continuity, however reduced or
hidden from view. We must
choose our histories, and
Thrush makes a convincing case for continuity—a
common history—linking us
to the indigenous urban past.
Kalapuya throughout the
Willamette Valley of Western
Oregon had been burning the
fields in late summer for centuries. Theirs was a managed
landscape, just as marked by
human intervention as the
ones we live in today. But their
practices were sustainable, due
in part to lower population
densities, but also because of
the intelligent design of their
methods.
Fanny Ebberts appears to be
one of those “Indian wom[e]n”
Charles Wilkes describes sitting in the unfurnished, bare
shelters of the indolent Tuality “farmers.” (See selection
above.)
to Acting Governor Pritchett in July 1850: “I have been requested
to inform you of the recent malconduct of the Tualaitin [sic] Indi‑
ans in breaking open houses, stealing and other depravations
upon some of the settlers of West Tualatin Plain. And they most
ardently desire that some steps may be taken to bring the offend‑
ers to justice by the general government or that instructions may
be given to the inhabitants what course to pursue for the general
good and safety of the community.”6
Such complaints were rare, in the official record at least, and
prompted little reaction. Mary Walker’s diary of the period gives
no indication of Native American presence in the immediate
neighborhood. Other memories of benign interactions survived,
especially in the south and mid-north of the county, the two prin‑
cipal former locations of the Tualatin tribe. John Rowell arrived
in the Scholl’s Ferry area in 1853 and remembered that for several
years Indians continued their traditional habits of camping and
fishing on his land and of using this as a base for hunting in the
nearby hills. Another local memoir describes “an annual potlatch
with feasting, trading, playing games and gambling … on what
later became the Guild farm near Midway. Indians attended from
a large area and even had a burial ground there.” Later memoirs
summoned up powerful images of brokerages of various kinds
between Native Americans and the newcomers. None is more
evocative than the Wilkes’s family memory of the Nez Perce prin‑
cess who was married to George Ebberts, an American trapper:
She [Fanny Ebberts] taught the newcomers how to prepare the
rosehips, to peel and eat the bark of certain trees, to dig and pre‑
pare the wild camas and the kouse or yampa which is a species
of the native carrot and to find the stores of hazelnuts hidden
by the squirrels … She divided her scanty store of wheat which
she taught them to prepare for food by parching and pounding
in an Indian mortar. This by using only three tablespoonfuls
to a pint of water made a gruel of which each child was given
three teaspoonsful three times a day. These together with the
wild game they could capture enabled them to subsist through
the first winter … When itinerant tribal beggars would show up
on the North Plains she would mount her pony and ride like
the wind and take the Indians by the arms and tell them to go.
That was sufficient as she seemed to cast some kind of spell over
them that they could not resist.7
These narratives of mutuality were about particular encounters
with particular people. As a collectivity, however, the traditional
Indians of Washington County anticipated in their increasingly
deracinated condition what was soon to become the fate of so
many Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest.
†
American Migrants
Early in the 1840s it became clear that the charter populations of
the Willamette—the Native Americans, the multinational trad‑
ers and trappers, and the American missionaries—would soon
be joined by significant numbers of migrants from the United
States. Before there was serious talk about legislative encourage‑
ment to the Oregon migration, there was a steady flow into the
area of American immigrants in anticipation of the veritable
population explosion that would come in the 1850s. When Wil‑
liam Slacum, the first official U.S. visitor to the Pacific Northwest
since the Lewis and Clark expedition, inspected the Willamette
Valley early in 1837, he found only 30 Americans permanently
in residence. Elijah White’s 1842 census of the Oregon country
listed a total of 421 adults and 297 children, the great majority
of whom resided in the valley. Over a third of the 240 heads of
households were of French-Canadian extraction. But the over‑
landers of 1843, 1844, and 1845 tipped the balance decisively in
the American favor; by mid-decade the population of Oregon was
probably close to 5,000, almost all American by both birth and
intent.8
The lure for this increasing movement of people, especially
from the Old Northwest, was the land itself. From Lewis and
Clark to Governor Simpson and William Parker, descriptions of
the Willamette Valley projected an almost arcadian scene. Lewis
concluded that the valley was “the only desirable situation for
a settlement which I have seen on the west side of the Rocky
Mountains.” Even the dour Governor Simpson observed that “the
country here is very pleasant [and] well wooded and Hills plains
and beautiful openings coming to view at every reach.” Parker
in his early trips was yet more positive: “For richness of soil, and
other advantages, I should not know where to find a spot in the
Valley of the Mississippi superior to this.” Popularized by Hall J.
Kelly’s pamphlets (“The finest country I ever saw”), Jason Lee’s
lecture tours, and Washington Irving’s Astoria, a picture devel‑
oped in the United States of the Willamette Valley as the one sure
prize in Oregon.9
Subsequent accounts only encouraged this view. Philip
Edwards’ 1842 report, based upon a residence of four years,
offered a detailed account of the valley. There were no winters—
“no weather a western or northern man would call cold”—the
land was “equal to any part of New York,” and the fields produced
wheat seven feet high and yields of fifteen to twenty bushels per
acre. “In no country in the world, may the husbandman look for‑
ward with more assurance to the reward of his toil.” The land was
beautiful “beyond anything to which we of the Mississippi valey
[sic] have ever been accustomed.”10
The object of this justifiable enthusiasm was a valley in the
shape of an inverted triangle, stretching along the Columbia 75
miles east and west at its greatest extent, with its sides, perhaps
200 miles long, defined by the gradually converging Cascade
and Coast Ranges. The broad lowland, which defined the valley’s
agricultural promise, lay inside this protective envelope, 100
miles in length and 20 to 40 miles in width. Here was room for
perhaps five thousand farms of 320 acres. Washington County
was a valley within this larger valley, amounting to approximately
700 square miles and ringed on all sides by mountains and hills.
If these heights did not impede the movement of people, they cer‑
tainly inhibited the flow of agricultural produce. Most important
were the Tualatin Mountains on the eastern side of the county,
separating Washington County from the markets of Portland.
To the south were the Chehalem Mountains, the ridge of which
defined the line between Washington County and its southern
neighbors, Yamhill and Clackamas Counties. Here lay the sec‑
ondary markets of Oregon City, but, again, natural obstacles, the
Tualatin and Willamette Rivers, intervened. The Coast Ranges
began in Washington County’s western sections and presented
an impenetrable barrier to overland travel to the Pacific. North‑
ward, before the broad reaches of the Columbia, the convergence
of the Tualatin Mountains and the Coast Ranges precluded agri‑
culture, ensuring that the northern reaches of the county were
given over to grazing and timber felling. Predictably, the richest
agricultural lands were the places of earliest settlement, in the
flat rolling lands of what became known as North Plains. Here,
with Hillsboro and Forest Grove as the trading centers, the agri‑
cultural practices and cultures of an older United States were
reestablished after what had been for many families a long period
of disruption.11
Migrations of land-seeking farmers began to arrive in the
1840s, signaling the end to the fur caravans and, in the main,
the termination of the fur trade itself. The old trappers now estab‑
lished in Washington County found a new role as guides to the
early overland caravans. The first substantial migration came in
1842 when Elijah White, Jason Lee’s bitter opponent, returned
to the Willamette with some 105 migrants; the following year
Marcus Whitman was associated with an even larger train of
perhaps 900 migrants, 120 wagons, and 3,000–5,000 cattle.
Unlike all previous trains, the 1843 overlanders maneuvered their
wagons through the final passes and arrived with them in the
valley of the Willamette.12
Edward Lennox, in his old age, recalled the processes that
brought his family to Washington County in the wagon train of
1843. His father, David Thomas Lennox, born in Catskill, New
York, and orphaned at an early age, had made his way south to
Kentucky when he was eighteen. There he found employment on
George Swan’s plantation just outside Lexington. He was soon
overseer and in 1826 married Swan’s daughter, Louisa. Edward
was born the following year. In 1829, David, Louisa, and their
small family joined several of the Swan family, including two of
Louisa’s brothers, in a move to central Illinois, near Rushville.
Twelve years later, in 1841, the Lennoxes, now with a sizable
family of their own, followed one of Louisa’s sisters and her
husband further afield, this time to extreme western Missouri,
just north of Kansas City. Edward recalled that the eighty acres
his father purchased, at a cost of five dollars an acre, was rich
but largely uncleared. Struggling to support his growing family,
David was compelled to take a job at nearby Fort Leavenworth,
just across the Missouri, cropping grass for the military garrison.
An Oregon promoter, Peter Burnett (later governor of California),
sketched a far different future in the Pacific Northwest, and the
Lennoxes, now including eight children ranging in age from one
to sixteen, were among the first families to sign up with the 1843
wagon train to “the pioneer’s paradise.”13
The Lennoxes were like many of the early migrants to Oregon.
They combined strong southern roots with a habit of regular
movement, and they moved as an extended family. The part of
the 1843 caravan known as the Platte River Company included
many others destined for residence in Washington County: Wil‑
liam Arthur, Alexander Blevins, William Beagle, Edward and
Priscilla Constable, Solomon and Lucetta Emerick, Lawrence and
Lucy Hall, John B. Jackson, H. M. Knighton, Andrew and Sarah
Masters, Isaac and Rachael Mills, William and Rachael Mills,
Isaac and Mary Smith, Alexander Zachary.14
In 1844 some fifteen hundred men, women, and children filed
into Oregon in over two hundred wagons; in the following year
the number of migrants neared three thousand. In the face of
this onslaught, the Hudson’s Bay Company simply melted away.
Fort Vancouver, downgraded in 1841, was abandoned in 1845 and
became a humble supply post for the American migrants at the
end of the Oregon Trail. McLoughlin, unappreciated by either
side, settled in Oregon City and became, no less symbolically,
an American citizen. Whitman’s influence, too, rapidly declined;
improvements to the trail on the south side of the Columbia
removed the necessity of floating wagons and emigrants down
the dangerous Columbia on rafts to the junction of the Willa‑
mette and the future site of Portland. By 1848, the tide of aspiring
farmers was swamping trappers and missionaries.15
Detailed accounts of agricultural opportunities in Oregon,
as distinct from the romantic reports of the 1840s, multiplied
after 1850. Alvin T. Smith, one of the first missionaries to turn
to farming, wrote from the West Tualatin Plains in the summer
of 1845 to the New Haven Columbian Register, “For wheat I do not
think this country can be surpassed by any other on the face of
the globe—Fifty-five bushells of wheat to the acre was raised last
year.” David Newsom’s dispatches from Marion County, thirty
miles south of Hillsboro, to the Illinois Journal of Springfield and
to the New York Tribune provided a chronicle of the “Sangamon
Company,” as he called the group of eight families that journeyed
together from central Illinois across the plains in 1851. Newsom’s
account of Oregon was unfailingly optimistic. He praised the
beauty of the land, the natural abundance of the soil, the health‑
ful conditions, the economic stability of a system of exchange
built upon specie, and the absence of winter. He was, he con‑
cluded, “truly glad I removed to this country. I am as contented a
man as can be found in Oregon.” At the end of the 1853 harvest,
Newsom summed up the case for migration:
Such are the dangers, toils, excitement, and destruction of
morals, and losses upon the journey here, from the United
States, that I would never advise families who are doing well,
and are healthy in the United States to break up there and move
here. Yet I rejoice that I and mine are here and well and doing
well. If you could see your old friend and his family, all looking
ten years younger, with light step, rosy cheeks, fat as pigs, in a
healthy, mild climate here, and all things around them flourish‑
ing; and my wife reconciled here, (which was not so at our arrival)
you could not fail to be glad for me and mine, and say I did right
to leave Illinois and move here.16
These glowing reports, and indeed the agricultural future of
Oregon, rested on the 1850 Donation Land Claim Law. This law,
as we have seen, promised 320 acres to each single settler and
640 acres to each couple established in Oregon on December 1,
1850, with half of any couple’s land registered in the wife’s name.
Single men who traveled to Oregon and settled after the passage
of the DLC would secure title to 160 acres of land; a couple could
claim 320 acres, again to be shared equally. The provisions of
the DLC were to expire in December 1853; amendments extended
its provisions for a further two years. The 1854 Preemption Law
provided those who could not obtain free land the opportunity to
purchase a vacant quarter section for a price of $1.25 per acre. In
addition, the DLC established a mechanism for guaranteeing full
legal title to all land claims. Land was readily available, legally
clear and either free or at minimal cost, for all those who would
take up the Oregon Trail.17
But it was clear that good land was in limited supply and that
some urgency was required on the part of intending settlers in
the new country. Whereas Newsom could report in mid-1852 that
“little of the country is taken up,” by early 1854 he was warning
that “about all of the claims in the whole Willamette Valley are
taken up and deeded. Lands are now beginning to sell at from $5
to $50 per acre.” Indeed time was short; in 1857 the territorial sur‑
veyor general reported that the Oregon frontier was closed: “The
greatest part of the most valuable lands in Oregon has been taken
by actual settlers under the donation laws…the pre-emptionists
… have been selecting the best of what remained. Now there is
but little vacant good land west of the Cascade mountains.”18
†
… By 1860, the core of the adult population of Washington County
came from the states of the Old Northwest.…Only 10 percent of
the adults were of foreign birth, and the New England population
had dwindled to less than half its 1850 level. Southerners and
migrants from the Border States now accounted for less than 30
percent of the adult population. Only 2 percent of the children
had been born in the states of the South or New England; foreign
birth accounted for less than I percent. Most children, nearly 70
percent, had been born in the Pacific Northwest.19
The Oregon country, and what we now recognize as Washing‑
ton County, had been transformed, materially and culturally, in
a mere thirty years. What had begun, from the European point
of view, as an outpost of transitory white and métis occupation
in accordance with the dictates of the international fur trade was
now American territory, a farmer-settler society transported two
thousand miles from the states of the Old Northwest and the
upper South to the virgin lands of the Tualatin Valley. The agency
for this transformation was the DLC, which promised to all who
would follow the Oregon Trail westward the free gift of more
acres of this land than any family could ever hope to cultivate.
†
The Range of Occupations
Washington County had its
share of fledgling settlements,
but without access to the
area’s principle waterways,
the Columbia and Willamette
Rivers, it could not support
the development of what Marx
and Braudel understood to be
a city. A city would need to
defeat competing entrepots
by denying them business. It
Among the negative features of the Donation Land Law, none
was so clearly recognized at the time as the effect of the law in
retarding the growth of villages and towns. Substantial grants of
rich agricultural land indicated an intention to create in Oregon
a large-scale commercial farming culture based on the family
farm. There was no encouragement of urban development.
Whereas an intending farmer might look to Oregon as a rural
paradise in which the government would supply the crucial raw
material as a gift, there was no such inducement to an intend‑
ing urban migrant. Indeed the DLC specifically excluded urban
or town areas from its coverage. The farmer’s land was free; the
urban dweller was forced to purchase land.20
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that Washington County,
two decades after its initial settlement, remained an overwhelm‑
ingly rural society. The county could boast a population in 1860
of 2,766, but it was a population entirely dependent on agricul‑
ture. Two-thirds of the occupations reported in the census of 1860
were “farmers,” a further 6 percent were “farm laborers,” and it is
likely that a good portion of the 10 percent who designated them‑
selves “laborers” also worked on farms.…There were only 127
men in the entire county who listed nonagricultural occupations,
and clearly a number of these were very much dependent upon
the agricultural well-being of the countryside; others among
them practiced various nonfarm occupations while also running
prosperous farms. As we consider the political leadership in the
county, we shall see that this small nonfarm, professional popu‑
lation (especially the doctors and lawyers) was disproportionately
represented in the ranks of those who took public roles.21
There were no towns of any size in Washington County even
by 1860. Neither Forest Grove nor Hillsboro, the county’s only
villages, possessed defined boundaries, and both included farm‑
ers who worked their homesteads just beyond the villages’ few
streets. Forest Grove was the larger place, containing perhaps 250
people in 1860; more important, it was much more developed in
terms of institutions and associations. Myron Eells, one of the
children of the founding missionary families and a student, said
that Forest Grove contained “one Academy, a University (erect‑
ing), one dry goods store and shoe store, one book store, two
blacksmith shops and two wagon shops, one… apothecary shop,…
one carpenter shop, one boarding house, one Templers Hall,
and about one hundred and twenty five inhabitants, besides the
shruburbs, [sic] which contain another hundred and twenty five.”
The institutions Myron Eells described were Tualatin Academy
and what became Pacific University, the county’s only places of
higher learning.22
Industry was almost invisible in either the villages or the
countryside. The twenty-five establishments listed as producing
industrial materials were mainly sawmills (fourteen) and grist
mills (four); together these firms employed only thirty workers
and represented a capital investment of just over $50,000. The
sawmills all depended on water power, and most were located
would require a hinterland
to dominate. Quite unlike the
old indigenous settlements of
Wapato or Cathlapotle, the
new center would thrive to
the degree that it monopolized the area’s commerce,
principally fed by farms and
a resource supply region of
timber. Washington County
was destined to be farmland,
feeding the coffers of a dominant river city (which soon
emerged as Portland).
Myron Eells’s brilliant midnineteenth-century neologism,
“the shruburbs,” deserves to be
revived
In the coming era of city
and
countryside,
banks
would make cities. The biggest banks would make the
biggest cities; where there
were none, dependency on a
financial and market center
would grow. Portland began
as a land claim whose value
was entirely speculative. Its
major asset was a myth about
geographical destiny—that it
marked “the head of navigation” (i.e., the furthest point a
big ship could get upriver) and
so would inevitably dominate
trade. When bankers arrived
to invest in that story, Portland’s destiny was assured. As
a kind of hothouse for growing
investments, these cheap land
claims were reliable, self-fulfilling engines of profit. With
more profit came more investment, and soon the balance
tipped in favor of the dominant site, starving competing
towns of money. They became
dependent on the new center.
Accumulation of wealth—
this congealing of value inside
the leaden stuff of land and
buildings—drove an entirely
different logic, a different
kind of power, than had the
ritual relinquishing of the
potlatch. Do the seeds of that
older logic, the power of giving
things away, lie dormant
within the fragmented chaos
of our economy today?
along the Tualatin River. Frank McMillan’s mill, located just
outside Forest Grove, was the largest of these, producing some
hundred thousand feet of lumber each year, and competed with
John Scott’s establishment on Gales Creek to the north. Forest
Grove was also the site of the Johnson brothers’ saddlery busi‑
ness, George Spencer’s door and sash business, and perhaps a
dozen other very small commercial operations, too small even
to appear in the manuscript schedule of nonfarm industries.
Forest Grove in 1860 was home to a total of six carpenters, three
teachers, three ministers, two wheelrights, two merchants, one
printer, and one lawyer. There was no bank in either village. Hill‑
sboro contained George Crowden’s blacksmith shop, four stores,
two lawyers’ offices, one or two wheelwrights, and a boarding‑
house. Together the two villages in 1860 accounted for less than
15 percent of the county’s total population of 2,766 and less than
a quarter of its nonfarm occupations. Most of the men engaged in
trade or employed as craftsmen were scattered among a series of
even smaller support and service centers. Washington County, in
both its rural character and the dispersed nature of its nonfarm
population, reflected a further consequence, intended or not, of
the Donation Land Claim Law.23
There was a pattern in the distribution of occupations across
Washington County. While we cannot locate the place of resi‑
dence of every nonfarm worker, most lived in—and in some sense
they defined—dispersed agricultural service centers far removed
from the two villages … a significant number of these men lived
south of the Tualatin River, a natural barrier to the movement of
people and goods. Farmers north of the river, unless they were in
the northernmost reaches of the county, generally traded in Hill‑
sboro and Forest Grove, although some services were available at
Centerville, between Dairy and McKay’s Creeks in the north-cen‑
tral portions of the county. Residents south of the river supported
a much more localized and dispersed service sector. It was here
in the southeast corner of the county that the small neighbor‑
hoods of Scholl’s Ferry, Cedar Creek, and Butte formed.24
The only other significant group in the occupational distribu‑
tion were farm laborers. Many of these, like Wilson Tigard in
1852, labored for an established farmer in order to raise the cash
to purchase a portion of an existing claim or to buy the machin‑
ery or seeds necessary for their first crop. Such evidence as we
do have suggests that in a period of acute labor shortage and
heavy demand, farm labor of this type was both profitable and
more highly rewarded than village labor. Wesley Mulkey, sher‑
iff and census taker for Washington County, estimated in 1860
that the average wage for agricultural labor was $40 per month
plus board whereas tradesmen averaged $49 per month without
board. If Mulkey was right that the weekly cost of board was
$5, the agricultural laborer was $11 a month—or nearly 20 per‑
cent—better off than his village counterpart. With farm values
averaging just over $1,000 in 1850 and $2,000 in 1860, farm
labor was a viable way of securing a stake in a still expanding
agricultural system.25
If a farmer could not afford to hire labor, he could always seek,
and could usually obtain, the assistance of neighbors. W. V. J.
Johnson recorded the helpful demeanor of James Canfield and
Christian Miller, two bachelors who were among the first set‑
tlers in Cedar Creek: “To their accommodating spirit and general
knowledge of the surrounding country the present numerous
settlers are somewhat indebted for … they spared no pains in
showing the landmarks and running over the country with any
one who wished to take up land in this vicinity. And the same
spirit of accommodation we are happy to say has been kept up
and carried on by each and every one who has settled in the valley
unto the present day.”26
Notes
1
On the general subject of the history of Native Americans in
Oregon, see Stephen Beckham, Requiem for a People: The Rogue
Indians and the Frontiersmen (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1971); Stephen Beckham, The Indians of Western Oregon:
This Land Was Theirs (Coos Bay, Ore.: Arago Books, 1977); Ste‑
phen Beckham, Rick Minor, and Kathryn Anne Toepel, Prehistory
and History ol BLM Lands in West-Central Oregon: A Cultural
Resource Overview, University of Oregon Anthropological Papers,
no. 25, 1981; Peter G. Boag, Environment and Experience: Settlement Culture in Nineteenth Century Oregon (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1992); Robert Boyd, “Strategies of Indian
Burning in the Willamette Valley,” Canadian Journal of Anthropology 5 [Reprinted in Robert Boyd, Indians, Fire, and the Land in the
Pacific Northwest (Corvallis, Or., Oregon State University Press,
1999)] (1986): 65–86; William Robbins, “The Indian Question
in Western Oregon,” in Experiences in a Promised Land, ed. Carlos
Schwantes and G. Thomas Edwards (Seattle: University of Wash‑
ington Press, 1986 .
2 S. F. Cook, “The Epidemic of 1830–1833 in California and Oregon.”
University of California Publications in American Archaeology
and Ethnology, vol. 43. ed. E. W. Gifford et al. (1956), 303–25. The
quotations from contemporary accounts are from Cook, 313.
3 David Douglas to William Hooker, October II, 1830, reprinted in
Johr Davies, Douglas of the Forests: The North American Journals of
David Douglas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980),
158–59. Emphasis in original.
4 Leslie M. Scott, “Indian Diseases as Aids to Pacific Northwest
Settlement:’ Oregon Historical Quarterly 29 (1928): 152. William
A. Slacum to John Forsythe [sic], Secretary of State, March 26,
1837, entitled “Memorial of William A. Slacum’” Senate Execu‑
tive Document 24, Twenty-fifth Congress, Second Session, vol. I.
Reprinted in the Oregon Historical Quarterly 13 (1912): 177–298
(hereafter cited as Slacum’s Report). See David T. Leary, “Slacum
in the Pacific, 1832–37: Background of the Oregon Report,” Oregon
Historical Quarterly 76 (1975): 118–34. See also Cook, “The Epi‑
demic of 1830–1833 in California and Oregon.”
5 Boag, Experience and Environment, offers the best discussion of
the Native American relationship to and use of the lands of the
Willamette.
6 William Geiger to Acting Governor Pritchett, July (n.d.) 1850,
Records of the Oregon Superintendency of Indian Affairs 1848–1873,
Bureau of Indian Affairs. National Archives.
7 Margaret Putnam Hesse, Scholls Ferry Tales (Scholls, Ore.:
Groner Women’s Club, 1976), 2–4; on Fanny Ebberts see Lincoln
E. Wilkes, By an Oregon Pioneer Fireside (Hillsboro, Ore., 1941),
112–33.
8 Slacum’s Report, 210. For the 1842 census, see Elijah White,
“Census Report,” Annual Report of Elijah White, Letters Received
by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–1881, Oregon Superintendency
(National Archives, Washington, D.C.); William A. Bowen, The
Willamette Valley: Migration and Settlement on the Oregon Frontier
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978), 12–15; Dorothy O.
Johansen, Empire on the Columbia: A History of the Pacific Northwest, 2d ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 182, 212. See also
9
10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
M. L. Wardell, “Oregon Immigration Prior to 1846,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 27 (1926): 41–64.
Lewis quoted in Meinig, The Great Columbia Plain, 31; Merk, ed.,
Simpson’s Journal, 64; Parker quoted in Meinig, The Great Columbia Plain, 123; Hall Jackson Kelly, “Mr. Kelly’s Memoir,” Committee
on Foreign Affairs, Supplemental Report, Territory of Oregon, Twentyfifth Congress, Third Session, reprinted in the Oregon Historical
Quarterly 18 (1917), 271–295, 287.
Philip L. Edwards, Sketch of the Oregon Territory, or Emigrant’s
Guide (Liberty, Mo.: Liberty Herald Press, 1842), 11, 12, 13. For
an assessment of the importance of this promotional literature on
emigration, see Unruh, The Plains Across, 1–62.
Bowen, The Willamette Valley, 6–7; Carl L. Johannessen, Wil‑
liam A. Davenport, Artimus Millet, and Steven McWilliams, “The
Vegetation of the Willamette Valley,” Association of American
Geographers, Annals 61 (1971): 286–302.
Drury, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, vol. I, 459–63; vol. 2, 61–
93, esp. 73, 76. See also Loewenberg, “Saving Oregon Again” and
Loewenberg, “Elijah White vs. Jason Lee.”
Edward H. Lennox, Overland to Oregon in the Track of Lewis and
Clarke, ed. Robert Whitaker (Oakland, Calif.: Dowdle Press,
1904), 1–13.
Ibid., appendix, 63–69.
Unruh, The Plains Across, 84; Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 202–5;
Carey, General History of Oregon, 251–54; Drury, Marcus and Nar‑
cissa Whitman, vol. 1, 467–68; vol. 2, 114–16,137–40,160.
Alvin T. Smith letter reprinted in Caroline C. Dobbs, Men of
Champoeg: A Record of the Lives of the Pioneers Who Founded the
Oregon Government (Portland, Ore.: Metropolitan Press, 1932),
84–86. David Newsom, David Newsom: The Western Observer,
1805–1882 (Portland: Oregon Historical Society, 1972), 46, 53.
Emphasis in original.
Dorothy O. Johansen, “The Land Base of Oregon’s Economy,” in
Genealogical Material in the Oregon Land Claims, vol. 2 (Portland,
Oregon: Genealogical Forum of Portland, 1957).
Newsom, David Newsom: Western Observer, 41, 45. Surveyor Gen‑
eral quoted in Johansen, “Land Base of Oregon’s Economy.”
WCDB.
For claims that “the most pronounced effect” of the Donation
Land Claim Law was “the scattering of population” and that, as
a consequence, “the growth of towns was retarded,” see Lloyd D.
21
22
23
24
Black, “Middle Willamette Valley Population Growth,” Oregon
Historical Quarterly 43 (1942), 44. See also James M. Bergquist,
“The Oregon Donation Act and the National Land Policy,” Oregon
Historical Quarterly 58 (1957): 17–35, and Johansen, “Role of Land
Laws.” Johansen notes that “the development of the Willamette
Valley was in a sense handicapped by the [Donation Land Claim
Law, which in granting claims of one square mile isolated the
settlers, impeded the growth of towns and the diversification of
occupations and crops.” Arthur Throckmorton, Oregon Argonauts:
Merchant Adventurers on the Western Frontier (Portland: Oregon
Historical Society, 1961), 122, claims that the DLC created “an
exodus” of population from existing towns in the territory.
See the WCDB and Chapter 6. On the practice of pioneer farm‑
ers maintaining two occupations, see William A. Bowen, The
Willamette Valley: Migration and Settlement on the Oregon Frontier
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978), 73–78. See also
Oscar O. Winther, The Great Northwest: A History, 2d ed. (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), 167.
Myron Eells, “The Towns of Washington County,” Student Journal, February 4, 1859, Pacific University Archives. Emphasis and
spelling as in the original. See also James R. Robertson, “The Ori‑
gins of Pacific University,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 6 (1905):
109–46.
United States Bureau of Census, Eighth Census (1860), Manu‑
script Returns, Schedule 5, “Products of Industry.” See also the
WCDB.
Some local merchants in the hinterland appear to have long
continued a barter or exchange program. See, for example, the
advertisement in the Portland Democrat, April 12, 1856, for “D.
T. Lenoxs’ store, East Side of Tualatin Plains,” announcing the
availability of merchandise “suitable to country trade.” The adver‑
tisement specified that “produce, such as flour, wheat, oats, butter
and cheese may be taken in exchange for any of the goods on sale
at his store; although cash will not be refused.” On local markets
and their connection with Portland trade, see Throckmorton,
Oregon Argonauts, 121. See also Margaret P. Hesse, Scholls Ferry
Tales (Scholls, Ore.: Groner Women’s Club, 1976).
25 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Eighth Census (1860), Manuscript
Returns, Schedule 5, “Products of Industry,” and Schedule 6,
“Social Statistics” for Washington County, Oregon. See also Johan‑
sen, “Land Base of Oregon’s Economy” for estimates of unskilled
labor in Oregon obtaining, in 1849 at the height of the gold excite‑
ment, wages of four to five dollars a day.
26 The Diary of W. V. J. Johnson, November 20, 1853.
Oregon Immigration Board
excerpts from Portland: The Metropolis of the
Pacific Northwest, 1889
Of all the cities of the United States which have attained
the position of trade centers, and put on the dignity of cityhood
within the last twenty-five years, indeed, we might well and truth‑
fully say, of all the cities of the United States, be they old or young,
with the exception, perhaps, of great trade centers such as New
York and Chicago, none offers such present advantages as a place
of business or a field for profitable investment, or such attrac‑
tions as a place of residence, nor gives such absolute guarantee
of the permanence of its position, as trade center and metropolis
of a large and rich section of country, and the continuance in the
future of the advantages enjoyed in the past, and presently exist‑
ing, as the city of Portland.
Portland is situated on the Willamette river just above its
confluence with the Columbia, and at the head of navigation, for
deep-sea vessels, of both rivers.
After the question of national
sovereignty was resolved in
1846, and the United States
took possession of all lands
south of the 49th parallel, the
effort to improve land values
through city-building commenced in earnest. The city
became the local hero in the
story of the nation. Its progress
spoke of the nation’s strengths,
its destiny. Portland was one
of a half-dozen embryo cities
vying for the role, and by no
means the best equipped. St.
Helens, downriver, had far
easier access for ocean-going
ships and better facilities;
Oregon City, upriver, had
more influential leaders, a
deeper history, and more
money. But Portland had
better writers. Looking back, it
appears that the force of their
propaganda, transmitted by
pamphlet and, crucially, the
region’s dominant newspaper, the weekly oregonian,
drove investment and insured
ultimate victory over the city’s
rivals.
†
…The city has none of that new and crude appearance so common
in cities of its age, nor is there any lack of those improvements so
necessary to health and comfort in city life, and as a rule, found
only in cities of greater age and larger proportions.
oregon immigration board 237
†
…“Cities are not made but grow,” is an old saying, the truth of
which is fully proven by the history of each one of the great cities
of the world, for cities are but centers of trade, of collection and
distribution, and arise but as the supply of a demand. As a con‑
sequence they are located where that demand centers, and their
size is determined by the extent and the density of the population
of the section of country of which they are the center.
†
Eugene F. Snyder’s early
portland: stumptown triumphant tells the tale clearly
and concisely. Portland’s propaganda hewed to certain
tropes, always falling back on
historical destiny as the city’s
raison d’être.
… No better illustration of the fixity and operation of these natu‑
ral laws in the growth of cities, can be found, than the city of
Portland. The city was not located through any design on the part
of anyone to build a city at this point, nor has it attained its pres‑
ent position through any organized effort, either on the part of its
citizens, or of any transportation line or lines, or of any body, to
build a city here.… [A merchant ship came up the river …] When
they could go no further they stopped and opened a store on the
banks of the river for the sale of their cargo. The spot where this
store was located, was, from this time on, the center of collec‑
tion and distribution; around this store clustered other stores and
warehouses; year by year this first trading vessel was followed by
other vessels; then came river steamers, plying upon the various
rivers reaching into all portions of the producing sections, year by
year their number grew and they brought their trade to this same
spot, for here, where navigation for sea-going vessels ceased, the
various lines of river navigation met, and last, but not least, came
the railroads, and these, being built with the lay of the country,
and in the line of its trade, though all built through separate sec‑
tions, and on different lines, all met at this same spot.… With the
growth of this trade and commerce grew the city of Portland, for
the spot where that first store stood is the center of the business
portion of the city of Portland to-day.
†
…Though as the years of a city, or even those of a human life,
are numbered, Portland is young in years, it has reached a posi‑
tion as to trade and wealth which, in the portion to population, is
unequalled in the United States, and probably the world. Already
it counts its millionaires by the score and those who are worth the
hundreds of thousands by the hundreds, and its claim to being the
richest city in the world in proportion to population, is not a vain
boast, but will stand close investigation, for it is founded on fact.
Nor is the wealth of the city in the hands of the few. The absence
of any poor quarter attests the almost absolute lack of poverty,
while the general prevalence of comfortable homes requiring
ample incomes for their maintenance, attests the universality of
prosperity and the general distribution of independent means.
oregon immigration board 239
L. Samuel
excerpts from Samuel’s Directory of Portland 1873
Samuel’s Directory was
an annual business almanac
paid for by the businesses
listed inside. It was a transparent piece of boosterism,
and nicely shows the tone and
tropes of this region’s approach
to city-building.
The rise and progress of a large city is always interesting
to the inhabitants. Portland is particularly so. From 1843, when
the site was first chosen by Overton; from 1844, when the first
hut was built by Lovejoy and Pettygrove, and from 1845, when
the latter gave it its name, and built the first store, its growth and
progress has been steady and sure. The site of the city is beautiful
and attractive. It is built on the west bank of the Willamette River,
the second largest river in the North-west, which is navigable for
137 miles. The elevation from the river gradually increases for
a mile and a half, until it reaches the hills in the background,
that form a semi-circle to the city, and that shelters it from any
strong winds from either the south or west. From these hills
the city appears to great advantage; portions of the Willamette
and Columbia rivers, the “garden valley,” the grand mountains
and splendid forests of the State and Washington Territory, for a
hundred miles, come into view. From Mr. Carter’s Hill to Judge
Marquam’s, a distance of three miles, a magnificent sight can
be had of Mount Hood, Mount St. Helens, and Mount Ranier,
distant about sixty, eighty and one hundred and twenty miles,
and standing 14,000, 12,000 and 9,000 feet respectively above
the level of the sea, clothed in white and capped with crowns of
perpetual snow.
The health of the city is secured by the admirable manner in
which it is laid out,—the streets running due North and South,
l. samuel 241
East and West,—by natural and artificial drainage; the streets
being kept with commendable cleanliness, and an abundant
supply of good water. The five winter months—from November
to March inclusive—are remarkably mild, by reason of the natu‑
ral and beautiful hills that form the background to the city, and
the warm currents of the Pacific. The seven months of spring,
summer and fall,—from April to November—are delightful. The
heat of summer is modified by the refreshing breeze from the
ocean, and the invigorating breath from the splendid snow-peaks
that adorn the vast range of the Cascade Mountains.
The site of Portland that was a forest in 1843, is now a city that
any State in the Union might be proud of. The town of Portland
that had one settler and one family in 1843, is now a city with
12,000 inhabitants, without any paupers. From having one log
hut in 1844, it has now more than a hundred private residences,
the building alone of which cost from $15,000 to $25,000 each,
and twenty of them, at least, occupy a block of ground each—200
feet square—that would sell from $15,000 to $20,000; the bal‑
ance of them occupy half or quarter blocks. These residences
are finished in the most elegant manner, and the grounds orna‑
mented with the greatest taste. The smaller houses and cottages
indicate similar good taste on a more limited scale, and all of
them, whether owned by the rich or those of more circumscribed
means, manifest great comfort and superior refinement.
†
…The city whose trade with the interior in 1848 was barter, and
whose exchange was leather, has now three Banks that can boast
of fine buildings and have an available loaning gold capital of
$3,250,000; while a considerable number of the merchants are
their own bankers. These banks confine themselves to a strictly
commercial business, and are prepared to loan freely to that class
of business men on short time; the rate of interest on such loans
is from ten per cent. per annum to one per cent. per month. There
is probably no class of business men in any city in the United
States, with a population of 12,000, that has so many firms of
solid wealth, so many merchants and bankers of tried integrity,
or who have more the confidence of the public.
The town-site of Portland that was re-sold in 1848 for $5,000
worth of leather, the real estate of the city is now assessed for
$5,698,600—the cash value of which is not less than $11,397,200.
In 1870 the real estate dealers sold $1,00,0000 worth of city
property; $1,600,000 worth was sold in 1871, and $750,000 in
1872. The falling off in the amount last year was owing to the
tightness in the money market, which still exists to a greater or
less degree.
†
… In 1850, the first steamboat—the Lot Whitcomb—was built at
Milwaukie; now there are thirty steamers on the Willamette,
Columbia, and other rivers of Oregon, connected with the trade
of Portland, having a joint capital of $5,300,000. In March, 1851,
the first regular steamship communication commenced with San
Francisco; the steamer Columbia was the first on the line; now
there is a weekly steamer in summer and three steamers a month
during the winter, known as the “Oregon Steamship Company,”
with a capital of $1,000,000.
At the close of the year 1850, the first newspaper was pub‑
lished in Portland, called the Weekly Oregonian. The same paper
has now a daily that commenced in 1861, as well as a weekly
edition. There are two other daily papers—the Herald and Bulletin—with weekly editions also. These papers are ably edited and
well managed financially. The business enterprise of the propri‑
etors, their office arrangements, and the influence of the papers
for good, will bear a favorable comparison with any others on the
Pacific Coast. Besides these daily papers there are the Commercial Reporter, the New NorthWest, (a woman’s journal,) the Pacific
Christian Advocate, and Catholic Sentinel, which are published
weekly, and the Oregon Churchman, published semimonthly.
Also, The Traveler’s Guide and Railroad Gazetteer, published
quarterly. There are also four large Job Printing Offices in the
city, each doing a good business.
This list of rail and marine
investments is similar to the
claims of other rising cities
of the time, including Seattle
(which boasted of its new rail
connection to Walla Walla,
Washington). Similar “directories” appeared in similar
“embryo cities” throughout the
Americas, perhaps anywhere
the European project planted
its colonizing roots dramas
such as this one transpired.
The tropes of boosterism
persist in our time. portland:
gateway to the northwest,
for example, a popular overview of the city’s rise, written
by its preeminent urban historian, Carl Abbott, concludes
with two dozen pages of “company profiles” extolling the
virtues of the Portland-based
businesses that paid for the
book.
†
… Street railroad cars were successfully introduced last year, and
are well patronized by the public.
The great modern leveler and civilizer—the Railroad—was
inaugurated by Ben Holladay, Esq., in the fall of 1868, and active
operations commenced in the spring of 1869, on the Oregon and
l. samuel 243
California line, on the east side of the Willamette River, and this
line is now built and in good running order from Portland to
Roseburg—200 miles. The Oregon Central Railroad, that was
commenced in 1871, and built on the west side of the Willamette
River, is completed from Portland to the town of St. Joseph, on
the Yamhill River—48 miles. Both these roads were built by
Mr. Holladay, and from their commencement, in 1868, may be
dated, and to them may be fairly credited, the rapid progress and
vast improvements made in Portland during the last four years.
During that time real estate had advanced in Portland on an aver‑
age of more than a hundred per cent., and so of farm lands along
these lines of railroad. Every department of industry has received
an additional impulse in the right direction by their introduction.
Great and extensive improvements, more thorough cultivation,
and the increased developments of the immense resources of the
State, are now the order of the day. If the early growth of the city
was comparatively slow and sure, the last few years have devel‑
oped great enterprises, vast improvements, immense wealth and
general prosperity. When these railroads are completed and their
connections formed,—the Northern Pacific Railroad finished as
far as Portland, and the Portland, Dalles and Salt Lake Railroad
built,—Portland’s commercial business will increase an hundred
fold, its population will be doubled in less than five years; the agri‑
cultural and commercial interests of the State will be completely
emancipated from its trammels; Portland and Oregon will take a
first place among the cities and States of the Union for mercantile
and commercial enterprise, and for agricultural, manufacturing,
mining and lumbering industries. The old prophesy will then
be realized: “Though thy beginning was small, yet thy latter end
should greatly increase.”
Coll Thrush
excerpts from Native Seattle
In the words of one descendant of the Denny Party, as
Seattle’s founders are typically called, the story of the city’s origin
“is an oft-told tale yet is ever new.” Indeed. In the century and
a half since the landing of Arthur Denny and his compatriots
on the beach at Alki Point on 13 November 1851, Seattle’s cre‑
ation story has been reduced, reused, recycled, and reenacted in
books, plays, speeches, and art. Often, the telling of the story says
more about the moment of the telling than about the event itself;
we will encounter many such recountings throughout Seattle’s
Native histories. The basic story, however, has remained the same.
Seattle historian Murray Morgan captured the scene best in his
1951 “history from the bottom up,” Skid Road. In this perenni‑
ally popular tale of the politics and personalities of Seattle’s first
century, Morgan described the arrival of the twenty-four settlers
on a rainy beach:
Three of the four women cried when the brig’s boat put them
ashore on the salt-smelling beach. Portland had been rude and
the ship awful, but this was worse: the only habitation was a
log cabin, still roofless, and the only neighbors a host of bow‑
legged Indians, the men wearing only buckskin breech-clouts,
the women skirts of cedar bark, the children naked. The sky was
low and gray, the air sharp with salt and iodine, the wind cold;
but soon the women were too busy to weep.
Coll Thrush is a Seattle native
who now teaches history at the
University of British Columbia. He refutes the myth of the
disappearance of the Indian by
showing the presence of indigenous cultures and people in
the founding and life of our
cities. The light he shines on
Seattle could just as easily be
turned on Portland, or other
West Coast cities. While Portland will not have the rich
indigenous geography that
Thrush finds in Seattle (it was
a neglected place, not even a
camp, that indigenous people
c a l l e d “ t h e s t o p p in g- o v e r
place” because it sat midway
between two settlements), the
city’s relation to an indigenous
urban landscape could be just
as revelatory and instructive.
The Denny party came overland from Illinois to Portland,
already the “preeminent city”
of the region. They were headed
to the Willamette Valley but,
like so many latecomers, were
discouraged by the paucity of
available claims and decided
to try their fortunes elsewhere.
Sickness and exhaustion kept
them in a Portland hotel for
over a week.
coll thrush 245
Morgan’s version of the story has it all: the miserable passage
on the schooner Exact, the dismal weather, the crying women,
the unfinished cabin. And most importantly, the story has Indi‑
ans. Possibly dangerous, certainly alien, their presence makes the
story all the more dramatic. It is in this moment—in the tense
introduction between two peoples—that Seattle’s urban history
begins. And to no small extent, it is the moment when, according
to the standard version of Seattle’s storyline, local Indian history
begins to end.1
Seattle’s creation story is not even really a story at all, but rather
a snapshot. Certainly, the Denny Party’s overland journey from
Illinois is part of the back-story, but it is really the singularity
of the landing at Alki Point, across Elliott Bay from present-day
downtown, that is the mythic point of beginning, in which longer
processes are collapsed into a frozen moment in time. In this
respect, Seattle’s creation story is like many others. In a 1991
essay about evolution and baseball, for example, natural historian
Stephen Jay Gould argued that stories about beginnings “come
in only two basic modes. An entity either has an explicit point of
origin, a specific time and place of creation, or else it evolves and
has no definable moment of entry into the world.” In his account
of the differences between the sport’s gradual evolution from a
“plethora of previous stick-and-ball games” and the more mythic
story of Coopers-town, Gould noted that “we seem to prefer the…
model of origin by a moment of creation—for then we can have
heroes and sacred places.” The same is true for American his‑
tory more broadly: we love our Mayflowers, Lexingtons, and Fort
Sumters. They are discrete moments chosen out of the complex‑
ity of the past and designated as the place where one thing is said
to end and another to begin.2
In Seattle, where the heroes are the Denny Party and the
sacred place is Alki Point, that snapshot in place and time has
literally been turned into a shrine of sorts. At the Museum of
History and Industry, the city’s official repository of its past, a
diorama displays the events of that blustery November day. Com‑
prising wax figures, handmade miniature clothing, shellacked
greenery, and a painted beachscape backdrop, the diorama was
created in 1953 by local doll maker Lillian Smart to commemorate
Seattle’s recent centenary and to celebrate the museum’s open‑
ing. It includes all the stock characters and props of the city’s
founding myth: a roofless cabin at the forest’s edge, tiny hand‑
kerchiefs lifted to wax faces, and children’s heads turned warily
toward Chief Seattle and a few other Indian men. The tableau
made manifest the story that Seattle residents had already been
telling themselves for decades, and within a few months of the
diorama’s unveiling, its sponsors—the Alki Women’s Improve‑
ment Club and the West Seattle Business Association—claimed
that “thousands of Seattle residents, tourists, and school children
have stood in front of it, admiring its beauty and realism, and
paying silent homage to Seattle’s founders.” For more than two
generations of Seattleites, visiting the diorama has been a kind of
urban pilgrimage. Still on display at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, Smart’s powerful visual distillation of the city’s
creation story is the image that most likely comes to many local
residents’ minds when they think of Seattle’s founding.3
Not unlike baseball’s creation story or the origin myth of the
nation itself, with its providential Pilgrims landing in that single
sacred moment at the place they named Plymouth, Seattle’s cre‑
ation story is also one of predestination. For all the drama of
crying women, threatening skies, and strange Indians, Seattle’s
future seems a done deal. Civic booster and local historian Wel‑
ford Beaton, for example, reiterated the title of his book The City
That Made Itself by claiming that “Seattle started deliberately.”
Nearby titles on any local library shelf express the same sense of
nascent destiny, of future greatness born in those first moments
at Alki. Outdoing Beaton, Mayor George Cotterill’s Climax of a
World Quest reads Seattle’s twentieth-century future back onto the
voyages of explorers like Vancouver, Cook, and even Magellan. In
local mythology, the arrival of “Seattle’s Pilgrims” is deliberate,
planned, and preordained, sprung like Athena from the collec‑
tive forehead of Arthur Denny and the other members of his
party. As for the indigenous people encountered in the creation
moment at Alki Point, their future was also foretold, written in
disease and dispossession. The powerful story of the “vanishing
red man,” as we shall see, both informed the Denny Party’s jour‑
ney to Puget Sound in the first place and has informed the telling
of their landing at Alki ever since. It is one of the foundational
pillars of Seattle’s standard civic narrative, in which one kind of
history (Indian) begins to decline the moment another history
(urban) starts its ascent. 4
But beginnings and endings are rarely clear in history, and the
events that we call history were rarely as deliberate or discrete as
coll thrush 247
we imagine them to be from our vantage point in the present. Like
most creation stories, whether of a sport or of a nation, Seattle’s
origin myth obscures more about actual historical events than
it reveals. First, it renders invisible a complex local indigenous
landscape of stories reaching back to the ice age, of villages made
wealthy by river and prairie and tideflat, and of numinous forces
beyond human understanding. Second, by compressing the land‑
ing of 1851 into a single moment, it ignores earlier processes of
empire and ecology that set the stage for city making on Puget
Sound. Third, it obscures the ambitions and imaginations of
the Denny Party themselves, ascribing to them motivations and
knowledge that are more ours than theirs. Finally, it sets urban
founders and indigenous people—and, through them, urban and
Indian history—in opposition, as seemingly alien to each other
as the two groups that met on the beach that November in 1851.
But if we widen our view beyond that one day of that one year
on that one beach, Seattle’s creation story takes on a very differ‑
ent form, looking more like Gould’s blurry account of baseball’s
actual evolution. Rather than a single moment of creation, in this
version of the story urban founding on Puget Sound becomes a
complex, contingent process in which indigenous worlds are mis‑
apprehended, empires vie for dominance, and future city fathers
change their minds and make mistakes. And most importantly, in
this other kind of creation story indigenous people and places are
at the center of the telling and have everything to do with getting
to the place called Seattle. Well before the city’s mythic moment
of birth, Seattle’s urban and Indian histories were already being
bound together in a landscape rich with contested meanings and
possibilities.
Before the arrival of the Exact and the Denny Party, perhaps
in the 1830s, a young man named Wahalchoo was hunting sea
ducks off a promontory of open grassy spaces among windstunted trees, known to him as Prairie Point. He was looking
for more than scoters and scaups; Wahalchoo had been fasting
and was also in search of spirit power. He found it there near
Prairie Point, if only briefly. While retrieving spent arrows, he
spied a vast longhouse deep in the green waters, surrounded by
herds of elk and with schools of salmon swimming over its cedarplank roof. This, Wahalchoo knew, was the home of a power that
brought wealth, generosity, and respect to those who carried it.
With its help, Wahalchoo could become a great leader. He went
home to find his father, who could help him obtain the power,
but the older man was away, and when Wahalchoo returned to
Prairie Point, the waters were clear but empty. The longhouse
beneath the waves had disappeared, and Wahalchoo was left to
seek power elsewhere.5
Indigenous people like Wahalchoo (who would, some twentyfive years later, make his mark on a treaty under the Christian
name Jacob) moved through landscapes that were dense with
meaning. The proof is in the names. Prairie Point, which would
become Alki Point in 1851, was but one named place on a pen‑
insula bordered on the west and north by deep salt water and
on the east by a meandering river and its estuary. The headland
that brooded to the east of Prairie Point was Low Point, while to
the south along the outer shore, a creek called Capsized came
pouring out of the forest near a place called Rids the Cold; south
of there were headlands called Tight Bluff and Place of Scorched
Bluff. Together, these place-names map the indigenous land‑
scape: open places among the forest, cliffs tightly crowded with
brush or blackened by mineral deposits. They are also the clos‑
est things we have to photographs of the pre-urban world; by the
time landscape photographers arrived in Seattle, most of these
places had been utterly transformed.
But photographs, like dioramas, are static, and the world
around Prairie Point was not. Thrust out into the currents and
storm paths of Puget Sound, the point’s sand and stone were
built up in one season, then swept away in another; before the
seawalls and bulkheads of the modern era, the promontory con‑
stantly shifted, sometimes subtly and at other times abruptly.
Similarly, the indigenous landscapes of what would come to be
known as Puget Sound country were changing long before the
arrival of the Denny Party in 1851. Some of these changes were
slow, others catastrophic, as Prairie Point snagged overlapping
nets of power, knowledge, and ecology over the course of cen‑
turies. When Arthur Denny and the rest came to Alki Point,
which they called New York, they intruded upon a world already
in the midst of profound changes. New networks of trade, impe‑
rial reconnaissance, and, most important of all, epidemic disease
each served as preludes to the founding of an American city.
The first written records of the lands and waters around the
future Seattle come from 1792, when British explorer George
Thrush opens the door to
seeing an urban history in
the indigenous past, but he
is hesitant to step through
it. While recovering the role
indigenous peoples played in
“the founding of an American city,” he distinguishes
that new city from the “preurban” past, which, in his
account, extends to as late as
the mid-nineteenth century,
when white “city builders”
arrived to catalyze the emergence of an urban settlement.
At other points Thrush refers
to “an urban history” preceding their arrival, but does not
develop that history. I maintain that the city existed here
(as it did around Wapato)
for many centuries before the
arrival of white city builders, but it was not the city of
Marx and Braudel. Rather, it
was the centerless metropolis
described by Sieverts, or the
“space of flows” of Manuel
Castells (see below).
coll thrush 249
Thrush
uses
Australian
scholar Paul Carter’s formulation of “place” as “a space
with a history.” It’s a useful
formula, reminding us that
our experience of “place” is
historically determined—that
is, the meanings of “place” are
shaped by specific histories.
And so we ask “whose history?” And “whose places?”
Why, for example, are the
carefully forged public places
of American cities so heavily policed? Portland’s “living
room,” Pioneer Courthouse
Square, with its myriad regulations and multiple police
forces, is typical. This treasured
public place, shaped by design
and legislation, expresses a
certain history—a European
history of public piazzas and
private businesses. Other histories spoil its meanings. And
so a list of “prohibited activities” is drawn up to protect
the public place. Why is there
no swap meet at this central
crossing point of the city?
Why is there no camping? In
the indigenous history of the
region, such activities turned
spaces into urban places. Their
meanings accrued over time,
as they became “spaces with a
history,” an urban history.
Finding a new history,
or recovering a lost one, can
conjure place where now we
see only failure or ugliness.
It’s not enough to rail against
the “inherent ugliness” (James
Howard Kunstler) of urban
forms that offend us. Rather,
we should question the histories that blind us to these
Vancouver and his crew sailed into the inland sea aboard the
Discovery. Like most European explorers, Vancouver spent little
time trying to ascertain indigenous peoples’ own knowledge of
their world. His journals contain few Native words and say little
of the region’s indigenous geography; instead, they are filled with
names like Whidbey and Rainier. They are examples of what
geographer Daniel W. Clayton has called “imperial fashioning,”
in which indigenous places were reinscribed with European
nomenclature and incorporated into the colonial geographies of
European nation-states. Even the name for the sea itself—given
in honor of Vancouver’s subordinate Peter Puget, who had dili‑
gently surveyed so much of it—transformed the inland sea,
whose indigenous name simply meant “salt water,” into a British
waterway with an Anglo-Norman pedigree. It transformed the
undifferentiated space of terra incognita into place, or “space with
a history,” emptying it of its indigenous history—at least on offi‑
cial maps—and making it part of a North America littered with
historical references to European people and places. This was
also one of Seattle’s first kinds of urban history, in its linking of
indigenous places like “Puget Sound” to imperial centers such as
London. But underneath this refashioned landscape lay another
geography; for virtually every imperial Puget there was an indig‑
enous counterpart, even if Vancouver and his men simply could
not, or would not, see it. It was less terra incognita than it was
terra miscognita.6
For the terra here already included an urban history of its own.
When Wahalchoo returned home for help in obtaining wealth
and power, he went, not to some hovel in the wilderness, but to
a proud village called Place of Clear Water, with a great cedar
longhouse that was one of the largest indigenous structures in
North America. Not far away, just around Low Point from the
place where Wahalchoo had gone diving for power, was another
settlement: Herring’s House, made up of several longhouses
and a larger house used for winter ceremonies. Neither settle‑
ment was just a “village,” a term that may connote primitiveness
and transience. Instead, these were places where elite families
coordinated social alliances, religious observances, and resource
distribution. Although not large in terms of population—both
Herring’s House and Place of Clear Water likely had only several
scores of residents each—they and other indigenous winter set‑
tlements functioned as towns in relationship to their territories.
Natural resources, political power, and spiritual force circulated
through these settlements in ways reminiscent of the networks
enmeshing larger urban places in other parts of the world—Cap‑
tain Vancouver’s London included.7
Each of these winter towns, along with nearby seasonal camps,
resource sites, and sacred places, was linked into a broader
geographic community through webs of kinship, trade, and
diplomacy. Throughout Puget Sound, these larger communities
(many of which would become known as tribes through relations
with the American federal government in the nineteenth cen‑
tury) were typically organized around watersheds, and there were
three such groups in the territories that would someday become
Seattle. Herring’s House, for example, was part of a larger con‑
stellation of communities whose members called themselves
the People of the Inside Place, after the location of their main
settlements inland from the Sound. Their name for themselves
would be anglicized as “Duwamish.” A second group, known as
the Hachooabsh, or Lake People, and usually described as a band
of the Duwamish, lived in towns ringing a vast, deep lake behind
the hills fronting Puget Sound. A third group, with connections
to the first two as well as to the people of Place of Clear Water
(who are now known as the Suquamish), was the Shilshoolabsh,
the People of Tucked Away Inside, who took their name from
their main settlement on the tidal inlet that the Americans would
call Salmon Bay. These three indigenous communities—the
Duwamish, the Lakes, and the Shilsholes—each had their own
towns, with names like Place of the Fish Spear and Little Canoe
Channel, and each town in turn had its own hinterland of prai‑
ries and cemeteries, fish camps and hunting grounds. These
local geographies were themselves connected through trade and
kinship to communities as far away as the arid interior plateau of
the Columbia River and the coast of Vancouver Island, knitting
the entire region together in a complicated indigenous weave of
towns and territories.8
When Discovery came into Salt Water in June of 1792, that
weave was already fraying. With few exceptions, Puget Sound
country seemed “nearly destitute of human beings” to the Eng‑
lishmen. Vancouver wrote that “animated nature seemed nearly
exhausted; and her awful silence was only now and then inter‑
rupted by the croaking of a raven, the breathing of a seal, or the
scream of an eagle.” After several encounters with Native people,
places and the people who live
there, leaving them stranded
in the anomic, empty realms
of “space.”
While Thrush makes a
convincing case that these
indigenous settlements established a dominant relationship
to nearby “hinterlands,” in the
European style, I think he has
been led to that assertion by a
needlessly limited conception
of “the urban.” He relies on
the history of concepts we saw
in Marx and Braudel. Rightfully trying to make the case
for an indigenous urban history, he looks for a pattern of
domination and dependency,
a hierarchy of towns. I believe
the indigenous urban history
of this region will come into
sharper focus through the lens
Sieverts provides: a dynamic
crossing-place of the local and
global, of nature and man,
time and space; an in-between
city that gives a proper history
to where we live now.
coll thrush 251
While every indigenous culture in North Pacific America
had its own story of the distant past, nearly all of them
turned on the arrival of an
all-powerful “changer,” much
like Dookweebathl. Many also
featured the same destructive
events (a flood, a tidal wave,
and earthquakes), often in the
same sequence and relation.
one reason for the silence became clear: smallpox. “This deplor‑
able disease,” Vancouver wrote, “is not only common, but it is
greatly to be apprehended is very fatal among them, as its indel‑
ible marks were seen on many.” Blind eyes, pockmarked skin,
and other ravages familiar to any urban European were clear evi‑
dence that the scourge of Variola had visited the local people, and
indeed, at least one major epidemic had already swept through
the region. Likely extrapolating from his own experiences in the
great cities of Europe, Vancouver imagined what had been lost
as his expedition came upon the remains of Native communities
where “since their abdication, or extermination, nothing but the
smaller shrubs and plants had yet been able to rear their heads.”
Vancouver and other Europeans tended to see indigenous North
Americans as “people without history,” but the evidence of that
history, in the form of fallen-in roofs and prairies unburned by
their cultivators and reverting to forest, was everywhere.9
Dramatic changes like those caused by Comes Out All Over,
as smallpox was known in the local language, were nothing new
to the indigenous people of “Puget’s Sound.” Their ancestors
had arrived some ten millennia earlier, just as vast glaciers were
retreating from the region, and their creation stories describe a
chaotic post–ice age world where rivers flowed in both directions,
the earth shifted, and brutal cold harassed the people until Dook‑
weebathl, the Changer, brought order to things. It would take
millennia for the climate to stabilize and for salmon and cedar,
the two most important benefactors of later indigenous life, to
colonize the region, while volcanic eruptions, massive earth‑
quakes, and catastrophic mudflows routinely punctuated Native
history with episodes of devastation. For the hierarchical societ‑
ies living on the shores of Salt Water, change produced anxiety:
the word dookw, “to change” or “transform,” is the root for a host
of concepts including worry, dissatisfaction, anger, infirmity,
and ferocity. At the same time, it is also the root of the words
for “yesterday” and “tomorrow”—an indication that change was
a constant in indigenous life before the arrival of Europeans and
that the “people without history” were people with a past.10
Few of these changes, however, had consequences as dramatic,
widespread, and permanent as the introduction of smallpox
and other diseases into the local ecology. The microbial intru‑
sion, followed not long after by that of Vancouver and his crew,
presaged—indeed, facilitated—the coming of an even greater
change: the settlement of the country by people of European
descent. The voyage of the Discovery had little direct impact on
the people of Salt Water, but in places like London and Boston
and Washington, Vancouver’s accounts inspired ambitious Brit‑
ons and Americans to establish a permanent presence in the
region, encouraged by accounts of a dwindling indigenous popu‑
lation. The first Americans came in 1841, when the United States
Exploring Expedition, led by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, sailed
up the Sound. The “Ex. Ex.,” as the expedition was known, was
among other things tasked with strengthening American claims
to lands north of the Columbia River, still held jointly by Britain
and the United States. Not surprisingly, the mission included
naming. As the crews of Wilkes’s sloop of war Vincennes and its
attendant brig Porpoise carefully mapped the bays and inlets, they
added a new set of names to Puget Sound’s growing imperial
geography. That summer, Prairie Point obtained its first Englishlanguage name when it was christened Point Roberts after the
Ex. Ex.’s physician.11
Like Vancouver, Wilkes found that the landscapes of Puget
Sound “savoured of civilization.” As for the indigenous residents,
their apparently small numbers suggested that the “Indians of
Puget Sound,” as they had been named, were unlikely to stand
in the way of white settlement, and even if they did, new waves
of disease were “rapidly thinning them off.” The real threat
for Wilkes and for the Congress that sent him came not from
indigenous people but from the British, who were establishing a
year-round presence at Fort Nisqually on the southern Sound. As
facilitators of the highly dynamic fur trade, Fort Nisqually’s Hud‑
son’s Bay Company factors were always looking for new places
to build, and for a short time Prairie Point was a candidate for
one of these outlying bastions of mercantile capitalism. An 1833
survey by Fort Nisqually physician William Tolmie provided the
first written description of the point (“flat and dotted with small
pines, and the soil … mostly sand”) and the first mentions of its
surrounding environs and the “Tuomish” Indians, who he noted
were “miserably poor and destitute of firearms.” But despite the
apparent friendliness of the local people—some surely led by
Seeathl—it was a bad place for an outpost, with poor soil and no
freshwater. With the signing of a treaty between Britain and the
United States in 1846, the issue became moot; British influence
at Fort Nisqually faded, although the fort’s presence continued to
The United States Exploring Expedition also passed
through Tuality in 1841, where
Beaverton ultimately grew.
Their findings are excerpted
above (from the report of
Charles Wilkes).
The process by which the multifarious peoples of this area
became known, singularly, as
“the Indians of Puget Sound”
is reviewed in detail by Alexandra Harmon in indians
in the making (excerpted
above).
coll thrush 253
have far-reaching consequences. During an outbreak of dysentery
and measles in the winter of 1847–48, Native people from all over
Puget Sound, including the territories in and around the future
Seattle, traded there and took the microbes home with them.12
Despite wave after wave of disease—at least five separate epi‑
demics by 1850—indigenous people remained the dominant
presence around Salt Water, as Samuel Hancock, one of the first
American settlers on Puget Sound, learned when he stopped at
Prairie Point in 1849. “A great many Indians came from their
houses to the beach here, to ascertain where we came from,”
he wrote, adding that they seemed “well disposed” toward him.
Hancock traded with the people, exchanging tobacco and looking
glasses for clams and salmon. Although buffeted by strength‑
ening storms of change during the early nineteenth century,
symbolized by new place-names, new diseases, and new things
to buy and sell, Prairie Point was still very much an indigenous
place when Hancock visited. The place where the Exact would
drop anchor two years later was still more Salt Water than Puget
Sound. Nothing illustrates this more than the word Hancock
used to describe the growing number of white settlers in the
region: he called them Whulgers, using the indigenous word for
Salt Water to describe those who thought they were coming to
Puget’s Sound.13
†
Many townsites were named
after existing cities. The founders of “New York–Alki” at
least had the presence of mind
to shift their city name to
something more inventive, i.e.,
Seattle. Portland was named
by the two land-claim holders, arguing between the home
city of one (Portland, Maine)
and the home city of the other
(Boston). A coin toss made it
Portland. Washington State’s
sparsely populated Olympic
Peninsula featured a Cairo,
Boston, London, Cosmopolis, and an Athens. Of these,
…When the Denny party landed at the point, they called it nei‑
ther Prairie Point nor Seattle. Instead, the tiny American outpost
was christened New York. Over time, it would come to be known
as New York–Alki, a moniker meaning “New York by-and-by”
or “New York eventually” in the local lingua franca of Chinook
Jargon. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the metropolis at
the mouth of the Hudson River was the ne plus ultra of American
aspiration, the model to which new cities on the nation’s urban
frontier aspired. It was the commercial capital of the nation and
reached out with steamers, railways, newspapers, and retail
houses into the rapidly expanding antebellum nation. More than
simply the economic center of the country, though, New York was
also its cultural hearth. While some critics had begun to describe
New York as a “wicked city,” it was more commonly lauded as the
driver of American progress, its success the result of a refined,
cultured urban environment that stimulated the nation’s intel‑
lectual and social development. The founders might have chosen
a different name for their hopeful settlement just three or four
decades later, after waves of immigration, exposés of urban vio‑
lence, and new attitudes about the perils of modern urban life
had changed the meaning of New York. But to a tiny clutch of
families in a half-finished cabin on a Puget Sound beach in 1851,
Gotham must have seemed the apotheosis of urban ambition.14
Leander Terry and his younger brother Charles were from
upstate New York and had likely had firsthand experiences with
America’s premier city. But for the majority of Seattle’s found‑
ers, the frontier towns of Illinois shaped their vision for Puget
Sound’s New York in ways a distant Gotham never could have. In
1850, when the Denny and Boren families left home for Oregon,
Knox County, Illinois, was in the midst of an urban revolution.
Permanent white settlement in the area had begun only in the
1830s, but by midcentury the forests of sugar maple, basswood,
and wild cherry were giving way as families headed by men
with stolid biblical names like Israel and Azel and Hiram estab‑
lished farms and feedlots. Life on the farms revolved around the
young town of Abingdon, whose limestone buildings and prim
grid of streets sat on high rolling ground above a tributary of
the Spoon River. Town life in Abingdon, a satellite of St. Louis,
was orderly: liquor violations, morals charges, and murders were
virtually unheard of, and judges handed out one hundred percent
conviction rates for such disorderly acts as “wantonly” burning
prairies. (We might ask if it was the fire itself or the wantonness
with which it was lit that was so criminal.) “Court days” were a
primary form of entertainment in this straitlaced town, and the
Cherry Grove Seminary, founded by Cumberland Presbyterians,
was the dominant cultural institution. It was from this buttonedup Protestant world that Seattle’s “Pilgrims” came.15
But if Knox County seems to us almost stereotypically mid‑
western, it was in fact part of the “Old Northwest,” and its
orderliness and peace stood on foundations of chaos and war.
In 1850, Abingdon was on St. Louis’s urban periphery, but only
twenty years earlier, it had been at the edge of the pays d’en haut,
a vast region crisscrossed by trade networks. These networks,
along which furs and other commodities made their way, reached
between the centers of European and Asian society and indig‑
enous communities like those of the Coiracoentanon, who lived
only Cosmopolis remains. A
promising nineteenth-century
townsite on the Columbia, at
the only river crossing of the
time (a railroad bridge), took
the world-beating name of
“Globe.” When the railroad
moved and multiple other
crossings were built elsewhere,
Globe fell into such neglect
that the few dozen residents
remaining forgot how to spell
the town’s name. It is now
Goble, Oregon.
This is perhaps the “empty,
uninhabited condition” Braudel refers to (above) when he
speculates about the context
of city-building in nineteenthcentury North America.
coll thrush 255
along the banks of what they called the Amaquonsippi and what
Americans would call the Spoon. By the eighteenth century,
what had been a “middle ground” of accommodation had become
what historian Richard White has called a “world of fragments,”
as European empires and indigenous nations vied for power.
The violence of the period led many Coiracoentanon to leave
the valley of the Amaquonsippi for refugee settlements to the
south. The last local conflict, known as the Black Hawk War, saw
the end of indigenous tenure in what could then become Knox
County. With treaties only a quarter century old nullified by war,
the surviving Coirancoentanon had by 1832 “disappeared forever
from this locality” according to one early writer, with “none of the
whites knowing when or where they went.”16
The result was that the Dennys and other settlers of 1840s
Knox County had very little contact with Native people, although
evidence of the indigenous past lay all around them. Settlers
regularly came across earthen mounds, flint arrowheads, and
the ruins of wigwams as they plowed and felled. Indians also
remained part of local memory in accounts of war. Social power in
Knox County typically sprang out of the Black Hawk War, whose
veterans and organizers translated their military leadership into
civilian political careers, and so the foundations of Abingdon’s
new urban order actually lay in chaos and violence. The Lows,
from nearby Bloomington, Illinois, and the Bells, from more dis‑
tant Edwardsville, Indiana, had all likely had similar experiences
in American towns built in the former pays d’en haut; William
Bell’s father, for example, had been a ranger during the wars of
American expansion. The Denny Party brought with them both
visions of urban order (and perhaps resigned expectations of war
with a “doomed” race) and very little firsthand experience with
Native people.17
On Puget Sound, those visions and expectations collided with
the realities of settling in Puget Sound. They collided, first, with
the fact that Indian people were not about to disappear with the
arrival of the urban frontier and, second, with the dawning reality
that, while war was always a possibility, for the most part indig‑
enous people were planning to participate in the creation of that
frontier. Founding a city in the Pacific Northwest meant living
alongside Native men, women, and children. Almost immedi‑
ately after the Exact put the settlers ashore, for example, Indians
came to live with them. Arthur Denny recalled the scene:
Soon after we landed and began clearing the ground for our
buildings they commenced to congregate, and continued coming
until we had over a thousand in our midst, and most of them
remained all winter. Some of them built their houses very near
to ours, even on the ground we had cleared, and although they
seemed very friendly toward us we did not feel safe in objecting
to their building thus near to us for fear of offending them, and
it was very noticeable that they regarded their proximity to us as
a protection against other Indians.
Denny’s account paints a radically different picture from Lil‑
lian Smart’s creation story diorama. Instead of twenty-four settlers
on an empty beach, with perhaps a handful of Indians on hand,
we see those same twenty-four whites as pale faces among hun‑
dreds of darker ones. Denny’s account also speaks to the reasons
Native people came to New York–Alki—out of curiosity, to trade,
or in fear of increasingly common raids from northern Indians.
Regardless of the reasons, by a few weeks after the founding, New
York–Alki was no longer just an American settlement. It was also
an indigenous one.18
Arthur Denny and the others should not have been surprised.
Although they had had only one direct interaction with Indians
on the overland journey, a furtive skirmish with some Shoshoni
men on the Snake River, other experiences farther west made
it clear that city founding in the Northwest would include Indi‑
ans. The early growth of Portland, for example (“quite a thriving
town …even at that early period” in Arthur Denny’s own words),
was fueled largely by its new sawmill. When the mill opened
in 1850 on the bank of the Willamette, local indigenous people
established a new settlement adjacent to it within weeks, where
they made up a significant portion of Portland’s population and
the mill’s labor force. Similarly, the “embryo city” of Olympia at
the head of Puget Sound consisted of “about a dozen one-story
frame cabins, covered with split cedar siding, well-ventilated and
healthy, and perhaps twice as many Indian huts near the custom
house” when David Denny and John Low met Lee Terry there.19
Within a few weeks of its founding, New York–Alki looked
much the same. It was a biracial place. To use the language
of the day, it was a place of Bostons and Siwashes, the former
a reference to the city of origin of many of the first Americans
on Puget Sound and the latter a derogatory term derived from
coll thrush 257
the French word sauvage. With little experience other than
tales of war, the settlers were forced to amend their ambitions
in light of their new, and seemingly precarious, circumstances.
Likewise, indigenous people who had left for Prairie Point but
who had arrived in New York–Alki had to come to terms with
the new rules of engagement represented by white settlement.
Facing each other across linguistic and cultural chasms, the
indigenous and white residents of Prairie Point/New York–Alki
mystified each other. Native practices were often inexplicable to
the settlers: despite complaints from one of the settler wives, for
example, one elderly indigenous woman insisted on throwing
her used tea leaves at table legs whenever she visited the cabins.
Meanwhile, settler children caught herding garter snakes into a
brush fire were sharply admonished by Indian neighbors, who
said it would bring a flood. (Soon after, according to a Denny
descendant’s own account, there was in fact a downpour.) Indig‑
enous men and women found the newcomers, and in particular
the Boston women, equally strange. They crowded into the crude
cabins to watch the women cook and clean; several memoirs tell
of Mary Denny and Lydia Low enlisting harsh words or a hot
skillet to maintain some semblance of privacy. During those first
few weeks, Americans and Indians each made attempts to reach
across divides of language, belief, and etiquette.20
Sometimes, it worked. When some laundry disappeared soon
after the settlers arrived, Arthur Denny spoke to Seeathl, who
admonished the other Indians present and oversaw the swift
return of the missing garments. On another occasion, one of
the white women fed a sick indigenous child, whose father, a
“hard case” dubbed Old Alki John, gave her a tin pail in return.
Although she refused his gift—more likely an actual payment,
and her refusal thus a minor affront to Native ideals of reciproc‑
ity—the two families had nonetheless established a bond. Also
during that first winter, a woman named Ooyathl, one of the
wives of Seeathl, died suddenly. David and Arthur Denny built a
cedar coffin for her body, which was “wrapped … in so many blan‑
kets that it would not go in.” Helping give Ooyathl the high-class
burial her status demanded helps explain the close connec‑
tions between the Denny families and the families of Seeathl in
decades to come, with David Denny a particular favorite of many
Native people in and around Seattle.21
But attempts at accommodation did not mean there were
no tensions. The male members of Denny Party in particular
saw themselves as the intellectual and moral leaders of New
York–Alki, no matter the number of their indigenous neighbors.
During that first winter, they made it clear that a new political
order, with them at the top, was emerging at Prairie Point. When
a “very white” Indian woman named Seeayay came to the set‑
tlement to escape an abusive husband on the Puyallup River to
the south, David Denny advocated on her behalf. She later mar‑
ried the son of Old Alki John (just plain Alki John), and as a
result, David Denny became known as the “Law-Man” among
local indigenous communities. Meanwhile, when an altercation
between Indians visiting from the Green River and the Cascade
foothills threatened to turn violent, Arthur Denny stepped in and
kept them apart until tempers died down. (While the indigenous
disputants likely saw him as an impartial outside moderator, in
keeping with local legal tradition, Denny surely interpreted their
acquiescence as a sign that the Indians sought order—in particu‑
lar, his order.) Other performances of white authority were less
subtle. When the Vincennes, the same ship that had been part of
Wilkes’s expedition, arrived at New York–Alki during that first
winter, it repeatedly fired cannon that had once been used in a
massacre in the South Pacific. The booming reports made “a
strong and respectful impression upon the hundreds of Indians
…while to the settlers, noticing the effect upon the Indians, it
was music of a delightful character.” During the same months
that an American minority learned to live among an indigenous
majority, that minority made it clear who planned to be in charge
in the years ahead.22
At the same time, indigenous people exerted their own influ‑
ences over the urban beginnings of New York–Alki. When the
brig Leonesa arrived, exchanging staples like flour and sugar
for wooden piles to help build San Francisco, it was Native men
who cut most of the trees and floated the lumber out to the ship.
Indians also brought bushel after bushel of potatoes to the settle‑
ment as supplies ran low during the winter, gathering them from
gardens in their own towns. And just as the name New York was
followed by a Chinook Jargon suffix, the first commercial venture
in the settlement, set up by John Low and Charles Terry in Novem‑
ber, had a name drawn from the hybrid trade language. The New
coll thrush 259
While official city history has
enshrined the Denny party
landing at Alki as the founding moment of Seattle, Thrush
finds that the events of that day
are not told in native histories
at all. Though it involved
indigenous people (and whites
who became very important
to indigenous people), the
day’s landing has not stood
out as a distinct story worth
telling. The divergence here—
between white history and
indigenous history—reminds
us that we have more than
just a “Rashomon problem” of
differing perspectives. It’s not
that two or more parties saw
the same events differently;
it is that, for some, the event
was not even an “event.” And
surely the blindness is reciprocal. How vast is the universe
of indigenous experiences that
arriving whites could not see
or comprehend? Vast enough
that when glimpsed at all,
whites did not describe it as
a world of real, lived experience, but called it “myth” or
“the spirit world.” What are
the chances for, in Williams’s
terms, “a common history”
when our world is shared
by groups that cannot see in
common?
York Markook House (markook or makook meaning “trade”) kept
“constantly on hand and for sale at the lowest prices all kinds of
merchandise usually required in a new country.” Indeed, New
York–Alki was a new country, for Native and settler alike.23
Despite the symbolism of events like Ooyathl’s burial and the
firing of the ship’s cannon, both intended to make lasting (if con‑
flicting) impressions upon local Indians, the founding of New
York–Alki does not register prominently in the oral tradition of
local Native peoples. In fact, it does not register at all. Among the
many indigenous accounts of nineteenth-century history in cen‑
tral Puget Sound, there are virtually no stories about the Denny
Party and the little settlement on the point. Clearly, what is so
important to Seattle’s civic place-story is much less so in Indian
country. Perhaps the landing at Alki was just one more arrival
of settlers during a period when similar foundings were taking
place on the shores of Salt Water; perhaps it is overshadowed by
other events of the 1850s: the treaties and the resulting conflict
that settlers would name an “Indian War.” And of course, not all
stories survive. Nor do their keepers. But perhaps the most obvi‑
ous reason that the Alki landing is not part of local indigenous
oral tradition is because the settlement of New York–Alki was a
temporary arrangement. And so in the late winter of 1852, Arthur
Denny, Carson Boren, and William Bell set out to circumnavigate
Elliott Bay in search of a permanent location for their home‑
steads. Since selling piles and timbers to passing ships was “the
only dependence for support in the beginning” as far as Denny
could see, “it was important to look well to the facilities for the
business.” The new site had to meet four requirements: a deep
harbor, a supply of freshwater, fine stands of timber close to the
shore, and feed for stock. As the three men explored the shores of
Elliott Bay, they circulated through another arc of the landscape,
but the indigenous places around Elliott Bay were largely invis‑
ible—save one. One Denny descendant described their arrival at
the spot, using modern landmarks to orient her readers:
In the afternoon as they paddled south, the explorers discovered
that the high bluff gradually dropped from a height of forty feet
to the level of a little tide stream with meadow grass on its banks,
which we know as Yesler Way. North of this was a knoll at the
foot of Cherry Street. South of the stream was a low wooded sec‑
tion, and half hidden therein were the ruins of an Indian hut.
The distinct shore line ended rather abruptly and merged into
tide flats at what is now the foot of King Street, making a point at
low tide and an island at high tide.
The three men decided that this place, known as Little Cross‑
ing-Over Place to Seeathl and his people because of a trail leading
into the back-country, was to be their new home.24
Soon, it would become Seattle. On 23 May 1853, plats for the
town of Seattle were officially filed. By then, the settlement had
grown into a small hamlet, including figures like Henry Yesler
and David “Doc” Maynard who would become key players in
Seattle’s urban drama. Although the Whulshootseed name for
the site was now familiar to many of the settlers, the “awkward
and meaningless” word meaning Little Crossing-Over Place was
never considered as a name for the town, while Duwamps and
Duwamish River, two other options used briefly during 1852,
were considered ugly and unflattering.25 Instead, the community
leaders chose to name their town after Seeathl, who had played
such a vital role in life at New York–Alki. Historians have debated
Seeathl’s reaction to this; some say that he was indifferent, others
that he was horrified by the decision and even went to Olympia to
protest it, and still more suggest that he may have given the name
willingly as he approached the end of his life. Regardless of what
he thought, the naming of Seattle is typically portrayed in civic
historiography as a critical turning point: a handing over from
the indigenous to the urban.26
Indeed, well before the day when Bell, Boren, and Denny
decided that Little Crossing-Over Place would be their new home,
the indigenous world of the Duwamish, Lakes, and Shilsholes
had been irrevocably transformed. The ruined longhouse at Little
Crossing-Over Place, overgrown with wild roses (and, according
to oral tradition, only one of several that had once stood there),
spoke to the abandonment of towns in the wake of epidemics
and slave raids. In Whulshootseed, similar words described both
houses and human bodies: house posts were limbs, roof beams
were spines, walls were skin. Just as sweeping a house and heal‑
ing a body could be expressed with the same verb, related words
spoke of illness and the falling down of a home, and so the ruins
were testaments to loss. Meanwhile, on a nearby bluff above
coll thrush 261
The past shows through
the present. In Sieverts’s
description: the city is “like
a palimpsest in which traces
of an older writing shimmer
beneath the new.”
Elliott Bay at what is now Spring Street, a cemetery adorned with
tin and trade beads spoke of the epidemics and the traders who
had brought them. Read like a text, the landscape seemed to tell
of the passing of Indians from Puget Sound, and so the naming
of Seattle seems the end of an era.27
But, of course, the story is much more complicated than that.
When the plat for Seattle was filed in May 1853, it showed a grid
of straight lines not unlike the layout of Abingdon or one of the
other towns from which the Bostons had come. On the ground,
however, the landscape would not be easily transformed into a
model of Cartesian harmony. Arthur Denny could attest to that.
“The front of our territory was so rough and broken as to render
it almost uninhabitable at that early time,” he recalled. “I dug a
well forty feet deep in the bottom of the gulch and only got quick
sand with a very limited amount of water. Direct communication
with the bay, by which we received all our supplies at that time,
was next to impossible, owing to the height of the bluff.” Terra
miscognita, in the form of gullies and springs, sand and slopes,
would exert its own agency over Seattle’s growth, forcing urban
visions to accommodate local realities.28
So would the people of Little Crossing-Over Place and Her‑
ring’s House and Clear Water and all the other Native towns. Just
as Vancouver’s Puget Sound had not erased Salt Water, just as
Wilkes’s Point Roberts and the Denny Party’s New York–Alki had
only partially obscured Prairie Point, Seattle would not entirely
replace Little Crossing-Over Place. In naming settlements like
Seattle, Europeans and Americans sought to claim them and
turn the abstract spaces of wilderness into places—into Home.
But such efforts were never completely successful. Instead, the
day-to-day realities of settlers and Natives meant that the new‑
comers would have to contend with the people and places they
sought to replace. Rather than being emptied of their meanings,
places in and around the young town would collect new mean‑
ings as settlers accreted their own experiences onto sites with
existing indigenous histories. For Seattle, that meant that the
coming years would be a time of gathering—of new stories about
place, about race, and about the boundaries between cooperation
and conflict. Seattle’s urban Indian history was just beginning.
†
Chapter 6: The Woven Coast
A visitor to Seattle in the summer of 1900 would have been
impressed. Where a town of fewer than four thousand people had
existed only twenty years earlier, a city of eighty thousand now
crowded the shores of Elliott Bay. A newly commissioned army
fort guarded the bluffs above West Point, a massive railroad and
shipping terminal was under construction at Smith’s Cove, and
electric lights illuminated much of downtown, powered by dis‑
tant dams. More than forty labor unions represented workers in
the city, including the longshoremen who shepherded millions of
dollars in international commerce into and out of Elliott Bay. The
Duwamish River still curved chaotically toward the Sound, but
its meandering days were numbered; plans were already under
way to transform it into an organized channel of commerce.
Even Ballast Island, where the refugees from Herring’s House
had come to protest seven years before, seemed to reflect Seattle’s
urban fortunes, growing each year as bricks, rocks, and other
detritus were added by ships from Manila, Honolulu, Valparaiso,
San Francisco, and Sydney. Metropolis had arrived.29
But in 1900, it was not the people of Herring’s House who now
camped on Ballast Island. Instead, it was people from the Strait
of Juan de Fuca. These were S’Klallam people, thirteen dozen
men, women, and children who had come to the city from their
homeland on the northern shore of the Olympic Peninsula. Their
canoes, and those of other Native people from even more distant
Native places, had inspired some observers to dub Seattle’s water‑
front the “Venice of the Pacific.” S’Klallam people camped safely
in the territory of the Duwamish: clearly, the city’s Indian terrain
had shifted.30
Meanwhile, several blocks away, on the site of Henry Yesler’s
old mill, a second kind of new Indian terrain existed. On a tri‑
angle of greensward known as Pioneer Place Park, wedged in
among the banks and hotels, a massive Tlingit carving rose over
flowerbeds and a neatly clipped lawn. At its base, mythic ancestor
Raven-at-the-Head-of-Nass anchored a series of striking figures: a
whale with a seal in its mouth, a smaller raven, a mink, a woman
holding her frog-child, and yet another raven carrying a crescent
moon in its beak. This was the Chief-of-All-Women pole, carved
to memorialize a woman who had lived and died a thousand miles
from Seattle. It was an unlikely candidate for the city’s first piece
In 1893, after an arson set by
white settlers destroyed the
settlement known as Herring
House, indigenous Duwamish
were offered refuge on the
city’s Ballast Island, a bleak
stretch of denuded land created by piling up the ballast
from dredging.
coll thrush 263
As with the HBC’s forts more
than a half-century earlier, the
businessmen of Seattle did not
create a new regional economy
so much as they reorganized
and expanded an existing
one. Indigenous people had
traded across thousands of
miles for centuries. They
maintained formalized trade
relationships with sufficient
fidelity to use a fiat currency,
haiqua (or dentalium shell),
that was recognized up and
down the coast and well into
the interior. They did business
with kin and strangers, with
friends and enemies alike, in
a shared trade language, the
Chinook Wawa, that newly
arrived whites also adopted
and adapted. As Thrush
points out, the first white-run
store in Seattle was called New
York Makook, Chinook for
“trade.” An existing pattern
was being reinscribed. The
changes brought by the rise of
Seattle are correctly described
by Thrush, not as the creation
of the urban, but as “the creation of a new urban story.”
of public art, but there it stood. According to one observer, it even
made Seattle unique, “the only city in the world which possesses
a monument of this character to a fast departing race.”31
The story of how canoes from the Strait of Juan de Fuca and
a totem pole from Alaska got to Seattle is the story of the city’s
arrival as a regional metropolis, of the linking of distant places
to each other and to that metropolis, and of the creation of a new
urban story. Just as Ballast Island was a physical manifestation of
Seattle’s connections to distant ports, Indian people and images
in Seattle reflected the city’s new economic and cultural bound‑
aries, which by the twentieth century reached as far north as
Alaska. Indian canoes arriving on Seattle’s waterfront from farflung places heralded the creation of an urban Indian hinterland
of which Seattle was one nexus. Meanwhile, Seattle’s experience
of regional empire, spurred in part by the discovery of gold in the
Klondike in 1897, led to a new urban vocabulary that used Native
imagery such as totem poles to highlight the city’s new position
as gateway to the North. Seattle’s Indian hinterland stretched
along a coast woven together by new urban and indigenous con‑
nections, and through that new weaving, both Native people and
the city would be changed.
August 1878, the Seattle Daily Intelligencer reported that scores
of Native men and women were camped at the foot of Washing‑
ton Street on their way to the hop fields of rural Puget Sound
country. Perhaps they were the people immortalized in Mr.
Glover’s bird’s-eye panorama of the city. If not, they were people
like them. Above the tide line, temporary shelters and dozens
of canoes filled with personal belongings turned the waterfront
into a sudden and unmistakable Indian neighborhood. The
paper predicted that after three or four weeks earning “consid‑
erable money” from labor in the fields, the Indians “will then
return, on their way stopping at Seattle to spend the larger part
of their earnings.” The movement of working Indian people—
and, not insignificantly, their money—in and out of Seattle was
becoming part of the city’s urban calendar and a central facet
of life in Native communities far beyond Puget Sound. Canoes
from Washington’s Pacific coast, the islands and inlets of British
Columbia, and as far north as Alaska were more than just modes
of conveyance toward economic opportunity: they were vehicles
in which Indian people traveled toward a new identity crafted
through their encounters with the urban.32
Long before hops and cities reoriented Native lives on the
Northwest Coast, indigenous people had come from great dis‑
tances to visit Puget Sound. In the 1990s, archaeologists working
on the site of a new sewage treatment plant at West Point in
Seattle found two remarkable pieces of carved stone, one worked
from dark green nephrite and the other hollowed out of light
gray stone. These were labrets, ornaments that had once pierced
the lower lips of elite Native people; the green one even bore
scratches where it had rubbed against the teeth of its wearer.
They were at least three thousand years old, and their origins lay
far to the north; no societies south of the central British Colum‑
bian coast had ever worn them. While the labrets are a mystery
(were they worn by men or women, slaves or invaders, spouses
or traders?), they attest to ancient voyages along the vast edge of
a continent.33
Stories of such journeys come from shallower time as well.
During the same decades that Vancouver and Wilkes explored the
Northwest Coast for their empires, indigenous people with their
own ambitions were making thousand-mile journeys in fortyfoot canoes to the places that would become Seattle. Shilshole
elders, for example, told one local historian of raids by Stikine
Tlingit from southeast Alaska; those unable to escape into the
backcountry around Tucked Away Inside were either taken
as slaves or killed, their heads thrown into Salmon Bay. The
Lekwiltok Kwakwaka’wakw of the northern Strait of Georgia had
earned a similar a reputation in Puget Sound by the 1820s, their
raids appearing in the oral traditions of both peoples. Even after
non-Indian settlement in Puget Sound, these northern Indians
(described by settlers as “northern British Indians” or even “Brit‑
ish-Russia red-skins” to distinguish them from local indigenous
people) continued to make forays into the inland waterways near
Seattle, sometimes turning their attentions to white schooners
and farms.34
But in the late nineteenth century, the nature and frequency
of Native visits to Puget Sound and Seattle changed. Drawn by
seasonal work in the region’s burgeoning economy, Indian men,
women, and children began traveling huge distances, often every
year, to Seattle and its outlying areas. As Puget Sound’s first large-
If, as Thrush argues, a “new
[Indian] identity” was emerging from this reconfigured
region, it was not because
indigenous people had never
known urban lives and relationships. It was because their
existing lives and relationships
were being reinscribed within
the “new urban story”—a different story that organized the
social landscape of trade like a
target, with progressively more
remote hinterlands circling
around a single, dominant
center, the city of Seattle. The
change from being equal partners in trade to temporary
wage workers on industrial
hops farms was perhaps more
profound than any change in
the distance or frequency of
their travel.
coll thrush 265
The house of the working
family that owns six phonographs and several unused
sewing machines sounds more
like an image of the contemporary suburban poor than like
a picture of the early-twentieth-century Indian. Perhaps
it is both.
scale agricultural commodity, hops played the largest role in these
migrations, but over time other kinds of crops—berries, vegetables,
herbs, flowers—demanded Native labor. For tribal communities
all along the coast, occasional forays into Puget Sound became
regular peregrinations. By the early twentieth century, the city
was a well-established stopover for Indian laborers whose home
communities ranged up and down the Northwest Coast.35
Canoes going to and from Seattle changed both their home
communities and the city. The most obvious effects were mon‑
etary: Indians fresh from the hop fields and other jobs injected
large sums of money into Seattle’s economy. One Seattle news‑
paper noted in 1879, for example, that Native visitors brought
“great trade” to the city’s merchants, and that “between their calls
going and returning they will leave several thousand dollars in
Seattle.” Native shoppers in Seattle quickly established a reputa‑
tion for shrewdness, with one paper referring to them as “sharp,
close traders [who] look upon the Bostons with a suspicious eye.”
According to some observers, Indians’ spending made them
preferable to other minorities in the city. One paper reported that
they were better than Chinese immigrants “as they spend the
money they receive … and keep it in the country, instead of hoard‑
ing it and shipping it to a foreign land, from whence no dollar
returns.” While not on a par with tourist dollars or large-scale
capital investments—particularly in later decades, as the urban
economy reached metropolitan proportions—Indian cash none‑
theless helped to fill urban coffers.36
Things bought in Seattle could be used to maintain Native
traditions in the hinterland, as the purchase of material goods
in Seattle and other urban centers meshed with indigenous
notions of prestige. One observer, for example, noted that “it was
a common thing to see several sewing machines in one Indian
house or half a dozen phonographs, and beds and tables by the
dozen but never used.… If by chance the owner of the house
should die, to ease his condition in the next world all these house‑
hold goods were piled upon his grave, often including the very
doors and window sashes of his house.” Goods procured in urban
places—phonographs and bedsteads as well as more mundane
resources like flour and coffee—helped maintain and even aug‑
ment indigenous institutions like the potlatch. Sometimes the
potlatches, important ceremonies in which Natives displayed
their wealth, reaffirmed their status, and cemented kinship and
community ties, were even held in Seattle. Orange Jacobs recalled
one such event in the 1880s, when a Canadian Indian named Jim
gave away hundreds of dollars’ worth of blankets, calico, suits of
clothing, and “Indian trinkets” to dozens of participants on the
tidelands south of town. Even the journey itself could be a display
of status; Pacheenaht chief Charles Jones once boasted that he
had paddled from Vancouver Island to Seattle in a single day. The
urban experience did not necessarily erode indigenous traditions;
it could in fact strengthen them. This was perhaps especially true
for Native people whose homes were in British Columbia, where
the potlatch was outlawed beginning in 1885.37
Casting one’s lot with the vagaries of the American agricul‑
tural economy, however, brought risks for travelers and those
they left behind. One Canadian Indian agent noted in 1891, for
example, that Seattle-bound Tsimshians had “failed to obtain
much labour, and realized but little profit.” Likewise, Kweeha
Kwakwaka’wakw Charles Nowell recalled one season when he,
his brother, and some in-laws stayed in Seattle for only two or
three days after learning that hops were “all burnt,” and returned
home virtually broke. Labor gluts and disasters like the hop louse
infestations of the 1890s could wreak havoc with Native fortunes.
In 1906, some unlucky Sheshahts from Vancouver Island were
forced to spend the winter digging clams and selling them in
Seattle for meager returns because of losses earlier in the season.
Meanwhile, migrants’ absences could leave their kin vulner‑
able on remote reserves: an agent on eastern Vancouver Island
reported in the late 1880s that Cowichan elders faced hardship as
younger relatives spurned local subsistence activities to pursue
wealth elsewhere.38
But perhaps the greatest challenge posed by annual migra‑
tions came from disease. Economic vectors between Seattle and
its Native hinterland were mirrored by biological vectors, path‑
ways where contagion traveled with the phonographs and cash.
Those vectors had helped fuel Seattle city leaders’ racist paranoia
in the 1870s, but if the paranoia had mostly ended by the last
years of the nineteenth century, the continuing effects of such
diseases had not. In fact, the prevalence of measles, tuberculo‑
sis, and other illnesses among Native travelers allows us to locate
them in the urban landscape. Death records for King County
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries show
clusters of Indian mortality among the tidelands and shanties
coll thrush 267
near the old Lava Beds. Canoes lay at the foot of Weller Street,
for example, while their owners and passengers died just blocks
away. The diseases went home with the survivors. Indian agents
on Vancouver Island were especially aware of the illnesses that
struck communities whose members had gone to town. In 1888,
Agent Harry Guillod reported that many Kyuquot and Chickleset
children had died of measles on the way back to Vancouver Island
from the Sound while the Hesquiaht, who had stayed home, had
been spared. Two months later, the province’s Indian superinten‑
dent reported that the same outbreak was now raging everywhere
on the British Columbia coast. Hundreds of miles from urban
centers, Native cemeteries bore the marks of diseases that blos‑
somed in crowded cities.39
Migration to and from Seattle had its more subtle costs as
well, eroding connections to indigenous places in the hinterland.
Among the Tlingit, for example, the central element of social life,
the kwáan, or clan, was a map of sorts, a linkage between a group
of people and a place expressed through subsistence activities and
oral tradition. Through relationships with urban places, however,
these intimate connections between people and place were shift‑
ing. Charlie Jim Sr., or Tóok’, a Hutsnuwu Tlingit Raven who
often came to the city, told a biographer that in the early twentieth
century he sometimes felt “like a man without a country” because
of his regular movements between southeast Alaska and Seattle.
For someone who defined himself in large part by his kwáan, and
thus his place, this was a telling statement. His story, likely not
unique, suggests that, while the coast was being woven together
in some ways, it was being sundered in others. 40
For all its risks, though, migration to Seattle and Puget Sound
gave Native people a chance at independence and presented chal‑
lenges to federal Indian policies in both the American and the
Canadian parts of the Northwest Coast. Treaties with Washing‑
ton State and the rules of the reserve system in British Columbia
allowed for the movement of Native people off of reservations
and reserves, but it often seemed to agents that such travel
undermined efforts to “civilize” Native people. From the Makah
Reservation, for instance, whole families headed to the hop
fields, leaving agency schools empty, Bibles unread, and lessons
unlearned. Makah Daniel Quedessa wrote to a white friend in
the 1880s that he would soon leave with his parents to go to pick
hops, adding that “I guess every one of the School childrens will
go up to pick hops.” Meanwhile, Canadian missionaries across
the Strait of Juan de Fuca found it “very up-hill work” persuad‑
ing families to stay on the reserve during the school year when
work and wages beckoned from the south. Native travel to Seattle
thwarted the larger goals of national policies, much as it had in
earlier periods of Seattle’s history. As before, efforts to define who
belonged where rarely worked out as planned. 41
For all the agents’ complaints, though, canoe trips to Seattle
actually helped Native people integrate themselves into settler
society. Few extant sources indicate how Native people perceived
places like Seattle, but it appears that, for some, encounters with
urban life inspired new, cosmopolitan ambitions. It is likely that
many found the material abundance, social opportunities, and
general spectacle of Seattle an exciting change of pace. Many
Native men and women may have agreed with Tsimshian Arthur
Wellington Clah, who simply called Seattle a “great city” in his
1899 diary. Others seem to have aspired to an urbanity of their
own; on Vancouver Island’s west coast, one sign of prestige at the
turn of the century was a home sporting bay windows and Vic‑
torian fretwork, emulating houses seen in Seattle and elsewhere.
The urban experience left subtle marks on communities hun‑
dreds of miles from the city itself, both augmenting traditions like
the potlatch and inspiring a new, cosmopolitan Indianness. 42
Notes
1
2
3
4
Sophie Frye Bass, Pigtail Days in Old Seattle (Portland, OR: Met‑
ropolitan Press, 1937), 13; Murray Morgan, Skid Road: An Informal
Portrait of Seattle (New York: Viking Press, 1951), 24.
Stephen Jay Gould, “The Creation Myths of Cooperstown,” in
Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History, by Stephen
Jay Gould (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 48.
For further analysis of the diorama, see Coll-Peter Thrush, “Cre‑
ation Stories: Rethinking the Founding of Seattle,” in More Voices,
New Stories: King County, Washington’s First 150 Years, ed. Mary
C. Wright (Seattle: Pacific Northwest Historians Guild, 2002),
34–49.
Welford Beaton, The City That Made Itself: A Literary and Pictorial
Record of the Building of Seattle (Seattle: Terminal Publishing Co.,
coll thrush 269
1914), 19; George F. Cotterill, Climax of a World Quest: The Story
of Puget Sound, the Modern Mediterranean of the Pacific (Seattle:
Olympic Publishing Co., 1928). For one of the best examinations
of the “vanishing Indian” narrative in American culture and his‑
tory (and for its role in shaping federal Indian policy), see Brian W.
Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian
Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1982).
5 Jacob Wahalchoo’s story is recounted in Jay Miller, Lushootseed
Culture and the Shamanic Odyssey: An Anchored Radiance (Lin‑
coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 11–12.
6 Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987),
xxiv. Carter draws upon the formulation crafted by geographer
Yi-Fu Tuan in Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Min‑
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), in which Tuan
distinguishes space—undifferentiated, abstract, untrammeled by
experience—from place, which is specific, local, and shaped by
lived experience. See also Daniel W. Clayton, Islands of Truth: The
Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island (Vancouver: University of
British Columbia Press, 2000).
7 For information on Clear Water, see Clarence B. Bagley, “Chief
Seattle and Angeline,” Washington Historical Quarterly 22, no.
4 (1931): 243–75. For discussions of indigenous towns in Puget
Sound, see Jay Miller, Lushootseed Culture, 10.
8 Marian Smith, Puyallup-Nisqually, 17; and Wayne M. Suttles, “Per‑
sistence of Intervillage Ties among the Coast Salish,” in Coast
Salish Essays, by Wayne M. Suttles (Seattle: University of Wash‑
ington Press; Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1987), 209–30.
9 Edmond S. Meany, ed., Vancouver’s Discovery of Puget Sound (New
York: Macmillan, 1907), 105, 108, 124. For analysis of the notion
of “people without history,” see Eric R. Wolf, Europe and People
without History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Califor‑
nia Press, 1982). For the most comprehensive study of epidemics
on the Northwest Coast, see Robert Boyd, The Coming of the Spirit
of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline
among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774–1874 (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1999).
10 For a summary of archaeological information for the region,
including material drawn from at least one site in Seattle, see
Charles M. Nelson, “Prehistory of the Puget Sound Region,” in
Handbook of North American Indians, ed. William C. Sturtevant,
11 12 13 14 15 vol. 7, Northwest Coast, ed. Wayne Suttles (Washington: Smithson‑
ian Institution, 1990), 481–84. For linguistic evidence, see Wayne
M. Suttles, “Northwest Coast Linguistic History—a View from the
Coast,” in Coast Salish Essays, 265–81. For stories of the Changer,
see Arthur C. Ballard’s collections Some Tales of the Southern Puget
Sound Salish (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1927) and
Mythology of Southern Puget Sound (Seattle: University of Wash‑
ington Press, 1929). For prehistoric natural disasters, see Arthur
Kruckeberg, A Natural History of Puget Sound Country (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1991); and Lynn L. Larson and
Dennis E. Lewarch, eds., The Archaeology of West Point, Seattle,
Washington: 4,000 Years of Hunter-Fisher-Gatherer Land Use in
Southern Puget Sound (Seattle: Larson Anthropological/Archae‑
ological Services, 1995). For the words arising from dookw, see
Dawn Bates, Thom Hess, and Vi Hilbert, Lushootseed Dictionary
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 84–85.
Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition
during the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, and 1842 (New York: G. P.
Putnam, 1844), vol. 4, 483; and Edmond S. Meany, ed., “Diary
of Wilkes in the Northwest,” Washington Historical Quarterly 17
(1926): 139.
Meany, “Diary of Wilkes in the Northwest,” 137–40. For accounts
of epidemics in the 1830s and 1840s, see Boyd, Coming of the Spirit
of Pestilence, 155, 267. For discussion of the Ex. Ex., see Nathan‑
iel Philbrick, Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery, the U.S.
Exploring Expedition, 1838–1842 (New York: Viking, 2003). For
Fort Nisqually, see Cecelia Svinth Carpenter, Fort Nisqually: A
Documented History of Indian and British Interaction (Tacoma, WA:
Tahoma Research Services, 1986), and William Fraser Tolmie,
The Journals of William Fraser Tolmie: Physician and Fur Trader
(Vancouver: Mitchell Press, 1963), 216.
Samuel Hancock, The Narrative of Samuel Hancock, 1845–1860
(New York: R. M. McBride and Co., 1927), 94–95.
Stuart M. Blumin, “Explaining the New Metropolis: Perception,
Depiction, and Analysis in Mid–Nineteenth Century New York,”
Journal of Urban History 11, no. 1 (1984): 9–38; Burrows and Wal‑
lace, Gotham, 649–841.
For accounts of Knox County during this time, see Albert J. Perry,
History of Knox County, Illinois: Its Cities, Towns, and People (Chi‑
cago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1912), 419–23, 447–49; and
James E. Davis, Frontier Illinois (Bloomington: Indiana University
coll thrush 271
16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 272 where we live now
Press, 1998), 331–33. For the Denny family’s history in the area,
see Arthur Armstrong Denny, “Reminiscences,” Bancroft Collec‑
tion, 5–8; and Sale, Seattle, Past to Present, 8–9, 17.
Albert Perry, History of Knox County, 5, 44; Richard White, The
Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes
Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
J. Joseph Bauxar, “History of the Illinois Area,” and Charles Cal‑
lender, “Illinois,” in Handbook of North American Indians, ed.
William C. Sturtevant, vol. 15, Northeast, ed. Bruce G. Trigger
(Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 594–601, 673–80.
Albert Perry, History of Knox County, 43–44, 447; Charles C. Chap‑
man, History of Knox County, Illinois (Chicago: Blakely, Brown,
and Marsh, Printers, 1878), 185–87; Rodney O. Davis, “The Fron‑
tier State, 1818–48,” in A Guide to the History of Illinois, ed. John
Hoffman (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 54; and Clarence B.
Bagley, History of Seattle from the Earliest Settlement to the Present
Time, vol. 2 (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1916), 824, 875.
Arthur Denny, Pioneer Days on Puget Sound, 13–14.
Ibid., 4–6, 8–9; Eugene E. Snyder, Early Portland: Stump-Town
Triumphant (Portland, OR: Binfords and Mort, 1970), 70; and
Emily Denny, Blazing the Way, 42.
Watt, Four Wagons West, 49–51, 60.
Eva Greenslit Anderson, Chief Seattle (Caldwell: Caxton Print‑
ers, 1943), 161; Emily Denny, Blazing the Way, 56; Carlson, “Chief
Sealth,” 26; Thomas Talbot Waterman, “The Geographical Names
Used by the Indians of the Pacific Coast,” Geographical Review
12 (1922): 192; personal communication with Thomas Speer,
Duwamish Tribal Services.
Emily Denny, Blazing the Way, 57–58; interview with Walter
Graham, February 1914, MOHAI MS Collection, folder 348;
Arthur Denny, Pioneer Days on Puget Sound, 14; and Thomas
Prosch, Chronological History, 26.
Wayne Suttles, “The Early Diffusion of the Potato among the Coast
Salish,” in Coast Salish Essays, 137–51; Thomas Prosch, Chronological History, 25–26; Arthur Denny, Pioneer Days on Puget Sound, 13;
and Watt, Four Wagons West, 55.
Arthur Denny, Pioneer Days on Puget Sound, 17; Watt, Four Wagons
West, 53, 64–65, 67; and Ruth Sehome Shelton, Gram Ruth Sehome
Shelton: The Wisdom of a Tulalip Elder (Seattle: Lushootseed Press,
1995), 25–27.
Thomas Prosch, Chronological History, 28–29, 31, 41–42; Beaton,
City That Made Itself, 21; and Watt, Four Wagons West, 70.
26 For examples of the various speculations, see Carlson, “Chief
Sealth,” 27; Thomas Prosch, Chronological History, 29; Bagley,
History of Seattle, vol. 2, 27; and Watt, Four Wagons West, 70. Some
modern-day Duwamish people see the naming of the city as a
theft of indigenous cultural property, especially cutting in light of
the dispossession they would later face. In personal communica‑
tions with the author, anthropologist Jay Miller has suggested that
Seeathl may have seen the naming as analogous to offering his
name to a young descendant, thus ensuring that the name would
live on. Meanwhile, present-day Duwamish tribal activist James
Rasmussen has argued that Seeathl would in fact be proud of the
city named after him; for that claim, see B. J. Bullert’s documen‑
tary Alki: Birthplace of Seattle (Seattle: Southwest Seattle Historical
Society and KCTS Television, 1997).
27 Bierwert, Brushed by Cedar, 43–44; Watt, Four Wagons West,
58–59.
28 Arthur Denny, Pioneer Days on Puget Sound, 19.
29 For descriptions of Seattle in 1900, see James R. Warren, “A Cen‑
tury of Business,” Puget Sound Business Journal, 17 September
1999; and Richard C. Berner, Seattle, 1900–1920: From Boomtown,
Urban Turbulence, to Restoration (Seattle: Charles Press, 1991). For
the origins of Ballast Island, see J. Willis Sayre, This City of Ours
(Seattle: Seattle School District, 1936), 69.
30 Manuscript of the twelfth census of the United States, NARA.
31 Viola Garfield, Seattle’s Totem Poles (Bellevue, WA: Thistle Press,
1996), 9–31; undated handbill (probably 1900s) by Lowman and
Hanford Co., MSCUA.
32 “Hop Pickers,” Seattle Daily Intelligencer, 27 August 1878.
33 Larson and Lewarch, Archaeology of West Point, 10–12.
34 Costello, Siwash, 120; Abbie Denny-Lindsley, “When Seattle Was
an Indian Camp, Forty-five Years Ago,” Seattle P-I, 15 April 1906;
Robert Galois, with Jay Powell and Gloria Cranmer Webster,
Kwakwaka’wakw Settlements, 1750–1920: A Geographical Gazetteer
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1994), 55; “The
Northern Indians,” Olympia Pioneer and Democrat, 17 October
1856; and “Indian Difficulty on the Reserve,” Olympia Pioneer and
Democrat, 12 December 1856. See also Mike Vouri, “Raiders from
the North: The Northern Indians and Northwest Washington in
the 1850s,” Columbia 11, no. 3 (1997): 24–35; and Lutz, “Inventing
an Indian War.”
coll thrush 273
35 For British Columbia Indians’ participation in the hops industry,
see John Lutz, “Work, Sex, and Death on the Great Thoroughfare:
Annual Migrations of ‘Canadian Indians’ to the American Pacific
Northwest,” in Parallel Destinies: Canadian-American Relations
West of the Rockies, ed. John M. Findlay and Ken Coates (Toronto:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 80–103. For an excel‑
lent analysis of these migrations and their implications for Native
identities (and perceptions of those identities), see Paige Raibmon,
Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-NineteenthCentury Northwest Coast (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2005).
36 “Hop Pickers,” Seattle Daily Intelligencer, 30 August 1879; Seattle
Daily Intelligencer, 16 October 1876; and “Hop Picking,” Seattle
Daily Intelligencer, 4 September 1878.
37 Norman Kenny Luxton, Tilikum: Luxton’s Pacific Crossing (Sidney,
BC: Gray’s Publishing, 1971), 40; Jacobs, Memoirs, 161; Ruth Kirk,
Tradition and Change on the Northwest Coast: The Makah, Nuuchah-nulth, Southern Kwakiutl, and Nuxalk (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1986), 117.
38 Annual Report of 1891, 169, Department of Indian Affairs, BCA;
Charles Nowell and Clellan J. Ford, Smoke from Their Fires: The Life
of a Kwakiutl Chief (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1941), 132–33;
Annual Report of 1906, 255, Department of Indian Affairs, BCA;
and Annual Report of 1887, 105, Department of Indian Affairs,
BCA.
39 King County Death Records, Puget Sound Branch, Washington
State Archives, Bellevue; Annual Report of 1888, 103, 114, Depart‑
ment of Indian Affairs, BCA; and Annual Report of 1891, 118,
Department of Indian Affairs, BCA.
40 Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Haa Kusteyí, Our Culture: Tlingit Life
Stories (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 13, 289–
95; Thomas Fox Thornton, “Place and Being among the Tlingit”
(Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1995); and Walter R. Gold‑
schmidt, Haa Aaní, Our Land: Tlingit and Haida Land Rights and
Use (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998).
41 Undated letter (1887?) from Daniel Quedessa to Kenneth G.
Smith, Kenneth G. Smith Papers, MSCUA; Annual Report of 1884,
100, Department of Indian Affairs, BCA; Annual Report of 1891,
xxxi, Department of Indian Affairs, BCA.
42 Arthur Wellington Clah, Diary, 1859–1909, entry for 31 August
1899, National Archives of Canada, Ottawa; Philip Drucker, The
Northern and Central Nootkan Tribes, Bureau of American Ethnol‑
ogy Bulletin 144 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1951),
13–14.
coll thrush 275
Robert E. Lang
Jennifer LeFurgy
With Robert E. Lang and Jennifer LeFurgy’s 2007 report
for the Brookings Institute we
leap ahead to the other end of
the “new urban story” indigenous people had joined when
the nineteenth century gave
way to the twentieth.
excerpts from Boomburbs:
The Rise of America’s Accidental Cities
Boomburb: A Bold New Metropolis or an
Updated Satellite City?
When satellite cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries reached a certain size they became dense urban cores.
But as boomburbs grow to be the size of these earlier satellite
cities, most remain essentially suburban in character. Just as sat‑
ellite cities reflected the dominant urban pattern of their time,
boomburbs may be the ultimate symbol of the sprawling post‑
war metropolitan form. Boomburbs typically develop along the
interstate freeways that ring large U.S. metropolitan areas. The
commercial elements of the new suburban metropolis—office
parks, big-box retail stores, and most characteristically, strip
malls—gather at highway exit ramps and major intersections.
Beyond these lie residential subdivisions dominated by large-lot,
single-family homes. Some may ask whether the boomburb is
merely a new kind of satellite city. Business, particularly manu‑
facturing, has been decentralizing for many decades—perhaps
even a century. For example, in a 1915 publication titled Satellite
Cities: A Case Study of Industrial Suburbs, the economist Graham
Taylor described an emerging metropolitan pattern in which
heavy industry was rapidly shifting to the suburbs in search of
more space and lower costs. More than seventy-five years ago,
the sociologist Ernest Burgess noted that there was already busi‑
Newark, New Jersey, across
the Hudson River from New
York City, is a good example
of a satellite city.
“Boomburb” is Lang and
LeFurgy’s word for the rapidly
growing, densely populated
peripheral centers of American cities. Like Joel Garreau’s
“Edge City,” this neologism
drapes a cleverly fashioned
piece of language over a complex, dynamic reality. Lang
and LeFurgy are very specific
about the characteristics of
this new form, which they outline in detail here. Boomburbs
emerged when the “new urban
story” of city builders — the
story of new cities hewn from
wilderness, birthing farmland
and supply regions the cities
could dominate — fell apart
into “sprawl” and decentralized urban growth.
robert e. lang & jennifer le furgy 277
ness growth at Chicago’s edge, which he characterized as being
“centralized-decentralized” in structure.1 Early twentieth-cen‑
tury “satellite” and “centralized” suburbs mimicked big cities,
although at slightly lower density and scale. Satellites had all of
the places that defined a city: a main street shopping area, highdensity residential neighborhoods, and by the late nineteenth
century, factory districts.2 In the 1920s it was even typical for
larger satellite cities in the New York region, such as Newark, to
have a signature art deco office tower, representing an already
decentralizing service economy.3
Boomburbs, however, do not resemble these older satellites.
While boomburbs possess most elements found in cities—such
as housing, retailing, entertainment, and offices—they are not
typically patterned in a traditional urban form. Boomburbs
almost always lack, for example, a dense business core and are
thus distinct from traditional cities and satellites—not so much
in their function as in their low-density and loosely configured
spatial structure. Boomburbs are urban in fact but not in feel.
A distinction must be made between the boomburbs of a
traditional city and those of the newer and less traditional South‑
western city. The boomburbs of Phoenix, Dallas, and Las Vegas,
for example, are similar to their core city. Glendale, near Phoenix,
and Garland, near Dallas, for example, have the density and urban
form of their core cities—except for a large downtown. Boom‑
burbs in these metropolitan areas, in other words, are extensions
of the auto-dependent city typical of the Sunbelt.
Terms for the Boomburb Phenomenon
“Naming the new suburban
city” is precisely the problem
that translator Diana George
solves by translating Thomas
Sieverts’s term zwischenstadt
as “where we live now.” While
it is true that zwischenstadt
has a more literal translation—”in-between city”—such
secondary descriptions, including “edge city” or “mega-city”
(which is to say, not “the city”
Urban scholars have been attempting for the past three decades
to characterize the large suburban cities that are referred to here
as boomburbs. As William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock note,
“In the early 1970s, as concern about the inner-city crisis waned
and the decentralization of the metropolis reached new propor‑
tions, ‘the urbanization of the suburbs’ suddenly became a topic
of national interest. The ensuing flurry of articles and books
introduced neologisms such as ‘outer city,’ ‘satellite sprawl,’ ‘new
city,’ ‘suburban city,’ ‘urban fringe,’ and ‘neo city’ to describe this
phenomenon.”4 Despite years of effort to label the new suburban
form, there remains no single name for it—boomburb being one
of many. Instead, as Sharpe and Wallock note, observers use an
array of names, suggesting that planners, developers, journalists,
and academics do not yet understand it.
Part of the problem is that we are bound by a language that
hierarchically ranks living space—urban, suburban, exurban,
rural—when the old ladder image no longer applies.5 But prop‑
erly naming the new suburban city is an important step in better
understanding it. As Pierce Lewis argues, “Language is impor‑
tant. We cannot talk about … phenomena unless we possess the
vocabulary to describe them, and many observers still cannot
agree on what to call this new amorphous form of urban geog‑
raphy.”6
A boomburb, as defined in this analysis, corresponds to what
urban historian Robert Fishman refers to as a technoburb, which
he defines as “a hopeless jumble of housing, industry, commerce,
and even agricultural uses.”7 In his view, today’s sprawling subur‑
ban metropolitan areas can no longer be judged by the standards
of the old metropolis, in part because the new suburban form
“lacks any definable borders, a center or a periphery, or clear dis‑
tinctions between residential, industrial, and commercial zones.”8
In Jane Jacobs’s parlance, boomburbs have far more microdes‑
tinations than macrodestinations.9 Yet while many boomburbs
may fit what Robert Lang refers to as edgeless cities, several also
are what Joel Garreau calls edge cities, a term for metropolitan
focal points outside the urban cores and older satellite suburbs.10
A list of such terms appears [below].11
anticity
boomburb
city a la carte
concentrated
decentralization
countrified city
disurb
edge city
edge county
edgeless city
exit ramp economy
exopolis
galactic city
limitless city
major diversified center
megacenter
megacounty
megalopolis unbound
metropolitan-level core
metropolitan suburb
metrotown
minicity
mini-downtown
multicentered net
net of mixed beads
new downtown
outer city
penturbia
but a type of city), cannot displace the primary terms they
rely on. “Where we live now”
solves the problem by offering
plain language independent of
the terms “city” and “countryside.” “Where we live now” is
also sufficiently empty to function as “city” does. “City” and
“countryside” dominate the
public imagination because
they refer to everything and
nothing. They stand for whatever we like to imagine of the
urban and the rural. They are
chameleon words that lead us
into more specific descriptions
by presenting a familiar face
that is little more than a mirror.
“Where we live now” functions
the same way. It is plain, and
meaningful to all because it is
unspecific. And so, just as we
do with the word “city,” readers can project into the phrase
without hesitation and then
go on to learn its meanings by
reading. Sieverts’s discussion of
“where we live now” functions
in precisely the same way discussions of “the city” function.
regional city
regional town center
rururbia
servurb
slurb
spillover city
spread city
sprinkler city
stealth city
subcenter
suburban business center
suburban downtown
None of these can beat Myron
Eells’s nineteenth - century
neologism “the shruburbs”
(see the excerpt from Bourke
and DeBats, above).
Lang and LeFurgy’s description of a boomburb — no clear
center or periphery, no clear
distinction between residential,
industrial, and commercial
zones — is Sieverts’s Zwischenstadt, or at least one form of
it, i.e. where we live now.
The look and feel of these rapidly proliferating ‘boomburbs’
does not accord with the trajectory of city-building, as Marx
or Braudel would tell it. Concentration and dominance
gives way to sprawl and interdependency. The heroic tale of
suburban employment center
suburban freeway corridor
suburban growth corridor
suburban nucleation
technoburb
the new heartland
urban core
urban galaxy
urban realm
urban village
And the names keep coming. Not content with the fast
growth implied by the term boomburb, Dolores Hayden recently
added zoomburb to describe even more explosive suburban
development.12
The terms above capture the dispersal of urban functions,
most notably the suburbanization of offices. Thus the terms
suburb and suburban continue to be used. But this process is
much more complex than a simple dispersal; the decentralization
involves a degree of recentralization, hence the terms city, urban,
center, downtown, core. The spread-out nature of the phenomenon
is reflected in the terms corridor, regional, spillover, spread, outer,
unbound, edge, edgeless, and limitless. There are also indications
that the new forms negate the traditional city, as in anticity, exopolis, and outtown, and bring together features usually considered
opposites, as in countrified city and urban village. The labels were
not conceived in a political vacuum: derogatory appellations also
are used, such as disurb and slurb.
The Look and Feel of Boomburbs
Boomburbs are much more horizontally built and less pedestrian
friendly than most older suburbs. The fifty-four boomburbs col‑
lectively—with millions of residents in total—may have fewer
urban qualities than those of such older suburbs as Arlington
and Alexandria, Virginia, together.
Alexandria is a city of almost 130,000 residents; Arlington
is a county of 190,000 people (it is the smallest county in the
United States and is often treated in the U.S. census as a city).
Together, the population of these two places is slightly smaller
than a big boomburb such as Anaheim. Arlington and Alexan‑
dria are directly across the Potomac River from Washington and
occupy the entire area that was once part of the District but was
ceded back to Virginia in the mid-nineteenth century because
it was not developing.13 Compared to the District they are sub‑
urbs, but they are urban environments when contrasted to the
rest of suburban northern Virginia. Note also that neither place
is known nationally for its big-city qualities. Arlington is famous
for its national military cemetery, Alexandria is loved by tourists
for its quaint Old Town.
Alexandria’s Old Town section is the most pedestrian-friendly
area in the two places. Arlington has a much larger office market.
Newer parts of Alexandria also have office and high-rise residen‑
tial buildings. The Washington region’s Metrorail system laces
through both Arlington and Alexandria (especially the former).
Arlington’s Metro stops have encouraged mixed-use, high-den‑
sity development.14 Alexandria’s are beginning to develop in the
same way. Both places are fully built, and most new development
is within the existing built environment.
Two traditional urban qualities—high-rise buildings and
pedestrian- oriented streets—provide a basis for comparing these
D.C. suburbs with boomburbs. The number of tall buildings is
easy to assess. All buildings worldwide above thirty-five meters
tall (about 115 feet) are tracked by Emporis, a real estate consult‑
ing firm.15… Arlington has 152 high-rise buildings, most of them
offices, followed by residences and hotels. Alexandria has 52
high-rises. Compare their total of 204 to 160 for all boomburbs
combined.
Some boomburbs contain substantial amounts of office space:
Scottsdale, Arizona, and Plano, Texas, have dozens of office
buildings with millions of square feet of floor space—and mostly
upper-end space at that. Yet together these two communities have
only four high-rise office buildings. Welcome to the boomburbs,
where low-slung office cubes line the freeways.
In recent years there has been a trend in boomburbs toward
taller buildings, especially residential towers. Consider Anaheim,
the rise of the city is forced into
revision, becoming a tragedy
that in North Pacific America
runs something like this: Our
cities grew in a wilderness;
then farmlands spread as
the forests were cut back; but
newcomers soon flooded our
small Eden and began to spoil
our farms and cities by filling
both with new growth, ugly
growth, sprawl. The hero’s
tale became a tragedy in the
playing out of these impossible
ideals, city and countryside.
But in the cracks and fissures, the places where “city”
was least perfectly imposed,
where “countryside” had longest been exposed to the bad
weather of human life—that
is to say, in sprawl—we still
find other logics, other histories, and other possibilities.
These possibilities flourish
in the peripheral areas around
central cities, the ones that
have outstripped the center
in the rate of their growth
and, often, in their populations. Among them, Lang
and LeFurgy count Beaverton
and Gresham, Oregon (‘baby
boomburbs,’ central cities, the
ones that have outstripped the
center), the first and second
most densely populated cities
in the state, flanking the third
densest, Portland. In this
landscape we find the return
of the repressed, an older
urban logic, now made monstrous by growth.
If our strategies are limited to
perfecting nostalgia for vanishing ideals (such as Main Street
or historic Old Town), we
are unlikely to do better than
Disneyland. Disney has more
money and control than most
municipalities or developers.
Perfecting nostalgia (as in the
New Urbanist developments
of Seabrook, Washington, or
Kentlands, Maryland) takes
money and control. And
there’s a substantial boomburb
market for that. But there are
also many unruly poor. To
find an urbanism that does
not shuttle them into neglected
landscapes, we will have to
look past traditional images of
urbanity (the Congress for the
New Urbanism can provide
you a list) into other histories
of human settlement.
which has proposals on the books for six high-rise condomini‑
ums, all of which exceed twenty-three floors, with one rising to
thirty-five. In fact, Orange County, California, is in a miniboom
of high-rises centered mostly in Anaheim, Costa Mesa, Irvine,
and Santa Ana.16 Tempe and Scottsdale, Arizona, are also seeing
a burst in this building, with ten condominium towers either
approved or under construction. Overall, boomburbs have fifteen
residential towers under construction, thirty-three more have
been approved, and twenty-three have been proposed.17
The other urban quality missing from boomburbs—pedes‑
trian-friendly streets—is harder to measure than building
height. Large areas of Alexandria and Arlington were built for
pedestrians. These include Old Town, Alexandria, and the areas
around the Metro stops along Arlington’s Wilson Boulevard cor‑
ridor at Rosslyn, Clarendon, Virginia Square, and Ballston. Both
places also have densely built pre–World War II subdivisions.
Conservatively, perhaps five square miles of Arlington and Alex‑
andria combined is friendly to pedestrians. That may not seem
like much, but it may equal or surpass the total of such space in
all of the boomburbs in America put together. There are plenty
of boomburbs—even big ones—in which pedestrian-oriented
areas are only several blocks or even one block. The so-called
downtowns of cities such as North Las Vegas and Chandler are
quite literally one block. Those boomburbs with several blocks
of downtown include Plano, Texas, and Riverside and Orange
in California. Tempe has a decent downtown (which is helped
by being proximate to Arizona State University), as do Salem,
Oregon (the only boomburb state capital—and the biggest outlier
in the study), and Bellevue, Washington.
There are also some boomburb new towns on the model of
places such as Reston, Virginia. Las Colinas in Irving, Texas, is an
example of a well designed new town, with shopping, residences,
and offices mixed together. Further down the pedestrian-friendly
scale is a “lifestyle center” such as The Camp in Costa Mesa, which
is a shopping area laid out in village form. Victoria Gardens is an
ambitious lifestyle center in Rancho Cucamonga, California; it
has some high-density housing mixed with retail space and all
laid out in an urban grid. Finally, there is Main Street USA at
Disneyland in Anaheim, which ironically is a bigger main street
than the ones found in perhaps half of all boomburbs.
Boomburbs: Cool, Hip, and Hot
From the perspective of big cities, or even of Arlington, it is easy
for some people to feel smug in relation to boomburbs. But attrac‑
tiveness is an elusive quality. The boomburbs may be horizontally
built and virtually 100 percent auto oriented, but some are con‑
sidered “cool” or even “hot” or at least “hip” by the media. These
are the adjectives especially applied to boomburbs in Orange
County, California. The Camp in Costa Mesa, in Orange County,
for example, is full of twentysomethings trolling for the latest in
surfing gear. And nearby Irvine houses the center of auto design,
in its Spectrum office complex (because according to a Spectrum
developer at the Irvine Corporation, Orange County is a proving
ground for “cool” cars).18
Even in the remote edges of northeastern Mesa, Arizona,
where speculative McMansions are under construction in gated
cul de sacs, upscale and trendy shopping and dining are already
firmly planted. A major surprise in many of the authors’ site tours
in the new parts of boomburbs is how much urban artifacts are
already present. Not just chain restaurants—although there were
plenty—but locally owned, white linen restaurants, many already
filled with regulars. Along with restaurants are stores selling
high-cost modern furnishings.
Another surprise, and one that contradicts the new urbanist
notions on the use of space, is the fact that boomburb minimalls are alive with street life. New urbanists have been sharply
critical of the supposed alienation produced by modern subur‑
ban retail centers, in contrast to traditional town centers.19 But
shopping malls have come a long way from the utilitarian days
when stores starkly fronted onto parking lots. Sidewalks have
widened, and most malls and restaurants in the Sunbelt offer
outdoor seating. Chains such as Starbucks often anchor a public
space in these places. On site tours to the boomburbs the authors
repeatedly observed that social life in mini-malls stands as per‑
haps the empirical finding most contrary to preconceived ideas
of suburban alienation. Some future Jane Jacobs may turn urban
planning orthodoxy on its head by describing the intricate social
ballet of these spaces and perhaps could argue—as Jacobs did
for the city—that boomburbs need to be studied on their own
terms.20
The literature of where we
live now is in fact the essential resource we need in order
to move beyond the current
divisive struggles of urban
planning. Some of it appears
in the final section of this
volume; most of it remains to
be written.
†
Some Surprises
Boomburbs being cool or hip is but one of the surprises that
turned up in the research for this book (of which being hot was
not a surprise). Another opinion of boomburbs—that they are
rich, elitist, white, and exclusive—is also wrong for the most
part. Here are our findings:
In the Portland area, five new
immigrants settle in the suburbs for every one that settles in
Portland itself. Beaverton, the
fastest growing, consequently
has higher concentrations of
foreign-born, foreign–first language, as well as Southeast
Asian and Hispanic populations. It is interesting that
African-Americans are the one
“minority” census category that
remains in much higher concentrations in the old center of
Portland (albeit only at 10 percent, compared to less than 2
percent in Beaverton).
• Several boomburbs have some of the highest percentages of
foreign- born populations in the United States, often exceeding
that of central cities. Boomburbs with diverse populations have
been labeled “new Brooklyns.”
• Housing in some new Brooklyns is among the most crowded
in the United States, with two or more people to a room.
• Boomburbs have less affordable housing than much of the
nation—only about half of boomburb residents can afford to
buy houses in their community, as opposed to a U.S. average
of nearly 59 percent. Because of this, homeownership in boom‑
burbs tends to be lower than the national average.
• Boomburbs are much more like one another than like a com‑
parably sized traditional city. Multiple demographic forces
sustain growth, with often high levels of both immigration
and migration.
• Many boomburbs have a right side and a wrong side of the
tracks—or, more accurately, of the freeway. For example,
Interstate 15 literally divides North Las Vegas’s affluent and
distressed halves.
• The Southwestern boomburbs are a land of big skies and small
lots, ironically, for a place with such open spaces.
• Boomburbs can be so big that parts of the city may be declin‑
ing while other parts are still developing. For instance, the
central parts of Chandler, Arizona, badly need redevelopment,
although developers are building new housing in open desert
that the city has annexed.
• Most boomburbs are newer than the rest of the nation, with
housing eight years newer than the U.S. average (1979 versus
1971). Yet seven boomburbs have housing older than the
national average.
• Many, if not most, boomburbs are approaching their buildout
point. The year each runs out of land—and its peak population
when it does—is usually easily predicted. By 2020 more than
half of present-day boomburbs will be built out.
• Just about every boomburb mayor interviewed would like to
have light-rail transportation in his or her city, reflecting a shift
in projection of growth from out to up: light rail would promote
real estate development in the downtown. Light-rail projects
are under way in Tempe and Mesa, Arizona, Lakewood, Colo‑
rado, and Mesquite, Texas.
• Only three boomburbs contain edge cities (or large clusters
of suburban offices and shopping malls). But boomburbs col‑
lectively do contain plenty of office space in edgeless cities
(scattered developments that never coalesce into edge cities).
• A dozen boomburbs and eighteen baby boomburbs have more
jobs than households, and about two-thirds of both city types
nearly have a jobs-to-housing balance.
Beaverton has light-rail, and
is designing around it. Existing routes that radiate out
from the old center of Portland have, in 2008, been
supplemented with new rail
connecting Beaverton directly
to other “peripheral” concentrations, reflecting the new
geography of commuting.
Washington County (old Tuality) reached a “zero-commute”
balance of jobs to housing in
the 1990s.
• Boomburb leaders often worry about the next round of boom‑
burbs that are gaining on their city—and maybe at the expense
of their city.
• Almost all boomburb mayorships are part-time (often nonpay‑
ing) jobs. Given the size of these places, it is hard to believe that
more of these positions are not full time.
• Boomburbs have devised a number of strategies to adapt gov‑
ernments intended for small towns to the realities of big cities.
In many cases, private solutions relieve the burden on both
public finance and management.
• Most boomburbs have been growing rapidly since 1940, so
their boom started with World War II and did not wait for the
postwar era.
• Several dozen new boomburbs could form by the mid-twentyfirst century. Interestingly, some of these places are as yet
unoccupied and unnamed but are part of big proposed proj‑
ects, such as Superstition Vistas east of Phoenix.21
Why Study Boomburbs?
To recognize what an affront
the rise of these former
suburbs is, imagine if the
demographic shift was accompanied by a name-change
and, for example, Portland
disappeared into “Greater
Beaverton.” Yet “dominant
cities,” in the old European
model, have routinely subsumed and even annexed
nearby, competing cities.
Boomburbs and baby boomburbs are critical cities to examine
on their own terms. For one thing, they contain one in nine U.S.
suburban dwellers. Since 1990 over half of all growth in cities
of 100,000–400,000 residents has been in these cities: boom‑
burbs now account for a quarter of all people who live in this
size city. When the bank robber Willie Sutton was asked, Why
do you rob banks? his famous answer was, Because that’s where
the money is. For similar reasons we study boomburbs and baby
boomburbs: because that is where the people are.… In addition,
a study of boomburbs reveals how large-scale communities are
being built and points to how America is growing.
The key finding is not entirely surprising: U.S. cities developed
since 1950 have been built around automobiles. But what fills this
auto-dependent space is often unexpected. For example, Ameri‑
ca’s new face of poverty is surprisingly often seen in boomburb
neighborhoods of small single-family homes, neighborhoods that
once represented the American dream. In addition, these cities
constitute a new census type. In the Census Bureau’s redefinition
of metropolitan America, it reformulated its municipal classifica‑
tion from the old central-city concept to the new principal-city
concept.22 Interestingly, dozens of boomburbs and baby boom‑
burbs, once termed noncentral cities (that is, suburbs), are now
termed principal cities and have a metropolitan statistical area
identification.23
The Census Bureau, in loosening its concept of what consti‑
tutes a city in the metropolitan context, recognizes that boomburbs
have a principal role in their regions, and some metropolitan sta‑
tistical areas may incorporate their names (such as the Phoenix,
Mesa, Scottsdale metropolitan statistical area). Redefining many
suburbs as cities added almost 13 million people to the principalcity share of metropolitan area population.24 Were it not for the
new category, central cities would be seen as losing a significant
share of metropolitan growth.
A study of boomburbs and baby boomburbs also sheds light
on other fast-developing parts of the country, such as fast-grow‑
ing counties containing mostly unincorporated land. Further,
the patterns of growth found in boomburbs often apply to big
suburban counties around large cities like Atlanta, Nashville, and
Washington.25 The major exception to this observation concerns
governance: boomburbs and baby boomburbs are incorpo‑
rated and thus are managed differently from unincorporated
developments, and understanding this contrast can help shape
development patterns. For example, commercial development in
large suburban counties may occur across a wide area, with the tax
benefits being shared equally. By contrast, boomburbs—as sepa‑
rate incorporated places—often compete against one another for
land uses that generate high sales taxes. This theme is explored
throughout the book and forms a major focus in the business and
governance chapters.
In an even broader sense, studying boomburbs provides
insight into metropolitan change writ large. There is a tradition
in the sociological literature to do a depth analysis on one type of
city or even of individual neighborhood to catch sight of the larger
theoretical currents. Consider such classic works as Middletown
and Levittown and more contemporary studies such as Streetwise
and the Celebration Chronicles.26 In Levittown, the new town is
treated as both an exemplar and a metaphor for all U.S. post–
World War II suburbia. This work does suffer somewhat from a
limitation due to face validity (a problem with all case analysis),
but it succeeds in fleshing out some basic truths about life in
tract-style subdivisions. In Celebration Chronicles, the approach
is to treat the town of Celebration as representive of the most
modern manifestation of suburbia and to test (and find wanting)
the “new urbanist” claim that an “architecture of engagement”
enhances social interaction.27
By offering an in-depth, objective, nonpolarizing view of large
suburban cities, this book can be important not only to policy‑
makers but also to developers, city officials, and of course all who
find themselves living in a boomburb. It may be no accident that
boomburbs boomed, but the size these places reached and the
speed at which they became complicated urban environments
have an accidental quality. Boomburbs were often planned, but
few planned to become cities (and some even remain in denial).
Even boomburbs that have stopped growing face the consequences
of their earlier growth. As this book shows, they are the proving
grounds for a twenty-first-century suburban cosmopolitanism.
Notes
1
Graham R. Taylor, Satellite Cities: A Case Study of Industrial
Suburbs (New York: Appleton, 1915); Ernest W. Burgess, Urban
Community: Selected Papers from the Proceedings of the American
Sociological Society (University of Chicago Press, 1925).
2 James Borchert, “Residential City Suburbs: The Emergence of a
New Suburban Type, 1880–1930,” Journal of Urban History 22, no.
3 (1996): 283–307.
3 James W. Hughes, K. Tyler Miller, and Robert E. Lang, The New
Geography of Services and Office Buildings (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Center for Urban Policy Research, 1992).
4 William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock, “Bold New City or Built-Up
‘Burb?’ ” American Quarterly 46, no. 1 (1994): 4.
5 Robert E. Lang, “Labeling America’s New Urban Form,” Associa‑
tion of Collegiate Schools of Planning/Association of European
Schools of Planning, Toronto, Ontario, 1996.
6 Pierce F. Lewis, “The Urban Invasion of Rural America: The Emer‑
gence of the Galactic City,” in The Changing American Countryside:
Rural People and Places, edited by Emery N. Castle (University
Press of Kansas 1995), p. 61.
7 Robert Fishman, “America’s New City: Megalopolis Unbound,”
Wilson Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1990): 24–45; quotation on p. 26. See
also Robert Fishman, “Space, Time and Sprawl,” Architectural
Digest 64, nos. 3, 4 (1994): 45–47.
8
Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias, p. 25.
9 Jacobs “The Greening of the City.”
10 Robert E. Lang, Office Sprawl: The Evolving Geography of Business
(Brookings, 2000); Lang, Edgeless Cities; Garreau, Edge City.
11 From Peter J. Taylor and Robert E. Lang, “The Shock of the New:
100 Concepts Describing Recent Urban Change,” Environment
and Planning A 37, no. 5 (2004): 951–58.
12 Hayden, A Field Guide to Sprawl.
13 Arlington actually fits into this area, while Alexandria’s new
section spills out into nonoriginal District of Columbia parts of
Northern Virginia.
14 Douglas Porter, Profiles in Growth Management (Washington:
Urban Land Institute, 1997).
15 See www.emporis.com (September 14, 2006).
16 James B. Kelleher, “OC Rising,” Orange County Register, June 17,
2005, p. A1; Roger Vincent, “Orange County Getting Twin HighRise Condo Towers,” Los Angeles Times, June 15, 2006, p. B1.
17 Data from www.emporis.com (September 14, 2006).
18 Debbie L. Sklar, “The Next Capital of Cool,” Irvine World News,
February 20, 2003; Dana Parsons, “Our Cover Is Blown: TV Says
We Are Hip,” Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2004, p. A22; David
Dean, vice president for strategic planning, Irvine Corporation (a
Spectrum developer), conversation with Robert Lang, October 30,
2002.
19 Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban
Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
(New York: North Point, 2000).
20 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York:
Vintage, 1961).
21 Superstition Vistas lies near the Superstition Mountains on state
trust land in Pinal County, Arizona. The land is slated for develop‑
ment over the next several decades as an enormous master-planned
community, which could be broken into several municipalities
each exceeding 100,000 residents. Morrison Institute of Public
Policy, The Treasure of the Superstitions: Scenarios for the Future of
Superstition Vistas (Arizona State University, 2006).
22 William H. Frey and others, Tracking Metropolitan America into the
21st Century: A Field Guide to the New Metropolitan and Micropolitan Definitions, Living City Census Series (Brookings, 2004).
23 Lang, Blakely, and Gough, “Keys to the New Metropolis.”
24 Ibid.
25 See also Lang and Gough, “Growth Counties.”
26 Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrill Lynd, Middletown: A Study in
Modern American Culture (Harvest Books, 1931); Herbert Gans,
The Levittowners (Columbia University Press, 1967); Elijah Ander‑
son, Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community
(University of Chicago Press, 1992); Andrew Ross, The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Values in
Disney’s New Town (New York: Ballantine, 1999).
27 See Stephanie Bothwell, Raymond Gindroz, and Robert Lang,
“Restoring Community through Traditional Neighborood Design:
A Case Study of Diggstown Public Housing,” Housing Policy
Debate 9, no. 1 (1998): 89–114; quotation on p. 89.
Section Three: Theory after History
Raymond Williams
excerpt from The Country and the City
We return to the concluding
chapter of Raymond Williams’s essential account of
the country and the city.
Here, the global fallout of this
fundamental dichotomy is
made plain.
Cities and Countries
I
The country and the city are changing historical realities,
both in themselves and in their interrelations. Moreover, in our
own world, they represent only two kinds of settlement. Our real
social experience is not only of the country and the city, in their
most singular forms, but of many kinds of intermediate and new
kinds of social and physical organisation.
Yet the ideas and the images of country and city retain their
great force. This persistence has a significance matched only by
the fact of the great actual variation, social and historical, of the
ideas themselves. Clearly the contrast of country and city is one of
the major forms in which we become conscious of a central part
of our experience and of the crises of our society. But when this is
so, the temptation is to reduce the historical variety of the forms of
interpretation to what are loosely called symbols or archetypes: to
abstract even these most evidently social forms and to give them
a primarily psychological or metaphysical status. This reduction
often happens when we find certain major forms and images and
ideas persisting through periods of great change. Yet if we can
see that the persistence depends on the forms and images and
ideas being changed, though often subtly, internally and at times
unconsciously, we can see also that the persistence indicates some
permanent or effectively permanent need, to which the changing
interpretations speak. I believe that there is indeed such a need,
and that it is created by the processes of a particular history. But
if we do not see these processes, or see them only incidentally,
we fall back on modes of thought which seem able to create the
permanence without the history. We may find emotional or intel‑
lectual satisfaction in this, but we have then dealt with only half
the problem, for in all such major interpretations it is the coex‑
istence of persistence and change which is really striking and
interesting, and which we have to account for without reducing
either fact to a form of the other. Or, to put it more theoretically,
we have to be able to explain, in related terms, both the persis‑
tence and the historicity of concepts.
The ideas of the country and the city, often are among the
major cases to which this problem applies. It is clear, for example,
that an idea derived from experience of a medieval city cannot
be taken, in a merely nominal continuity, as an idea about a
twentieth-century metropolis, any more than a pastoral idea of
rural Boeotia can be taken as a relevant interpretation of modern
Norfolk. But equally we cannot say that the idea of pastoral inno‑
cence, or of the city as a civilising agency, coming up, as each
does, in so many periods and forms, is a simple illusion which
has only to be exposed or contradicted. Exposure and contradic‑
tion are often critically necessary, but if we keep only to the ideas
we are already aware of this, in the comparable persistence of
ideas of rural idiocy or the city as a place of corruption. We then
find ourselves facing the further questions: what kinds of experi‑
ence do the ideas appear to interpret, and why do certain forms
occur or recur at this period or at that?
To answer these questions we need to trace, historically and
critically the various form of the ideas. But it is useful, also, to
stop at certain points and take particular cross-sections: to ask not
only what is happening, in a period, to ideas of the country and the
city, but also with what other ideas, in a more general structure,
such ideas are associated. For example we have to notice the regu‑
lar sixteenth- and seventeenth-century association of ideas of the
city with money and law; the eighteenth-century association with
wealth and luxury; the persistent association, reaching a climax
in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the mob
and the masses; the nineteenth and twentieth-century associa‑
tion with mobility and isolation. Each of these ideas has a certain
persistence, but isolation, for example, only emerges as a major
theme during the metropolitan phase of development, while
the response to the city as money ranges from isolated kinds of
corruption and intrigue to perception of a commercial and politi‑
cal system. There are similar radical differences in associations
with ideas of the country: the idea of settlement, for example, as
compared with the idea of rural retreat, which implies mobility.
Each idea can be found in very different periods, and seems to
depend on class variations, whereas the other obvious contrast,
between an idea of cultivated country, cultivation being honest
growth, and the idea of wild or unspoiled country, not cultivation
but isolated nature, has a clearer historical perspective, since the
latter so evidently involves response to a whole way of life largely
determined elsewhere. The degree to which the fact of labour is
included, in observing a working country, is similarly, as we have
seen, historically conditioned. Yet even within a period, we can
see how in an idea like that of the Golden Age an apparent simi‑
larity turns out, on analysis, to cover different real ideas, as in its
alternative uses by an aristocracy, by small proprietors and by the
landless. Often, in these cases of association and internal varia‑
tion, it matters more what else is being said than what is being
said about the country; just as in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries it often matters more what else is being said than what
is being said, in conventional ways, about the city.
This complexity goes very deep. It is useful, for example, to
see three main periods of rural complaint in which a happier
past is explicitly invoked: the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries; the late eighteenth and early nineteenth; the late nine‑
teenth and early twentieth. And it is then clear enough that each
of these corresponds to a period of exceptional change in the
rural economy, which we find directly reflected in varying ways.
But it is not only that each of these reflections comes to include
other social and metaphysical ideas. It is also that the convention
of the country as a settled way of life disturbed by unwanted and
external change has been complicated, in our own century, by
very similar ideas about towns and cities. The complaints of rural
change might come from threatened small proprietors, or from
commoners, or even, in the twentieth century, from a class of
landlords, but it is fascinating to hear some of the same phrases—
destruction of a local community, the driving out of small men,
In Portland in 2008, a great
deal is being said about
nearby small farms, dense
city neighborhoods, local
markets for local goods, sustainability, and the virtues of
planning a “European-style”
city in America (i.e., city
and country separate and
protected, and all served by
multimodal transport). Portland promotes its place “in a
global discussion.” The links
being forged between the city
of Portland and its European
or global partners leap over
many of the deeply international communities nearby,
such as Beaverton. For example, while the city of Portland
gains international recognition for its uniquely strong
urban growth boundary,
political activists in Beaverton and elsewhere (many of
them developers) work hard
to undermine it. Agendas promoted strongly inside the city
trigger impassioned opposition
from residents and developers in surrounding areas. The
restriction on building outside
the urban growth boundary
has been the flash point of this
conflict, and the state is now
involved in resolving it by reassessing its overarching vision
of “smart growth.”
indifference to settled and customary ways—in the innumerable
campaigns about the effects of redevelopment, urban planning,
airport and motorway systems, in so many twentieth-century
towns and even, very strongly, in parts of London. I have heard a
defence of Covent Garden, against plans for development, which
repeated in almost every particular the defence of the commons
in the period of parliamentary enclosures. Clearly ideas of the
country and the city have specific contents and histories, but just
as clearly, at times, they are forms of isolation and identification
of more general processes. People have often said ‘the city’ when
they meant capitalism or bureaucracy or centralised power, while
‘the country,’ as we have seen, has at times meant everything
from independence to deprivation, and from the powers of an
active imagination to a form of release from consciousness. At
every point we need to put these ideas to the historical realities:
at times to be confirmed, at times denied. But also, as we see the
whole process, we need to put the historical realities to the ideas,
for at times these express, not only in disguise and displacement
but in effective mediation or in offered and sometimes effective
transcendence, human interests and purposes for which there
is no other immediately available vocabulary. It is not only an
absence or distance of more specific terms and concepts; it is that
in country and city, physically present and substantial, the experi‑
ence finds material which gives body to the thoughts.
I have traced what I believe to be these major processes, in their
major variations, within a single literature and society: a litera‑
ture, English, which is perhaps richer than any other in the full
range of its themes of country and city; and a society which went
through a process of historical development, in rural and then
industrial and urban economies and communities, very early and
very thoroughly; still a particular history but one which has also
become, in some central ways, a dominant mode of development
in many parts of the world. Each of the phases of this history can
be looked at more deeply in itself, and there are still other ways
of describing the sequence, the interaction and the development.
There is an obvious need for more comparative studies: there is
already rich material in French and Russian literature, where
both the country and the city have related but specific major
meanings; in German thought and literature, where the idea of
the city as a cultural centre followed an especially positive course;
in American literature and culture, where the speed and scale
of the process have created very powerful and at times universal
ideas and images; in Italian culture, not only as a source, but
in the dramatic character of its contemporary transition; in the
literatures, as we have seen, of the developing world, where other
ways of seeing a related process have been becoming articulate.
All this, it is hoped and can be expected, will be specifically and
comparatively studied.
II
But it is not, was not, ever a question of study alone. The very fact
that the historical process, in some of its main features, is now
effectively international, means that we have more than material
for interesting comparisons. We are touching, and know that we
are touching, forms of a general crisis. Looking back, for exam‑
ple, on the English history, and especially on its culmination in
imperialism, I can see in this process of the altering relations
of country and city the driving force of a mode of production
which has indeed transformed the world. I am then very willing
to see the city as capitalism, as so many now do, if I can say also
that this mode of production began, specifically, in the English
rural economy, and produced, there, many of the characteristic
effects—increases of production, physical reordering of a totally
available world, displacement of customary settlements, a human
remnant and force which became a proletariat—which have since
been seen, in many extending forms, in cities and colonies and
in an international system as a whole. It then does not surprise
me that the complaints in Covent Garden echo the complaints
of the commoners, since the forces of improvement and devel‑
opment, in those specific forms—an amalgam of financial and
political power which is pursuing different ends from those of
any local community but which has its own and specific internal
rationale—are in a fundamental sense similar, as phases of capi‑
talist enterprise.
What the oil companies do, what the mining companies do,
is what landlords did, what plantation owners did and do. And
many have gone along with them, seeing the land and its proper‑
ties as available for profitable exploitation: so clear a profit that the
quite different needs of local settlement and community are over‑
ridden, often ruthlessly. Difficult and complex as this process is,
The forms that local self-determination takes today would
have surprised Williams.
Saskia Sassen, in an excerpt
below, describes the capacity
of the contemporary city—
aided and abetted by Internet
technologies—to engender a
“localization of the global.”
She finds myriad examples of
dispossessed populations that
focus on local conflicts (with
land owners, big companies,
and governmental bodies)
connecting their struggles to a
global network of fellow travelers who echo and aid their
efforts. These networks form
a centerless, dispersed web of
exchange, beyond the regional
urban landscape, linking disparate people.
since the increases in production and the increases in new forms
of work and wealth are undoubtedly real, it is usually more neces‑
sary to see this kind of contrast—between forms of settlement
and forms of exploitation—than to see the more conventional
contrast between agricultural and industrial development: the
country as cooperation with nature, the city and industry as
overriding and transforming it. There is a visible qualitative dif‑
ference between the results of farming and the results of mining,
but if we see only this contrast we see only some of the results.
The effects on human settlements, and on customary or locally
self-determined ways of life, are often very similar. The land, for
its fertility or for its ore, is in both cases abstractly seen. It is used
in an enterprise which overrides, for the time being, all other
considerations. Since the dramatic physical transformations of
the Industrial Revolution we have found it easy to forget how
profoundly and still visibly agriculture altered the land. Some of
the earliest and most remarkable environmental effects, negative
as well as positive, followed from agricultural practice: making
land fertile but also, in places, overgrazing it to a desert; clearing
good land but also, in places, with the felling of trees, destroying
it or creating erosion. Some of these uses preceded any capitalist
order, but the capitalist mode of production is still, in world his‑
tory, the most effective and powerful agency for all these kinds
of physical and social transformation. The city is only one if now
conventional way of seeing this kind of change; and the country,
as almost all of us now know it, is undoubtedly another. Indeed
the change from admiration of cultivated country to the intense
attachment to ‘unspoiled’ places is a precise record of this persis‑
tent process and its effects at one of its most active stages.
But we must then also make a distinction between such tech‑
niques of production and the mode of production which is their
particular social form. We call the technical changes improve‑
ment and progress, welcome some of their effects and deplore
others, and can feel either numbed or divided; a state of mind
in which, again and again, the most abstract and illusory ideas
of a natural rural way of life tempt or at least charm us. Or we
can fall back on saying that this is the human condition: the irre‑
solvable choice between a necessary materialism and a necessary
humanity. Often we try to resolve it by dividing work and lei‑
sure, or society and the individual, or city and country, not only
in our minds but in suburbs and garden cities, town houses and
country cottages, the week and the weekend. But we then usually
find that the directors of the improvements, the captains of the
change, have arrived earlier and settled deeper; have made, in
fact, a more successful self-division. The country-house, as we
saw, was one of the first forms of this temporary resolution, and
in the nineteenth century as many were built by the new lords of
capitalist production as survived, improved, from the old lords,
sometimes their ancestors, of the agrarian change. It remains
remarkable that so much of this settlement has been physically
imitated, down to details of semi-detached villas and styles of
leisure and weekends. An immensely productive capitalism, in
all its stages, has extended both the resources and the modes
which, however unevenly, provide and contain forms of response
to its effects.
It is then often difficult, past this continuing process which
contains the substance of so much of our lives, to recognise, ade‑
quately, the specific character of the capitalist mode of production,
which is not the use of machines or techniques of improvement,
but their minority ownership. Indeed as the persistent concentra‑
tion of ownership, first of the land, then of all major means of
production, was built into a system and a state, with many kinds
of political and cultural mediation, it was easy for the perception
to diminish though the fact was increasing. Many modern rural‑
ists, many urban conservationists, see ‘the state’ or ‘the planners’
as their essential enemy, when it is quite evident that what the
state is administering and the planners serving is an economic
system which is capitalist in all its main intentions, procedures
and criteria. The motorway system, the housing clearance, the
office-block and supermarket replacing streets of homes and
shops, may materialise in the form of a social plan, but there is no
case in which the priorities of a capitalist system have not, from
the beginning, been built in. It may be simple industrial develop‑
ment or mining: the decision will have been made originally and
will be finally determined by owners calculating profit. The road
system will include their needs and preferences for modes of dis‑
tribution and transport, and these are given priority, either as in
the case of lorries against railways or as in the more general situa‑
tion in which the land itself is looked on, abstractly, as a transport
network, just as it is looked on elsewhere, again abstractly, as
an opportunity for production. Housing clearance and housing
shortage are alike related to the altered distribution of human
Minority ownership (that
is, the fact of a few rich
people owning so much) is
the offense Williams wants
to rally us against. Not the
forms through which minority
ownership has expressed itself
(including the dichotomy of
city and country), but the
very mode of capitalism itself,
which is this imbalance of
wealth. Justice is only possible
with its redress. While positive change need not be this
radical (though, why not?),
pragmatic planners can learn
that a “sense of ownership”
among “stakeholders” catalyzes more meaningful change
than would the victory of one
set of interests over another.
In terms of Portland’s current
conflicts, for example, it would
be a mistake to dismiss the
“suburbanites” or developers
as too ignorant or self-interested; rather we should find
common cause with what is
valuable to them. It is by now
clear that the divisive ideals of
“city” and “countryside” do
not help us uncover any compelling middle ground.
Information, a ceaseless river
of it, has become the balm
that calms us whenever doubt
creeps in. To “understand,”
for example, planning problems, we attend hearings and
read pundits in the papers.
We track and contribute to
blogs. The constant weaving
together of this discourse keeps
our minds aligned with what
we thought we knew, with
the common wisdom that’s
encoded in the way we shape
questions: Should there be a
limit to urban growth? How
do we protect family farms?
The very questions contain
their answers and preserve a
conflict that is so old and foundational we begin to panic in
its absence. Art and literature
settlement which has followed from a set of minority decisions
about where work will be made available, by the criteria of profit
and internal convenience. What are called regional policies are
remedial efforts within these priorities rather than decisively
against them. The industrial-agricultural balance, in all its physi‑
cal forms of town-and-country relations, is the product, however
mediated, of a set of decisions about capital investment made by
the minority which controls capital and which determines its use
by calculations of profit.
When we have lived long enough with such a system it is
difficult not to mistake it for a necessary and practical reality,
whatever elements of its process we may find objectionable. But
it is not only that the specific histories of country and city, and of
their immediate interrelations, have been determined, in Britain,
by capitalism. It is that the total character of what we know as
modern society has been similarly determined. The competitive
indifference or the sense of isolation in the cities can be seen as
bearing a profound relation to the kinds of social competition
and alienation which just such a system promotes. These experi‑
ences are never exclusive, since within the pressures and limits
people make other settlements and attachments and try to live by
other values. But the central drive is still there.
Again, enough of us now, for a long enough period, have
been living in cities for new kinds of communication to become
necessary, and these in their turn reveal both the extension and
mobility of the urban and industrial process and the appropria‑
tion and exploitation of the same media for capitalist purposes.
I do not only mean advertising, though that is a specific defor‑
mation of the capitalist city. Nor do I mean only the minority
ownership and purposes of the press. I mean the conversion of a
necessary social mode into specific forms. It is very striking that
in response to the city and to a more deeply interrelated society
and world we have developed habitual responses to information,
in an altered sense. The morning newspaper, the early radio
programme, the evening television, are in this sense forms of
orientation in which our central social sense is both sought and
in specific and limited ways confirmed.
Wordsworth saw that when we become uncertain in a world
of apparent strangers who yet, decisively, have a common effect
on us, and when forces that will alter our lives are moving all
around us in apparently external and unrecognisable forms, we
can retreat, for security, into a deep subjectivity, or we can look
around us for social pictures, social signs, social messages, to
which, characteristically, we try to relate as individuals but so as
to discover, in some form, community. Much of the content of
modern communications is this kind of substitute for directly
discoverable and transitive relations to the world. It can be
properly related to the scale and complexity of modern society,
of which the city is always the most evident example. But it has
become general, reaching to the most remote rural regions. It is
a form of shared consciousness rather than merely a set of tech‑
niques. And as a form of consciousness it is not to be understood
by rhetorical analogies like the ‘global village’. Nothing could be
less like the experience of any kind of village or settled active
community. For in its main uses it is a form of unevenly shared
consciousness of persistently external events. It is what appears
to happen, in these powerfully transmitted and mediated ways,
in a world with which we have no other perceptible connections
but which we feel is at once central and marginal to our lives.
This paradoxical set of one-way relationships, in itself determin‑
ing what we take to be relevant information and news, is then a
specific form of consciousness which is inherent in the dominant
mode of production, in which, in remarkably similar ways, our
skills, our energies, our daily ordering of our lives, our percep‑
tions of the shape of a lifetime, are to a critical extent defined
and determined by external formulations of a necessary reality:
that external, willed reality—external because its means are in
minority hands—from which, in so much of our lives, we seem
to have no option but to learn.
Underlying social relations often manifest themselves in these
habitual and conventional ways. The communications system is
not only the information network but also the transport network.
The city, obviously, has always been associated with concentra‑
tion of traffic. Notoriously, in modern transport systems, this is
still the case, and the problem often seems insoluble. But traffic
is not only a technique; it is a form of consciousness and a form
of social relations. I do not mean only the obvious derivation of
so many problems of traffic from a series of decisions about the
location of work and the centralisation of political power; deci‑
sions which were never, in any real sense, socially made, but
which were imposed by the priorities of a mode of production. I
mean also the forms of modern traffic. It is impossible to read the
can help us imagine other conflicts and pose new questions.
Williams was a vocal critic of
his contemporary, Marshall
McLuhan, the target of his
skepticism here, about “analogies like the ‘global village.’ ”
Possibly he would have been
no more convinced by Saskia
Sassen, who also implies
that foundational change
may come via new global
communications
technologies. However, like Williams,
Sassen insists on the importance of personal action and
personal contact (in concert
with new networks of virtual
information.)
early descriptions of crowded metropolitan streets—the people
as isolated atoms, flowing this way and that; a common stream of
separated identities and directions—without seeing, past them,
this mode of relationship embodied in the modern car: private,
enclosed, an individual vehicle in a pressing and merely aggre‑
gated common flow; certain underlying conventions of external
control but within them the passing of rapid signals of warning,
avoidance, concession, irritation, as we pursue our ultimately
separate ways but in a common mode. And this is no longer only
a feature of the city, though it is most evident there. Over a whole
network of the land this is how, at one level, we relate; indeed it
is one form of settlement, intersecting and often deeply affecting
what we think of as settlements—cities, towns, villages—in an
older mode.
In all these actual social relations and forms of conscious‑
ness, ideas of time, often of an older kind, continue to act as
partial interpreters. But we do not always see that in their main
bearings they are forms of response to a social system as a
whole. Most obviously since the Industrial Revolution, but in my
view also since the beginning of the capitalist agrarian mode of
production, our powerful images of country and city have been
ways of responding to a whole social development. This is why,
in the end, we must not limit ourselves to their contrast but go
on to see their interrelations and through these the real shape of
the underlying crisis.
It is significant, for example, that the common image of the
country is now an image of the past, and the common image of
the city an image of the future. That leaves, if we isolate them, an
undefined present. The pull of the idea of the country is towards
old ways, human ways, natural ways. The pull of the idea of the city
is towards progress, modernisation, development. In what is then
a tension, a present experienced as tension, we use the contrast
of country and city to ratify an unresolved division and conflict of
impulses, which it might be better to face in its own terms.
Aspects of the history of the ideas can then help us. We have
seen how often an idea of the country is an idea of childhood:
not only the local memories, or the ideally shared communal
memory, but the feel of childhood: of delighted absorption in our
own world, from which, eventually, in the course of growing up,
we are distanced and separated, so that it and the world become
things we observe. In Wordsworth and Clare, and in many other
writers, this structure of feeling is powerfully expressed, and we
have seen how often it is then converted into illusory ideas of
the rural past: those successive and endlessly recessive ‘happy
Englands of my boyhood’. But what is interesting now is that we
have had enough stories and memories of urban childhoods to
perceive the same pattern. The old urban working-class commu‑
nity; the delights of comer-shops, gas lamps, horsecabs, trams,
piestalls: all gone, it seems, in successive generations. These
urban ways and objects seem to have, in the literature, the same
real emotional substance as the brooks, commons, hedges, cot‑
tages, festivals of the rural scene. And the point of saying this is
not to disprove or devalue either kind of feeling. It is to see the
real change that is being written about, as we discern its common
process.
For what is at issue, in all these cases, is a growth and altera‑
tion of consciousness: a history repeated in many lives and many
places which is fundamentally an alteration of perception and
relationship. What was once close, absorbing, accepted, familiar,
internally experienced becomes separate, distinguishable, critical,
changing, externally observed. In common or backstreet, village
or city quarter, this process happens. We can say, of course, that
it is an inevitable process; that this growth of adult consciousness
is profoundly necessary, if only to see that these valued worlds
were and are being created by men. But we have to say also that
the village or backstreet of a child is not and cannot be the village
or backstreet of the contemporary working adult. Great confusion
is caused if the real childhood memory is projected, unqualified,
as history. Yet what we have finally to say is that we live in a world
in which the dominant mode of production and social relation‑
ships teaches, impresses, offers to make normal and even rigid,
modes of detached, separated, external perception and action:
modes of using and consuming rather than accepting and enjoy‑
ing people and things. The structure of feeling of the memoirs is
then significant and indispensable as a response to this specific
social deformation. Yet this importance can only be recognised
when we have made the historical judgement: not only that these
are childhood views, which contemporary adult experience con‑
tradicts or qualifies; but that a process of human growth has in
itself been deformed, by these deep internal directions of what an
adult consciousness must be, in this kind of using, consuming,
abstracting world. It is not so much the old village or the old back‑
street that is significant. It is the perception and affirmation of a
world in which one is not necessarily a stranger and an agent, but
can be a member, a discoverer, in a shared source of life. Taken
alone, of course, this is never enough. Indeed its displacement
to fantasies about old villages and old backstreets can dimin‑
ish even its immediate significance. To make an adult, working
world of that kind would involve sharp critical consciousness and
long active agency. Yet we can see here, in a central example, the
true aetiology of some of the powerful images of country and
city, when unalienated experience is the rural past and realistic
experience is the urban future. If we take only the images, we
can swing from one to the other, but without illumination. For
we have really to look, in country and city alike, at the real social
processes of alienation, separation, externality, abstraction. And
we have to do this not only critically, in the necessary history of
rural and urban capitalism, but substantially, by affirming the
experiences which in many millions of lives are discovered and
rediscovered, very often under pressure: experiences of direct‑
ness, connection, mutuality, sharing, which alone can define, in
the end, what the real deformation may be.
Saskia Sassen
excerpts from Territory Authority Rights
…The national as container of social process and power
is cracked, opening up possibilities for a geography of politics
that links subnational spaces. Cities are foremost in this new
geography. One question this engenders is how and whether we
are seeing the formation of new types of politics that localize in
these cities.
The large city of today emerges as a strategic site for these new
types of operations.1 It is one of the nexuses where the formation
of new claims materializes and assumes concrete forms. It does
not necessarily represent a majority situation but is rather a sort
of frontier zone for novel, perhaps merely incipient, forms of the
political, the economic, the “cultural,” and the subjective (AbuLughod 1989; Watson and Bridges 1999; Yuval-Davis 1999; Clark
and Hoffman-Martinot 1998; Allen, Massey, and Pryke 1999).2
Today global cities especially are the terrain where multiple glo‑
balization processes assume concrete, localized forms. These
localized forms are, in good part, what globalization is about.
Thus they are also sites where some of the new forms of power
can be engaged. Much of the organizational and command side
of the global economy is located in a network of about forty global
cities, forming a strategic geography of power. Another localiza‑
tion of the global is immigration, a major process through which
a new transnational political economy and translocal households
are being constituted (Portes 1995; Bhachu 1985; Mahler 1995;
Saskia Sassen (b. 1949) is a
sociologist with an enduring
interest in the dynamics of
political empowerment. While
she is best known for catalyzing
the discussion of globalization
through her early analysis of
“global cities” (1991), her most
far-reaching work, and most
recent, assesses the confluence
of displaced poor people with
nodes of global finance in forty
or so urban centers that she
calls “a strategic terrain for a
series of conflicts and contradictions.” New York, London,
Mexico City, and Hong Kong
are examples. In these glittering capitals ringed by the
dispossessed, the poor find
common cause and a fertile
terrain for building new tools
of resistance to old or incipient
hegemonies. Sassen sees two
new “assemblages” of “territory, authority, and rights”
emerging from the dissolution
of the nation-state: on the one
hand, the global corporations
that have used the nation-state
to enable their own ascendance; and, less well known,
the dispossessed whose expulsion from citizenship—either
literally or effectively—has
landed them in the same postnational territory as the global
corporations. In this selection,
Sassen focuses on the poor,
assessing their rise in cities
equipped to birth new “multi-
saskia sassen 305
scalar” assemblages—groups
operating at the most personal
and the most global levels all
at once.
The medieval city gave rise
to modern citizenship. That
process is the focus of early
chapters in Sassen’s book.
But nation-states grew to
displace cities. Now, with
vastly increased mobility and
with information freed from
most geographical bounds by
Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Boyd 1989; Georges 1990) largely in
major cities. Most immigrants, certainly in the developed world,
whether in the United States, Japan, or Western Europe, are dis‑
proportionately concentrated in major cities. Immigration is one
of the constitutive processes of globalization today (Sassen 1998:
part 1; Skeldon 1997), even though it is not recognized or repre‑
sented as such in mainstream accounts of the global economy.
If we consider that large cities concentrate both the leading
sectors of global capital and a growing share of disadvantaged
populations—immigrants, poor women, people of color gener‑
ally, and, in the megacities of developing countries, masses of
shanty dwellers—then cities have become a strategic terrain for a
series of conflicts and contradictions. We can thus think of cities
also as one of the sites for the contradictions of the globalization
of capital even though, heeding Katznelson’s (1992) observation,
the city cannot be reduced to one dynamic. Recovering cities
along these lines means recovering multiple presences in this
landscape.
The significance of the city today is as a setting for engendering
new types of citizenship practices and new types of incompletely
formalized political subjects. While citizenship originated in
cities and cities played an important role in its evolution, we
cannot simply read some of these current developments as a
return to that older historical condition. Nor does current local
city government have much to do with earlier notions of citizen‑
ship and democracy described for ancient and medieval cities in
Europe (Isin 2000: 7). Here I would like to return to the fact of
the embeddedness of the institution. What is being engendered
today in terms of citizenship practices in the frontier zone that is
the global city is quite different from what it was in the medieval
city of Weber. Today’s citizenship practices have to do with the
production of “presence” of those without power and a politics
that claims rights to the city. What the two situations share is
the notion that through these practices new forms or elements
of citizenship are being constituted and that the city is a key site
for this type of political work being, indeed, partly constituted
through these dynamics. After the long historical phase that saw
the ascendance of the national state and the scaling of key eco‑
nomic dynamics at the national level, the city is once again a scale
for strategic economic and political dynamics.
The historicity of this process rests in the fact that under
Keynesian policies, particularly the Fordist contract, and the
dominance of mass manufacturing as the organizing economic
dynamic, cities lost strategic functions and were not the site for
creative institutional innovations.3 The strategic sites were the
large factory and the processes of mass manufacturing and mass
consumer markets, as well as the national government where
regulatory frameworks were developed and the Fordist contract
instituted. The factory and the government were the strategic
sites where the crucial dynamics producing the major institu‑
tional innovations of the epoch were located. With globalization
and digitization, and the specific territorial and organizational
rearrangements, global cities emerge as such strategic sites. As
several of the key components of economic globalization and dig‑
itization instantiate in this type of city they produce dislocations
and destabilizations of existing institutional orders and legal/reg‑
ulatory/normative frames for handling urban conditions. It is the
high level of concentration of these new dynamics in these cities
that forces creative responses and innovations. 4 While the strategic
transformations are sharply concentrated in these cities, many are
also enacted (besides being diffused) in cities at the lower end of
national urban hierarchies. Furthermore, particular institutions
of the state, such as the executive branch and the Treasury, also
are such strategic sites even as other components of the state lose
significance through deregulation and privatization.
Current conditions in global cities are creating not only new
structurations of power but also operational and rhetorical
openings for new types of political actors that may have been
submerged, invisible, or without voice. A key element here is that
the localization of strategic components of globalization in these
cities means that the disadvantaged can engage the new forms of
globalized corporate power and, further, that the growing num‑
bers and diversity of the disadvantaged in these cities under these
conditions become heuristics in that they become present to each
other. It is the fact of such “presence,” rather than power per se,
that generates operational and rhetorical openings. Such an inter‑
pretation seeks to make a distinction between powerlessness and
invisibility/impotence, and thereby underlines the complexity of
powerlessness. Powerlessness is not simply the absence of power;
it can be constituted in diverse ways, some indeed marked by
digital technology, nationstates are “cracked” open.
Cities have reemerged as the
conduits of political empowerment. They are “once again
a scale for strategic economic
and political dynamics.” But
the machinery is entirely
changed. The global city,
which is to say, where we live
now, embeds individuals in
assemblages that operate at
every level, from the very local
and personal to the global,
all at once. This is Sieverts’s
Zwischenstadt at its most
concentrated: a multi-scalar
environment at once enabled
by multiplicity and inimical
to categorical separations.
Sassen’s language can be unfamiliar, and even off-putting,
but it is rarely imprecise. “The
growing numbers and diversity of the disadvantaged in
these cities under these conditions become heuristics in that
they become present to each
other,” means that by gathering so many different people
with such a variety of problems, the city turns them all
into resources for each other.
Each neighbor becomes the
ready, easy solution to another
neighbor’s problems.
saskia sassen 307
Sassen’s understanding of
powerlessness—that it “is
not simply the absence of
power”—offers us a road
away from the stark terms of
a city’s dominance over its
hinterlands and competitors.
Those separations have been
eroded, leaving all in a jumble.
Struggle of one against the
other makes little sense.
Sassen focuses on the catalyzing effects of visibility. In the
global city, change or empowerment follows from a process
of becoming visible, becoming
articulate, rather than struggles to wrest power away from
competing “others.” Or, as she
puts it with greater precision:
visibility “does not necessarily bring power, but neither
can it be flattened into some
generic powerlessness.” The
struggle is to “gain presence
… vis-à-vis each other.” This is
a politics of radical inclusion,
of coexistence rather than
competition.
impotence and invisibility, but others not. The fact that the disad‑
vantaged in global cities can gain “presence” in their engagement
with power but also vis-à-vis each other does not necessarily bring
power, but neither can it be flattened into some generic power‑
lessness. Historically this is different from the 1950s–70s in the
United States, for example, when white flight and the significant
departure of major corporate headquarters left cities hollowed
out and the disadvantaged abandoned.5 Today the localization
of the global creates a set of objective conditions of engagement
whereby local struggles, such as those against gentrification, are
actually instances of a larger conflict about rights to the city in
a context where global capital needs these cities for some of its
strategic organizational operations and a growing mass of dis‑
advantaged and minoritized people find in these same cities the
possibility for survival and for access to space, whether that is
housing or a shanty.6
The conditions that today make cities sites for political inno‑
vation in turn destabilize older systems of organizing territory
and politics (Caldeira 2002; Drainville 2004). The rescaling of
the strategic territories that articulates the new politico-economic
system contributes to the partial unbundling or at least weak‑
ening of the national as the container of social process (Taylor
1994). Insofar as citizenship is embedded and in turn marked
by its embeddedness, these new conditions may well signal the
possibility of new forms of citizenship practices and identities,
particularly enabled and made visible in cities.
The impact of the multiple transformations discussed in
the chapters in part 2 of this book has been significant in cre‑
ating operational and conceptual openings for other actors and
subjects to enter domains of activity once exclusive to national
sovereigns. Other actors, from NGOs and minority populations
to supranational organizations, are increasingly emerging as
actors in international relations.
The ascendance of a large variety of nonstate actors in the
international arena signals the expansion of an international
civil society. This is clearly a contested space, particularly when
we consider the logic of the capital market—profitability at all
costs—against that of the human rights regime. But it does
represent a space where other actors can gain visibility as indi‑
viduals and as collectivities, and come out of the invisibility of
aggregate membership in a nation-state exclusively represented
by the sovereign.
The category of global civil society is, in a way, too general
to capture the specific transboundary networks and formations
connecting or articulating multiple places and actors. A focus on
these specifics brings “global civil society” down to the spaces and
practices of daily life, furthered by today’s powerful imaginaries
around the idea that others around the world are engaged in the
same struggles. This begins to constitute a sense of global civil
society that is rooted in the daily spaces of people rather than on
some global stage. It also means that the poor, those who cannot
travel, can be part of global civil society. I include here cross-border
networks of activists engaged in specific localized struggles with
an explicit or implicit global agenda and noncosmopolitan forms
of global politics and imaginaries attached to local issues and
struggles that are part of global horizontal networks containing
multiple other such localized efforts. A particular challenge in
the work of identifying these types of processes and actors as part
of globalities is decoding at least some of what continues to be
experienced and represented as national. These types of practices
and dynamics are constitutive of globalization even though we do
not usually recognize them as such. The global city is a specific
type of site for the emergence of new types of transnational social
forms. It endogenizes global dynamics and thereby transforms
existing social alignments. And it enables even the disadvan‑
taged to develop transnational strategies and subjectivities. Often
this enablement is at heart a prise de conscience. What I mean
here is that it is not always a new social form as such but rather a
subjective, self-reflexive repositioning of an old social practice or
condition in a transnational framing. Transnational immigrant
households, and even communities, are perhaps emblematic of
these new types of micropolitics and subjectivities.
There are two strategic dynamics I seek to isolate here: the
incipient denationalizing of specific types of national settings,
particularly global cities; and the formation of rhetorical and
operational openings for actors other than the national state
in cross-border political dynamics, particularly the new global
corporate actors and the collectivities whose experience of mem‑
The “daily spaces” that constitute what Sassen calls “global
civil society” are a part of the
city. Planning and city policy
can either nurture or starve
those spaces. Simple, farreaching services such as free
wireless Internet access, public
libraries, or cheap space to
host visitors and gatherings,
can equip a city to perform
these functions better. In
many places, such as Mexico
City, it is no longer a matter
of petitioning the government
or even international bodies
to provide this or that service,
to protect this or that right. It
is a matter of organizing the
neighbors to get, say, fresh
water, a tool library, or an
Internet account. The same
is true in global cities around
the world, even down to the
scale of a city like Portland.
Global citizenship increasingly depends on the right
relations with the nearest
neighbors of all.
In a global city, Sassen
observes, a sufficient surplus
of people fall off the radar to
reassemble into something
with global political agency.
Maybe this means a shantytown out of reach of city
services and beyond the arm
of the police, finding common
saskia sassen 309
cause with dispossessed populations in other cities. One
literate neighbor with access to
a school computer or a library
is enough to make the link.
Or, more prosaically, maybe
it means a group of teenagers
whose musical tastes are out of
keeping with every venue and
radio station in town. They
make some cheap recordings
and start taking the bus to
shows in nearby towns. They
get a MySpace page and
trade e-mails with Norwegians who like their music.
They travel to Japan. Within
a few years they are part of
an international music scene
that exists entirely apart from
the for-profit entertainment
world and changes their lives,
and the lives of tens of thousands of kids elsewhere. This
is a powerful kind of politics
already being played out in
global cities such as Portland,
Montreal, São Paolo, and
Olympia, Washington. How
can urban planning plan for
this?
Sassen makes a claim for these
global cities that is so crucial
it must be repeated: “The
excluded … also can make
history, thereby signaling
the complexity of powerlessness. Many of these dynamics
become legible in cities.”
bership has not been subsumed fully under nationhood in its
modern conception, for example, minorities, immigrants, firstnation people, and many feminists.
There is something to be captured here. In the context of a
strategic space such as the global city, the types of disadvantaged
people described here are not simply marginal; they acquire pres‑
ence in a broader political process that escapes the boundaries of
the formal polity. This presence signals the possibility of a poli‑
tics. What this politics will be will depend on the specific projects
and practices of various communities. Insofar as the sense of
membership of these communities is not subsumed under the
national, it may well signal the possibility of a transnational poli‑
tics centered on concrete localities.
†
…The critical assumption here is that citizenship is inevitably
an incompletely specified contract between the state and the
citizen, and that in this incompleteness then lies the possibil‑
ity of accommodating new conditions and incorporating new
formal and informal instrumentalities. Periods of change make
this incompleteness operational and legible, whether in the con‑
testing of discrimination, aspirations to equal citizenship, the
decision by first-nation people to go directly to international fora
and bypass the national state, or the claims to legal residence by
undocumented immigrants who have met the requisite formal
and informal criteria. I also interpreted this growing distance
between the state and the citizen as the emergence of a type of
political subject that does not quite correspond to the notion of
the formal political subject that is the voting and jury-serving
citizen, notably citizen women who center their political claimmaking in the subject that is the mother or housewife rather than
citizen. The multiplying of informal political subjects points to
the possibility that the excluded (in this case from the formal
political apparatus) also can make history, thereby signaling the
complexity of powerlessness. Many of these dynamics become
legible in cities. Through the thickness of daily life and local,
mostly informal politics, cities can accommodate and enable the
unbundling of the tight articulation of the citizen and formal
state politics. These various trends resonate with the case of the
burghers in medieval cities: they were informal actors who found
in the space of the city the conditions for their source of “power”
as merchants and for their political claim making. In my inter‑
pretation, complex cities today also function as such a productive
space for the very different types of informal political actors and
their claim-making. Whether this is a productivity exclusive to
cities or whether cities simply make these processes more visible
is, at this point, an empirical question.
†
A Politics of Places on Global Circuits:
the Local as Multiscalar
The issue I want to highlight here concerns the ways in which
particular instantiations of the local can be constituted at mul‑
tiple scales and thereby generate global formations that tend
toward lateralized and horizontal networks rather than the verti‑
cal arrangements typical of entities such as the IMF or WTO. I
examine this through a focus on diverse political practices and
the technologies they use. Of particular interest is the possibility
that local, often resource-poor organizations and individuals can
become part of global networks and struggles. These practices
are contributing to a specific type of global politics, one that runs
through localities and is not predicated on the existence of global
institutions. The engagement can be with global institutions,
such as the IMF or WTO, or with local institutions, such as a
particular government or local police force charged with human
rights abuses. Theoretically these types of global politics illu‑
minate the distinction between a global network and the actual
transactions that constitute it: the global character of a network
does not necessarily imply that its transactions are equally global.
It shows the local to be multiscalar in a parallel to the preced‑
ing section, which showed the global to be multiscalar—that is,
partly embedded in a network of localities, specifically, financial
centers.
†
… An important feature of this type of multiscalar politics of the
local is that it is not confined to moving through a set of nested
Multi-scalar assemblages are
the core actors in Sassen’s
powerfully evolved global
city. These are groups bound
together by common cause,
however enduring or fleeting,
grand or prosaic, that have
agency and legibility at many
scales, from local to city to
national to global. They can
be the punks of Manchester
circulating their cheap CDs
saskia sassen 311
via PayPal, or the Coca-Cola
Company of Atlanta, Georgia, putting Manzana Lift
into the bellies of campesinos
in Chiapas. The dispossessed
and the very powerful have,
ironically, a head start on the
rest of us because they have
the least investment in the fate
of nations, those old misers of
territory, sovereignty, and
rights.
scales from the local to the national to the international but can
directly access other such local actors in the same country or
across borders. One Internet-based technology that reflects this
possibility of escaping nested hierarchies of scale is the online
workspace, often used for Internet-based collaboration (Bach and
Stark 2005). Such a space can constitute a community of practice
(Sharp 1997) or knowledge network (Creech and Willard 2001).
An example of an online workspace is the Sustainable Develop‑
ment Communications Network, also described as a knowledge
space (Kuntze, Rottmann, and Symons 2002), set up by a group
of civil society organizations in 1998; it is a virtual, open, and
collaborative organization engaged in joint communications
activities to inform broader audiences about sustainable develop‑
ment and build members’ capacities to use ICT effectively. It has
a trilingual Sustainable Development Gateway to integrate and
showcase members’ communication efforts. It contains links to
thousands of member-contributed documents, a job bank, and
mailing lists on sustainable development. It is one of several
NGOs whose aim is to promote civil society collaboration through
ICTs; others are the Association for Progressive Communications
(APC), One World International, and Bellanet.
†
In the most vivid and quotidian
ways, Craigslist demonstrates
exactly the potential Sassen
asserts here, for the Internet to
“intensify transactions among
residents of a city.”
…Yet another key scalar element here is that digital networks can
be used by political activists for global transactions, but they can
also be used for strengthening local communications and trans‑
actions inside a city. The architecture of digital networks, primed
to span the world, can intensify transactions among residents of
a city or region, and it can make them aware of neighboring com‑
munities and gain an understanding of local issues that resonate
positively or negatively with communities that are in the same
city rather than with those that are at the other end of the world
(Riemens and Lovink 2002). Recovering how the new digital
technology can serve to support local initiatives and alliances
inside a locality is conceptually important given the almost exclu‑
sive emphasis in the representation of these technologies of their
global scope and deployment.7
Returning to Howitt’s (1993) point about the constructing of
the geographical scales at which social action can occur, cyber‑
space is, perhaps ironically, a far more concrete space for social
struggles than is the national political system.… It becomes a
place where nonformal political actors can be part of the political
scene in a way that is much more difficult in national institu‑
tional channels. Nationally, politics needs to run through existing
formal systems, whether the electoral political system or the judi‑
ciary (taking state agencies to court). Nonformal political actors
are rendered invisible in the space of national politics. Cyberspace
can accommodate a broad range of social struggles and facilitate
the emergence of new types of political subjects that do not have
to go through the formal political system. Individuals and groups
that have historically been excluded from formal political systems
and whose struggles can be partly enacted outside those systems
can find in cyberspace an enabling environment both for their
emergence as nonformal political actors and for their struggles.
The types of political practice discussed here are not the cosmo‑
politan route to the global. They are global through the knowing
multiplication of local practices. These are types of sociability
and struggle deeply embedded in people’s actions and activities.
These practices are also institution-building work with global
scope that can come from localities and networks of localities
with limited resources and from informal social actors. We see
here the potential transformation of actors “confined” to domestic
roles into actors in global networks without having to leave their
work and roles in their communities. From being experienced as
purely domestic and local, these “domestic” settings are trans‑
formed into micro-environments articulated with global circuits.
They do not have to become cosmopolitan in this process; they
may well remain domestic and particularistic in their orientation
and remain engaged with their households and local community
struggles, and yet they are participating in emergent global poli‑
tics. A community of practice can emerge that creates multiple
lateral, horizontal communications, collaborations, solidarities,
and supports. I interpret these as micro instances of partial and
incipient denationalization.
†
…While suffused with history, this book does not trace the history
of the national state. Mine are analytic incursions into specific
periods as they have been constructed by particular disciplinary
forms of knowledge—history, law, geography, political science,
The Internet reconfigures all
subjects as formally equivalent, or at least equivalently
reconfigurable. That is, whoever uses the Internet can
look like anyone or anything
else. A trio of artists calling
themselves “The Yes Men”
can act as a multinational
trade organization, the WTO.
An individual can become
a museum or a school. A
soda pop can masquerade as
a teenager with a MySpace
page. Even before the gray line
of duplicity is crossed, digital
media can loosen and then
reconfigure subjectivities so
that anyone has equivalent
agency to anyone else. These
transparent operations also
help political actors become
accustomed to the constructedness of authority, whether
that is institutional authority
or the authority of “identity
politics.” All of this flexibility obliges us to be ready to
engage new kinds of political
subjects, contextually negotiated subjects whose rights
and obligations and historical
formations are not rooted in
identity or nativist claims of
entitlement.
Sassen’s method has also
informed the shaping of this
book, the one you are reading,
which uses history as “a natural experiment” to expose
“a few historical formations
which I see as critical in illuminating the processes whereby
the [city] gets assembled and
saskia sassen 313
then partly disassembled.”
As with Sassen’s account of
the nation-state, this is not a
debunking of the city nor of its
considerable role in shaping
what will supplant it. We seek
to recover (again paraphrasing Sassen) “the multifaceted
and multidirectional character of past transitions, notably
from [indigenous settlement
to city-building, so that] the
transition from [the city to
where we live now] can also
be shown to be far less defined
than a [strict] opposition.”
sociology, and technology. The result is a set of in-depth exca‑
vations of a few historical formations which I see as critical in
illuminating the processes whereby the national gets assembled
and then partly disassembled. I focus on periods when existing
configurations and stabilized meanings become unsettled.
†
… In some cases we see discontinuities surface that obscure
critical continuities, and in others we see the obverse—surface
continuities obscuring critical ruptures. Ultimately, the explana‑
tion for these multiple, partial, and frequently illegible dynamics
is that the new does not invent itself. I interpret foundational
change and the ascendance of novel formations as in good part
a function of capabilities shaped and developed in the period
preceding the one under examination—in this case, that of the
formation and ascendance of the nation-state. The conditionality
explaining the outcome—in this case partial denationalization
of the national as historically constructed—is that at least some
of those earlier capabilities become lodged in novel organiz‑
ing logics. Critical to such an analysis is a need to distinguish
between the whole and its parts, as well as deciphering the tip‑
ping points that mark the switch.
Under these conditions, history can function as a natural
experiment—one that accommodates a mix of variables, poten‑
tials, and constraints and, at the same time, reveals the outcome.
This helps develop an analytics through which to study the pres‑
ent. Looking at the present transformation through this lens
takes the analysis beyond a privileging of the new and the selfevident global.
†
… In recovering the multifaceted and multidirectional character
of past transitions, notably from the feudal order to the national
state, the transition from a national to a global age can also be
shown to be far less defined than a national-global opposition.
I used particular historical conjunctures as a type of natural
experiment, and in this sense the use of history has theoretical
and analytical aims. These are natural experiments that have
been completed—to be distinguished from a notion of the past as
completed. They can help us understand the character of social
change in complex systems. In focusing on capabilities constitu‑
tive of a given order and tracking their movement or decay across
major historic transitions, I can recover something about the
making of critical elements of a new order.
Notes
1
2
3
4
For George Simmel cities produced new mentalities and identi‑
ties: the stranger and blasé attitudes, Benjamin’s flanneur. Today,
Turner (2000) argues, these somewhat negative attributes become
positive: irony, emotional distance, cosmopolitan irony, and the
multicultural tensions of global cities become the citizen virtues
in a global city.
See here the difference with the transformation of the Enlight‑
enment and aspirations to cosmopolitanism (e.g., Kant) into
exclusionary nationalist paradigms of citizens with the develop‑
ment of the nation-state. Thus Friedrich Meinecke’s notion of
cosmopolitanism is a critique of Prussian nationalism. In the
twentieth century the critics of cosmopolitanism were generally
also critics of liberalism.
As already discussed in chapter 2, much of Weber’s examination
in The City focuses on the gradual emergence and structuring of
the force-composition of the city in various areas under different
conditions and its gradual stabilization into a distinct form. He
traces the changing composition of forces from the ancient king‑
ships through the patrician city to the demos of the ancient world,
from the Episcopal structures and fortresses through the city of
notables, to the guild-dominated cities in Europe. He is always
trying to lay bare the complex processes accompanying the emer‑
gence of urban community, which for Weber is akin to what today
we might describe in terms of governance and citizenship.
An important element in Weber’s work on cities, discussed in
chapter 2, is his emphasis on certain types of innovation and
change; the construction of rules and norms precisely because
deeper arrangements on which norms had been conditioned are
being destabilized. Herein also lie opportunities for new political
actors to emerge, as well as changes in the role or locus of older
norms, political actors, and forms of authority. This is a highly
saskia sassen 315
5
6
7
dynamic configuration where older forms of authority may strug‑
gle and succeed in reimposing themselves.
The ghetto uprisings of the 1960s were short, intense eruptions
confined to the ghettos and causing most of the damage in the
neighborhoods of the disadvantaged themselves. In these ghetto
uprisings there was no engagement with power.
The expanded demand for developing office, commercial, and
residential space for top-end users encroached on minority and
disadvantaged neighborhoods and commercial districts and led
to growing numbers of homeless beginning in the 1980s in the
major emerging global cities—New York, London, Paris, Tokyo,
and so on.
One instance of the need to bring in the local is the issue of what
databases are available to locals. Thus the World Bank’s Knowl‑
edge Bank, a development gateway aimed at spurring ICT use and
applications to build knowledge, is too large according to some
(Wilks 2001). A good example of a type and size of database is
Kubatana.net, an NGO in Zimbabwe that provides Web site con‑
tent and ICT services to national NGOs. It focuses on national
information in Zimbabwe rather than going global.
Manuel Castells
excerpt from “An Introduction to the Information Age,”
in The Blackwell City Reader
8 Timeless Time
As with all historical transformations, the emergence of a new
social structure is necessarily linked to the redefinition of the
material foundations of life, time and space. Time and space are
related, in society as in nature. Their meaning, and manifesta‑
tions in social practice, evolve throughout histories and across
cultures, as Giddens, Thrift, Harvey, Adams, Lash, and Urry,
among others, have shown.
I propose the hypothesis that the network society, as the
dominant social structure emerging in the Information Age, is
organized around new forms of time and space: timeless time,
the space of flows. These are the dominant forms, and not the
forms in which most people live, but through their domination,
they affect everybody. Let me explain, starting with time, then
with some greater detail on space, given the specific interests of
many in this conference.
In contrast to the rhythm of biological time of most of human
existence, and to the clock time characterizing the industrial
age, a new form of time characterizes the dominant logic of the
network society: timeless time. It is defined by the use of new
information/communication technologies in a relentless effort
to annihilate time, to compress years in seconds, seconds in split
seconds. Furthermore, the most fundamental aim is to elimi-
Manuel Castells (b. 1942) is
a Marxist sociologist whose
interest in the formation
of urban communities led,
ultimately, to his analysis
of contemporary “network
society” as a “space of flows.”
It is this notion—that economic value and social and
political relations are shaped
by braided and interfering
flows of information (that
secondarily direct the shaping and possession of material
or territory)—which became
foundational for many contemporary accounts of the
city and its potentials. Where
Sassen mines the subject of
global flows for pragmatic
examples of political and
social action, Castells writes
as a kind of philosopher of
the “network society” (albeit
a Marxist, and therefore
materialist, philosopher). He
speculates on what these flows
mean for human identity and
values. He provides us with a
powerful set of metaphors.
manuel castells 317
The space of flows is “the
material organization of timesharing social practices that
work through flows.” Examples
of such material organization include e-mail and other
Web-based programs, airports,
transportation routes, and the
passport control officers who
stop you or let you go. The city
of Portland is a space of flows,
shaped quite differently than
the indigenous trade networks
that preceded it, which were
also a space of flows. Flows of
information and capital braid,
interfere, and part, moving
material and territorial realities along with them. Castells
calls this motive force “the
prevalence of the logic of the
space of flows over the space
of places.” Money and information move in time (or fail
to), and this fact shapes the
construction of a building. To
complain about the building
and ignore the space of flows
would be a pointless exercise in
aesthetic criticism. Addressing
the space of flows will help you
make a better building.
The flows that Castells
describes are mostly electronic,
digital information and vast
amounts of capital moving
as swiftly as a pulse of light
in fiber-optic cables to shape
the construction of places and
lives around the globe. But
what if the flows were tidal,
oceanic, estuarial—the flow
of people and material and
ideas across a vast and laby-
nate sequencing of time, including past, present and future in the
same hypertext, thus eliminating the ‘succession of things’ that,
according to Leibniz, characterizes time, so that without things
and their sequential ordering there is no longer time in society.
We live, as in the recurrent circuits of the computer networks
in the encyclopedia of historical experience, all our tenses at the
same time, being able to reorder them in a composite created by
our fantasy or our interests.
David Harvey has shown the relentless tendency of capitalism
to eliminate barriers of time. But I think in the network society,
that is indeed a capitalist society, but something else at the same
time, all dominant processes tend to be constructed around time‑
less time. I find such a tendency in the whole realm of human
activity. I find it certainly in the split second financial transac‑
tions of global financial markets, but I also find it, for instance,
in instant wars, built around the notion of a surgical strike that
devastates the enemy in a few hours, or minutes, to avoid politi‑
cally unpopular, costly wars. Or in the blurring of the life cycle
by new reproductive techniques, allowing people a wide range
of options in the age and conditions of parenting, even storing
their embryos to eventually produce babies later either by them‑
selves, or through surrogate mothers, even after their procreators
are dead. I find it in the twisting of working life by the variable
chronology of labour trajectories and time schedules in increas‑
ingly diverse labour markets. And I find it in the vigorous effort
to use medical technology, including genetic engineering, and
computer-based medical care to exile death from life, to bring a
substantial proportion of the population to a high level of lifeexpectancy, and to diffuse the belief that, after all, we are eternal,
at least for some time.
As with space, timeless time characterizes dominant functions
and social groups, while most people in the world are still sub‑
mitted to biological time and to clock time. Thus, while instant
wars characterize the technological powers, atrocious, lingering
wars go on and on for years, around the planet, in a slow-motion
destruction process, quasi-ignored by the world until they are dis‑
covered by some television programme.
I propose the notion that a fundamental struggle in our soci‑
ety is around the redefinition of time, between its annihilation or
desequencing by networks, on one hand, and, on the other hand,
the consciousness of glacial time, the slow-motion, intergenera‑
tional evolution of our species in our cosmological environment,
a concept suggested by Lash and Urry, and a battle undertaken,
in my view, by the environmental movement.
rinthine coast or an inland
sea? This space of flows—the
coast and the rivers—shaped
patterns of indigenous urban
settlement in North Pacific
America.
9 The Space of Flows
Many years ago (or at least it seems to me as many) I proposed
the concept of Space of Flows to make sense of a body of empiri‑
cal observation: dominant functions were increasingly operating
on the basis of exchanges between electronic circuits linking
up information systems in distant locations. Financial markets,
global media, advanced business services, technology, informa‑
tion. In addition, electronically based, fast transportation systems
reinforced this pattern of distant interaction by following up
with movements of people and goods. Furthermore, new loca‑
tion patterns for most activities follow a simultaneous logic of
territorial concentration/decentralization, reinstating the unity
of their operation by electronic links, e.g. the analysis proposed
in the 1980s on location patterns of high tech manufacturing; or
the networked articulation of advanced services throughout the
world, under the system labelled as ‘global city’.
Why keep the term of space under these conditions? Rea‑
sons: (1) These electronic circuits do not operate in the territorial
vacuum. They link up territorially based complexes of produc‑
tion, management and information, even though the meaning
and functions of these complexes depend on their connection
in these networks of flows. (2) These technological linkages are
material, e.g. depend on specific telecommunication/transporta‑
tion facilities, and on the existence and quality of information
systems, in a highly uneven geography. (3) The meaning of space
evolves—as the meaning of time. Thus, instead of indulging in
futurological statements such as the vanishing of space, and the
end of cities, we should be able to reconceptualize new forms of
spatial arrangements under the new technological paradigm.
To proceed with this conceptualization I build on a long intel‑
lectual tradition, from Leibniz to Harold Innis, connecting space
manuel castells 319
and time, around the notion of space as coexistence of time. Thus,
my definition: space is the material support of timesharing social
practices.1
What happens when the time-sharing of practices (be it syn‑
chronous or asynchronous) does not imply contiguity? ‘Things’
still exist together, they share time, but the material arrangements
that allow this coexistence are inter-territorial or transterritorial:
the space of flows is the material organization of time-sharing social
practices that work through flows. What concretely this material
organization is depends on the goals and characteristics of the
networks of flows, for instance I can tell you what it is in the
case of high technology manufacturing or in the case of global
networks of drug traffic. However, I did propose in my analysis
some elements that appear to characterize the space of flows in
all kinds of networks: electronic circuits connection informa‑
tion systems; territorial nodes and hubs; locales of support and
social cohesion for dominant social actors in the network (e.g. the
system of VIP spaces throughout the world).
Dominant functions tend to articulate themselves around the
space of flows. But this is not the only space. The space of places
continues to be the predominant space of experience, of everyday
life, and of social and political control. Places root culture and
transmit history. (A place is a locale whose form, function, and
meaning, from the point of view of the social actor, are contained
within the boundaries of physical contiguity.)
In the network society, a fundamental form of social domina‑
tion is the prevalence of the logic of the space of flows over the space
of places. The space of flows structures and shapes the space of
places, as when the differential fortunes of capital accumulation
in global financial markets reward or punish specific regions, or
when telecom systems link up CBDs to outlying suburbs in new
office development, bypassing/marginalizing poor urban neigh‑
bourhoods. The domination of the space of flows over the space
of places induces intra-metropolitan dualism as a most important
form of social territorial exclusion, that has become as significant
as regional uneven development. The simultaneous growth and
decline of economies and societies within the same metropolitan
area is a most fundamental trend of territorial organization, and
a key challenge to urban management nowadays.
But there is still something else in the new spatial dynamics.
Beyond the opposition between the space of flows and the space
of places. As information/communication networks diffuse in
society, and as technology is appropriated by a variety of social
actors, segments of the space of flows are penetrated by forces of
resistance to domination, and by expressions of personal experi‑
ence. Examples:
a. Social movements. Zapatistas and the Internet (but from the
Lacandona forest). But also American Militia.
b. Local governments, key agents of citizen representation
in our society, linking up through electronic networks,
particularly in Europe (see research by Stephen Graham).
c. Expressions of experience in the space of flows.
Thus, we do witness an increasing penetration, and subversion,
of the space of flows, originally set up for the functions of power,
by the power of experience, inducing a set of contradictory power
relationships. Yes, it is still an elitist means of communication,
but it is changing rapidly. The problem is to integrate these obser‑
vations in some theory, but for this we still lack research, in spite
of some insightful elaborations, such as the one by Sherry Turkle
at MIT.
The new frontier of spatial research is in examining the
interaction between the space of flows, the space of places, func‑
tion, meaning, domination, and challenge to domination, in
increasingly complex and contradictory patterns. Homesteading
in this frontier is already taking place, as shown in the pioneer‑
ing research by Graham and Marvin, or in the reflections of Bill
Mitchell, but we are clearly at the beginning of a new field of
study that should help us to understand and to change the cur‑
rently prevailing logic in the space of flows.
Castells summons the Left’s
favorite Internet activists, the
Zapatistas, as an example
of resistance that uses the
space of flows over the space
of places. But, as Sassen and
others have pointed out, the
Zapatistas actually had to
hand-carry their communiqués from the jungle where
they were encamped, before
handing them over to allies
with computers to spam the
global media network. The
space of flows is built in places;
it is constituted by places even
as it constitutes the space of
places. Castells is well aware of
this dialectic, even if he doesn’t
develop it as far as he could in
the Zapatista example.
Dr. Sherry Turkle is a
Lacanian psychologist who
studies, among other things,
“the ‘subjective side’ of people’s
relationships with technology,
especially computers” (in the
words of her MIT faculty
profile).
Conclusion: The Network Society
So, what is the Network Society? It is a society that is structured
in its dominant functions and processes around networks. In
its current manifestation it is a capitalist society. Indeed, we live
more than ever in a capitalist world, and thus an analysis in terms
manuel castells 321
of capitalism is necessary and complementary to the theory of the
network society. But this particular form of capitalism is very dif‑
ferent from industrial capitalism, as I have tried to show.
The Network Society is not produced by information technol‑
ogy. But without the information technology revolution it could
not be such a comprehensive, pervasive social form, able to link
up, or de-link, the entire realm of human activity.
So, is that all? Just a morphological transformation? Well,
historically, transformation of social forms has always been
fundamental, both as expressions and sources of major social
processes, e.g. standardized mass production in the large fac‑
tory as characteristic of the so-called fordism, as a major form of
capitalist social organization; or the rational bureaucracy as the
foundation of modern society, in the Weberian conception.
But this morphological transformation is even more signifi‑
cant because the network architecture is particularly dynamic,
open-ended, flexible, potentially able to expand endlessly, with‑
out rupture, bypassing/disconnecting undesirable components
following instructions of the networks’ dominant nodes. Indeed,
the February 1997 Davos meeting titled the general programme
of its annual meeting ‘Building the Network Society’.
This networking logic is at the roots of major effects in our
societies. Using it:
• capital flows can bypass controls
• workers are individualized, outsourced, subcontracted
• communication becomes at the same time global and
customized
• valuable people and territories are switched on, devalued
ones are switched off.
The dynamics of networks push society towards an endless
escape from its own constraints and controls, towards an endless
supersession and reconstruction of its values and institutions,
towards a metasocial, constant rearrangement of human institu‑
tions and organizations.
Networks transform power relationships. Power in the tra‑
ditional sense still exists: capitalists over workers, men over
women, state apparatuses still torture bodies and silence minds
around the world.
Yet, there is a higher order of power: the power of flows in the
networks prevails over the flows of power. Capitalists are depen‑
dent upon uncontrollable financial flows; many workers are at
the same time investors (often unwillingly through their pension
funds) in this whirlwind of capital; networkers are inter-related in
the logic of the network enterprise, so that their jobs and income
depend on their positioning rather than on their work. States are
bypassed by global flows of wealth, information, and crime. Thus,
to survive, they band together in multilateral ventures, such as
the European Union. It follows the creation of a web of political
institutions: national, supranational, international, regional, and
local, that becomes the new operating unit of the information
age: the network state.
In this complexity, the communication between networks
and social actors depends increasingly on shared CULTURAL
CODES. If we accept certain values, certain categories that frame
the meaning of experience, then the networks will process them
efficiently, and will return to each one of us the outcome of their
processing, according to the rules of domination and distribution
in scripted in the network.
Thus, the challenges to social domination in the network soci‑
ety revolve around the redefinition of cultural codes, proposing
alternative meaning and changing the rules of the game. This is
why the affirmation of IDENTITY is so essential, because it fixes
meaning autonomously vis-à-vis the abstract, instrumental logic
of networks. I am, thus I exist. In my empirical investigation I
have found identity-based social movements aimed at changing
the cultural foundations of society to be the essential sources of
social change in the information age, albeit often in forms and
with goals that we do not usually associate with positive social
change. Some movements, that appear to be the most fruitful
and positive, are proactive, such as feminism and environmen‑
talism. Some are reactive, as in the communal resistances to
globalization built around religion, nation, territory, or ethnicity.
But in all cases they affirm the preeminence of experience over
While Castells’s pronouncement that “the power of
flows in the networks prevails over the flows of power”
sounds a gloomy, deterministic note, it also contains the
optimism Sassen has mined
from numerous examples,
worldwide, of materially disadvantaged populations that
productively engage the space
of flows. Whether it’s kids who
love a certain music or families trying to get a doctor to
a remote region or scattered
political actors finding solidarity and “heuristics” among
their virtual neighbors, the
space of flows is a tool that can
be used from either end.
I strongly disagree with Castells’s belief in the relevance
and reach of “identity-based
social movements.” I see no
reason to locate “experience,”
“meaning” and “the value of
life” primarily inside identitybased struggles in contested
terrains. Nor do I agree that,
by contrast, “networks,” which
blur identity and corrode the
tokens of power in identity
politics—such as authenticity and biography—are the
realm of “instrumentality,”
“function,” and “exchange
value.” Castells’s argument
manuel castells 323
needlessly collapses a dialectical middle ground into
a sharply opposed binary.
There’s plenty of soulless
exchange value in the realm
of territorially based identity struggles, just as there
can be real experience and
meaning in network transactions. Further, he obscures
the considerable power that
disadvantaged groups have
gained by shedding their
identities to reconstruct
themselves—and create new
political subjects—in the digital realm. I look to them for
hope. If Castells would rather
look toward “communal resistances to globalization built
around religion, nation, territory, or ethnicity,” he is
welcome to them.
instrumentality, of meaning over function, and, I would dare to
say, of use value of life over exchange value in the networks.
The implicit logic of the Network Society appears to end his‑
tory, by enclosing it into the circularity of recurrent patterns of
flows. Yet, as with any other social form, in fact it opens up a
new realm of contradiction and conflict, as people around the
world refuse to become shadows of global flows and project their
dreams, and sometimes their nightmares, into the light of new
history making.
Notes
1
Leibniz: ‘Space is something purely relative, like time; space being
an order of coexistences as time is an order of successions. For
space denotes in terms of possibility and order of things that exist
at the same time, in so far as they exist together….When we see
several things together we perceive this order of things among
themselves.’
Peter Hall and Kathy Pain
Peter Hall (b.1932) is one of
the foremost living urban historians. In 2003 the European
Union funded a three-year
research project into the
emerging “polycentric global
metropolis,” directed by Hall
and geographer Kathy Pain.
This excerpt is from their
summary report, a kind of
taxonomy of polycentric
urbanism.
excerpts from The Polycentric Metropolis:
From global cities to global city regions5
If global cities are defined—directly or indirectly—in terms of
their external information exchanges, logic suggests that poly‑
centric global MCRs should be defined in terms of corresponding
internal linkages. These linkages, accordingly, form the main
research focus of the POLYNET study. The first need is to con‑
ceptualize how information is transmitted along these links, and
how that transmission impacts on the urban nodes that connect
them into a network.
Information can move in two ways: electronically, and inside
people’s heads for face-to-face exchange (Hall, 1991). The latter
movements may occur daily on a regular basis (commuting,
which brings people’s brains into a workplace) or less frequently
and/or more irregularly (business meetings, where participants
bring their brains to a common exchange). We have good data
on commuting for most cities, but very little information on
other movements. A few pioneering attempts have been made
to record all information exchanges through diaries (God‑
dard, 1973; Carlstein et al, 1978); these suggest that electronic
exchanges tend to be more routine in character (using what
Goddard calls ‘programmed’ information) and serve as a prelude
to face-to-face meetings where ‘unprogrammed’ information is
exchanged, a point underlined by more recent studies (Mitchell,
“MCR” stands for “Mega-City
Region.”
It’s astonishing to see that
Hall and Pain forget the existence of books and printed
matter. Information moves
through books, invisible to
electronic networks (and surveillance) and freed from the
aggravating infidelity and
mortality of persons. A real
ecology of information would
include these material media
alongside the digital and interpersonal media that Hall and
Pain focus on, and be vastly
enriched by their inclusion.
peter hall & kathy pain 325
In this study, Hall and Pain
look at eight MCRs, all
European. There is no MCR
in North Pacific America.
An interstate highway links
Vancouver, BC, Seattle, and
Portland (all with metro
areas exceeding two million) with a half-dozen cities
with population counts above
one hundred thousand in a
continuous band of development stretching almost three
hundred miles. The poet Richard Jensen has coined the
acronym VbStoPe, for this
linear polycentric metropolis
(i.e.,Vancouver-bellingham
Seattle-tacoma-olympia-Portland-eugene). Eight million
people live in VbStoPe, a kind
of infant version of the MCRs
that Hall and Pain have studied. Distances in VbStoPe are
greater and population is less
dense or evenly distributed, but
the pattern and potential are
the same. Imagine VbStoPe
with high-speed rail. Unfortunately, VbStoPe is hobbled
by multiple jurisdictions—two
nations, two states, a province,
and countless counties and
municipalities.
1995, 1999; Graham and Marvin, 1996). Because of this basic
distinction, traditional dense central business districts (CBDs)
still offer massive agglomeration economies, as first argued long
ago (Haig, 1926).
Crucial here is the recent interest of economists in business
clustering. Michael Porter’s work on clusters, defined as ‘geo‑
graphic concentrations of interconnected companies, specialized
suppliers, service providers, firms in related industries, and asso‑
ciated institutions … in particular fields that compete but also
co-operate’ (Porter, 1998, p197), has been highly influential in
European economic and spatial policy. The concept is a venerable
one in economics, albeit only recently rediscovered (Marshall,
1890), but specific studies on APS clustering have been sparse.6
The recent study of clustering in London, based on large postal
questionnaire and in-depth interview studies in central London
(Taylor et al, 2003), reinforces the Porter thesis but also confirms
the pioneer findings of Goddard (1973). For knowledge transfer
and innovation a balance between competition and cooperation is
vital; both are accentuated when firms are located close together.
Innovation is more likely there because it depends on market
trading of codified or tacit knowledge, where face-to-face interac‑
tion is critical to establish and maintain personal relationships
of trust and cooperation. Cooperation comes not only through
‘institutional thickness’ provided by closely located trade and
professional institutions but also through increasingly complex
interdependencies between firms and between service providers
and their customers. Paradoxically, there is close cooperation with
competitors in client project teams and through cross-servicing
relations, for example, in financial and legal services. Further,
for the most clustered firms access to skilled labour—the core
of APS business—is equally or more important than proximity
to customers. Consequently, such clusters develop a depth of
infrastructure, advantageous to all firms but essential to those
operating globally. Clustering is important for new firm forma‑
tion; very small offices (as well as large offices of major global
firms) are a feature of such concentrated clusters. Thus, while
‘back-office’ functions and staff may leave (or be outsourced to
distant locations), the overall scale of clustering may be little
affected. The vital need to keep key staff, coupled with custom‑
ized operational requirements, keeps the most centralized office
locations remarkably resilient over time.
The critical question here, much discussed, is the impact of
technology: sophisticated systems of electronic exchange poten‑
tially permit highly flexible mixtures of the two kinds of exchange.
Specialized consultants seem to be able to operate effectively
up to about two hours’ travel time from metropolitan cores (or
from the major airports associated with those cores), in semirural locations like the Cotswold Hills outside London, or the
Odenwald outside Frankfurt MCR, conducting many exchanges
electronically, but travelling to meetings in those cores—or, via
air or rail connections, in other cores. High-quality transporta‑
tion networks, in the form of highways or highspeed rail links,
are crucial here.
Further, these meeting places may no longer be located in tra‑
ditional CBDs. Increasingly, professional and managerial workers
function effectively in a variety of geographical spaces: they may
process electronic information in home offices in suburbs or the
remote countryside, in airplanes and trains and hotels and air‑
port lounges; they may meet face-to-face in all these places as
well as in convention centres (which may be purpose-built, or in
adapted hotels, or in converted country houses), or in new-style
offices such as IBM’s UK headquarters at Bedfont Lakes outside
London Heathrow airport, which features a central cafeteria-type
atrium surrounded by hot-desk cubicles. Some of these face-toface meeting places may be scattered; others however will be
clustered, for the good reason that they are located close to trans‑
port nodes such as airports or train stations.
Perhaps because of this, such face-to-face functions requir‑
ing agglomeration appear to be undergoing a complex process of
what Dutch planners have called concentrated deconcentration:
they disperse over the scale of a wide city region, but simulta‑
neously reconcentrate at particular nodes within it, limited only
by continuing time-distance constraints. Traditional central city
locations still matter, but increasingly they are not the sole clus‑
tering points for economic activity; they form merely a part of a
wider spatial division of labour within the urban area, with other
significant clusterings (Kloosterman and Musterd, 2001, p626).
The result in many large cities, observable over many decades,
is an increasingly polycentric urban structure. The traditional
CBD, based on walking distances and served by a radial public
transportation structure, is still attractive to old-established
informational services (banking, insurance, government) as in
The notion of cooperation
among competing centers is
a huge departure from the
impulse that got city-building started in North Pacific
America. The “embryo city”
was the Darwinian competitor par excellence, a ruthless,
terrain-eating machine that
could turn landscape into
profits faster than any other
engine of commerce. Portland,
the oldest of the region’s cities,
has perhaps gone the furthest
toward new models of inclusion and cooperation. But tell
that to the mayors of nearby
Vancouver, Washington, or
ex-suburban Gresham. The
old acrimony between center
and periphery persists. What
common ground—or, what
deeper history—could be
summoned to plant the seeds
of regional cooperation that
Europe has seen blossom into
enviable urban riches?
This outer limit (two hours’
travel time) increases Portland’s global polycentric region
to the Oregon Coast, over the
Cascade Mountains to Bend,
Oregon, south past Eugene,
and north almost to Seattle.
A north-south high-speed rail
line would link VbStoPe into
a single MCR by bringing the
travel times across the entire
region down below the twohour limit.
The emergence of other business districts, whether inside
the city limits or outside, is one
reason why Sieverts, indeed
many planners, calls for peripheral point-to-point rail, rather
than a radial system of spokes
linking peripheral places to the
downtown. Portland’s existing
rail, MAX, is radial, but only
because it is relatively young.
Two peripheral point-to-point
lines will be completed before
2010, one on the east side of
the city and the other linking
Beaverton to Wilsonville, on
the west.
The necessity of public investment in quality rapid transit
may be the Achilles heel that
the City of London, Downtown Manhattan, Marunouchi/Otema‑
chi in Tokyo. But from the 1930s and above all from the 1960s, it
came to be supplemented by a secondary CBD, often developing
in a prestigious residential quarter, and attracting newer services
such as corporate headquarters, the media, advertising, public
relations and design, as in London’s West End, the 16e arrondissement of Paris, Midtown Manhattan or the Akasaki/Roppongi
districts of Tokyo. Even more recently, since 1960, a tertiary CBD
or ‘internal edge city’ has developed through speculative develop‑
ment on old industrial or transport land, now redundant: London
Docklands, La Défense in Paris, New York’s World Trade Center
and World Financial Center, and Tokyo’s Shinjuku.
All these clusters are usually close together in terms of dis‑
tance (typically 3 to 4 miles, 5 to 8km) and in time (15 to 20
minutes) and are connected by high-quality urban public trans‑
port; secondary centres invariably developed on the basis of new
connections developed a few years earlier (the London tube, the
Paris metro, the New York subway and the Penn and Grand
Central Stations, the Tokyo metro), tertiary centres sometimes
developed on the same basis (Shinjuku on Tokyo’s Yamanote ring
railway; the World Trade Center and World Financial Center on
the PATH system), but more often required new investment (the
Paris Réseau Express Régional (RER) Line A serving La Défense;
London’s Jubilee Line extension serving Canary Wharf).
But there are also more distant manifestations. Many
cities have recently come to demonstrate also an ‘external’ edge
city, often on the axis of the main airport, sometimes (very
recently) a high-speed train station: London Heathrow; Paris
Charles de Gaulle; Brussels Zaventem; Amsterdam Schiphol
and its extension, the so-called Zuidas (Southern Axis) next to
the city’s new Zuid (South) station; Stockholm Arlanda and the
adjacent E4 corridor; and the corridor connecting Washington’s
Reagan and Dulles airports through the city’s Virginia sub‑
urbs, with new ‘edge cities’ at Rosslyn, Ballston and Tysons
Corner. In Europe the most notable examples, like the tertiary
CBDs, take a special form: they result from conscious strategic
planning, albeit in reaction to market forces, and they depend
on considerable public investment in transport infrastructure
(Bontje and Burdack, 2005). And these overlap with even more
distant ‘outermost’ edge city complexes attracting back office and
R&D functions, typically at major train stations 20–40 miles
(35–65km) from the main core: Reading 40 miles (70km) west
of London; the planned Ville Nouvelle of St Quentin-en-Yvelines
only 15.5 miles (25km) south-west of Paris; Kista at the terminus
of the Stockholm Tunnelbana close to the E4 corridor; Greenwich
in Connecticut; and Shin-Yokohama in Kanagawa prefecture west
of Tokyo. Finally, specialized subcentres may develop for certain
functions like education, entertainment and sport, exhibition and
convention centres: London’s Royal Docks; the Open University
in Milton Keynes 55 miles (90km) north of London; or the Tokyo
Waterfront. These take various forms and have equally varied
locations: reclaimed or recycled land close to the traditional core,
older university cities that have become progressively embedded
in a wider metropolitan area (Oxford and Cambridge in the UK,
Uppsala in Sweden, and New Haven in the US), relocated uni‑
versities (Université de Paris-XI, Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit,
Tsukuba University outside Tokyo). And some may acquire new
functions, as with the emergence of Cambridge as a major hightechnology centre (‘Silicon Fen’) since 1970.
Within this increasingly polycentric structure, there is increas‑
ing specialization: many functions—back offices, logistics
management, new-style headquarters complexes, media centres,
and large-scale entertainment and sport—relocate over time to
decentralized locations, albeit at different speeds and with differ‑
ent effects. The result is that increasingly, the relevant focus is no
longer the city: it is the region (Kloosterman and Musterd, 2001,
p627). And here, two key concepts that often appear to be con‑
traposed—the Christallerian hierarchy and the concept of urban
networks—make an uneasy reunion (van Houtum and Lag‑
endijk, 2001, p751): the resulting city region is highly networked
through its multiple nodes and links, but there is a recognizable
urban hierarchy that operates at a regional scale. In the extreme
case, the Asian mega-city, this is mediated by state planning, but
in a highly flexible way: in the Pearl River Delta region of China
core command-and-control functions are concentrated in Hong
Kong, other service functions in Guangzhou, while other routine
manufacturing and service functions are scattered across the
cities of the delta, but the entire region is by definition highly
condemns American cities to
inevitable obsolescence. We
lack the political will to make
so huge an investment in the
future.
centralized on a global scale (Xu and Li, 1990; Yeung, 1996; Sit
and Yang, 1997; Hall, 1999); the same pattern can be recognized
in the Yangtze delta, in the relationships between Shanghai as
centre for advanced services as against Suzhou for R&D and
high-technology manufacturing (Hall, 2005).
The form bears some similarities to Gottmann’s mega‑
lopolis (see p3); but it is infinitely more complex, because more
highly interconnected; besides, it differs fundamentally from
Gottmann’s formulation because it is based on Castells’s ‘space
of flows’ connecting the individual urban elements, and con‑
sciously seeks to measure these flows (Taylor, 2004a, p20). Here,
as around Shanghai, around Jakarta and around Singapore, we
see the beginnings of a new urban form that in some cases even
transcends national boundaries: a city region on a vast scale, net‑
worked externally on a global scale and internally over thousands
of square kilometres: the precursor of a new scale of urban orga‑
nization. Allen Scott has titled the largest such areas the ‘global
city-region’ (Scott, 2001); the POLYNET study builds on his pio‑
neering work.
Introducing POLYNET
This ecology of “major cities”
and smaller ones extends
the historical model Braudel
tracked—that is of a dominant
city and the hinterland (now
urbanized) that it dominates.
But it also shifts us toward
a polycentricity that enables
cooperation, rather than coercion. The European MCRs in
Hall and Pain’s study run the
gamut from South East England, where “30–40 centres”
are dominated by London, to
the RhineRuhr, or Ruhrgebiet,
in Germany, where almost a
The starting point of the POLYNET study, as stressed earlier in
this chapter, is that polycentricity, a central objective of the ESDP,
needs more closely defining. At the European level, it would
promote global economic and knowledge flows from global (and
sub-global) cities within the European ‘Pentagon’, like London,
Paris and Frankfurt, to benefit cities in other more peripheral
parts of Europe (Hall, 1993, 1996)—especially ‘gateway’ cities
outside North West Europe, and smaller cities within it through
cooperation and improved high-speed transport links between
cities (Taylor et al, 2003). But at a finer geographical scale, polycentricity refers to outward diffusion from major cities to smaller
cities within their spheres of influence, sometimes over wide
areas, as found in the eight MCRs in North West Europe that are
the focus of the study:
1 South East England, where London is now the centre of a
system of some 30–40 centres within a 100 mile (l60km)
radius from Central London, extending as far as Bournemouth
and Swindon in South West England, Northampton in the
East Midlands and Peterborough in the East of England;
2 The Randstad in The Netherlands, encompassing the Rands‑
tad cities of Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht,
but now extending outwards to include the new city of Almere
in the reclaimed polders east of Amsterdam;
3 Central Belgium, comprising Brussels and a surrounding
ring of large and medium size cities, with a high degree of
interdependence and a total population of some 7.8 million;
dozen midsized cities coexist, with no dominant one.
VbStoPe is neither of those.
It’s more like the Randstad
of Holland, with three bigger
cities shaping an economy
that involves a dozen or more
smaller ones. The similarity
largely ends there. VbStoPe is
sparse and its internal linkages are meager. Where the
average population of a European MCR is close to eighteen
million, VbStoPe has eight
million, on par with only the
Dublin-Belfast corridor.
4 RhineRuhr, one of the world’s largest polycentric MCRs,
embracing 90 towns and cities, among them 11 high-order
centres more or less on the same level with a total population
of some 12 million people, in this case with no obvious ‘core
city’;
5 The Rhine-Main Region of Germany, encompassing the core
cities of Frankfurt am Main (including Offenbach), Wies‑
baden, Mainz, Darmstadt, Hanau and Aschaffenburg;
6 The EMR of Northern Switzerland, an incipient MCR extend‑
ing in a discontinuous linear pattern across East Central
Switzerland from Zürich in the east to Basel in the west;
7 The Paris Region, a special case: through the 1965 Schéma
Directeur, outward decentralization pressures have been
accommodated in new city concentrations forming extensions
of the agglomeration, with little impact on surrounding rural
areas. But recent research shows that the region’s economic
core is no longer within the historic Ville de Paris, but in a
‘Golden Triangle’ bounded by the city’s western arrondisse‑
ments, La Défense and the suburbs of Boulogne-Billancourt
and Issy-les-Moulineaux (Beckouche, 1999; Halbert, 2002);
8 Greater Dublin, within a 30–40 mile (50–70km) radius of
the city, but particularly northward along the Dublin-Belfast
corridor; here decentralization appears to extend as far as
Newry, crossing national boundaries.
A long-continued process of concentrated deconcentration in
these areas (though much less noticeably in Paris or Dublin)
has thus produced clusters of up to 50 cities constituting net‑
worked urban regions with up to 20 million people, drawing
enormous economic strength from a new functional division of
labour and connected by dense flows of people and information
along motorways, high-speed rail lines and telecommunications
systems. Recent work in fact suggests that the so-called Central
Area of North West Europe—the area centred upon Paris, Brus‑
sels, Cologne, Amsterdam and London—is an incipient MCR of
37 million people (Anon, 2002), characterized by functional divi‑
sions of labour between city units in a highly networked region
and by intensive development along transportation corridors
(Ipenburg et al, 2001).… The eight POLYNET MCRs together
make up a much bigger (though discontinuous) mass of no less
than 72 million people, and while not contiguous they are suffi‑
ciently close and highly linked as to form a super MCR: Europolis,
fully comparable with the largest such regions in Eastern Asia.
†
POLYNET: Developing theory, formulating hypotheses
To provide a foundation for the study, we first need to sum‑
marize—at the risk of repetition—some of the theoretical
formulations discussed in this chapter. There are four key ele‑
ments which underpin the study (Knox and Taylor, 1995).
The first is the notion of a world city hierarchy (Friedmann,
1986, 1995) or global city (Sassen, 1991, 2001). Friedmann empha‑
sized the command-and-control functions of major cities—the
locations of corporate headquarters running global businesses.
Sassen emphasized the concentration of APS (financial, profes‑
sional, and creative) in major cities that facilitate production and
distribution across the global economy. Both identified New York,
London and Tokyo as the leading cities in the world economy;
neither was quite clear about the cities below that level.
The second is the notion of a world city network (Taylor, 2001,
2004a). This analyses inter-city relations in terms of the orga‑
nizational structure of the global economy; it views world cities
as ‘global service centres’ connected into a single worldwide
network. This emphasis on networks implies that cities in a glo‑
balized world do not merely compete with each other, as so often
argued; crucially, they also have cooperative relations—a feature
that is strongly encouraged in the ESDP. A network requires
mutuality between its members in order to operate and survive.
This approach is not just theoretically interesting: it has impor‑
tant practical policy implications. ‘Connectivities’ within multiple
business networks located in global cities confer cooperative rela‑
tions on world city networks. Work within this framework by
the GaWC Group at Loughborough has already demonstrated in
complementary quantitative and interview studies that London
and Frankfurt, often viewed as competitor financial centres since
the establishment of the Eurozone (excluding London) and the
establishment of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, in fact
have mutually cooperative relationships as well (Beaverstock et
al, 2001, 2003a, b, 2005; Hoyler and Pain, 2002; Pain, 2005).
The third is the recognition of global city regions (Scott, 2001).
This treats world cities as more than simply centre-cores; they are
viewed as more complex urban regions, encompassing several
cities, networked in a polycentric structure. The starting-point of
the Polynet project uniquely combines these two research strat‑
egies: it studies the internal network structures of global city
regions within a worldwide network of regions. To paraphrase
a long-ago formulation of the geographer Brian Berry (Berry,
1964), it aims to study ‘City Regions as Systems within Systems
of City Regions’.
The fourth is Manuel Castells’s immensely influential con‑
cept of a space of flows in the network society (Castells, 1996). He
contrasts our traditional concern for ‘spaces of places’ (such as
countries or cities) with contemporary transnational movements
of people, commodities, and—especially—information, which
he calls ‘spaces of flows’. This space of flows is today found at
In the global city (2001),
Sassen discusses forty cities
that she calls “global cities.”
a range of different geographical scales up to and including the
global scale. Cities within networks and as city regions are the
critical hubs and nodes of the space of flows.
†
APS are Advanced Producer
Services, meaning most of the
high-tech financial services
that shape the world capital
market.
…The first and central POLYNET hypothesis is that APS knowledge
flows extend beyond the global city network to create interlink‑
ages between other cities and towns in North West Europe at a
city region scale, leading to a new spatial phenomenon: the global
‘mega-city region’. But the GaWC methodologies, adapted for use
in this research, are not concerned with geographical or adminis‑
trative boundaries. Global cities are conceptualized as ‘processes’
(Castells, 1996) and as hubs or nodes in globalizing APS network
servicing strategies (Sassen, 2001). Firms and their networks
thus become the subjects of investigation, and relations within
and between ‘global cities’ are examined through their business
connectivities in the global city network. Hence a first overarch‑
ing research question for POLYNET has been how to define the
area for study—the MCR.
†
ESDP stands for the European Spatial Development
Planning network.
… A second, related hypothesis is that knowledge-intensive APS
business operations and flows are associated with a polycentric
pattern of urban development in each MCR. Since the ESDP seeks
to promote polycentric regional development as an antidote to
problems associated with uneven economic development within
the European Union, a key concern is to understand how major
informational and skills flows associated with leading European
global cities London and Paris can benefit other European cities
and regions. While the POLYNET study regions differ in their
internal regional urban structures, they all contain important
business services centres. A second overarching question for the
research has therefore been to what extent flows associated with
concentration of services in primary business services centres in each
region are associated with polycentric development at the regional
scale?
The analysis of urban hierarchies and of business organiza‑
tional structures… reveals that the concept of polycentricity is both
process-sensitive and scale-sensitive, reflecting the complexity of
functional interdependencies between the contemporary space of
flows and the space of places in a ‘knowledge economy’. While
analysis of commuting flows suggests a low degree of regional
polycentricity in all the MCRs, specific APS inter-urban linkages,
based on intra-firm connectivities, suggest a potentially higher
degree of polycentricity for most regions. The nature of polycen‑
tricity associated with different sectors, functions and scales of
APS activity is examined in each MCR.
†
The Interviews: Key conclusions
The most important findings, distilled from the conclusions of
Chapter 8, are these:
• Unique role of ‘First Cities’: just one city in each mega-city
region (MCR) constitutes the ‘First City’ for global advanced
producer services (APS), with a degree of sectoral specializa‑
tion in some cases.
• Importance of secondary centres too: offices belonging to
regional networks are spread out across secondary centres
in each MCR, especially in accountancy; logistics has a
distinct—and largely a-spatial—servicing logic; banking/
financial services, concentrated in First Cities, play an impor‑
tant role in fostering interrelationships between sectors.
• Communication flows have different value: the communication
flows occurring within First Cities, and articulated through
them, are of a far superior intensity and value to those occur‑
ring within firms across the wider MCRs.
The
broad
conclusions
reached by Hall and Pain
suggest a kind of taxonomy
of polycentric development.
Polycentricity can be pursued,
or not, at many levels of density and connectivity (from
Dublin/Galway’s linear corridor to the “blue banana” of
London, Amsterdam, Paris,
through Lyon, to Milan) and
at any degree of centralization,
(from South East England’s
strict focus on London to the
RhineRuhr’s radically dispersed polycentricity). No
single European example fits
VbStoPe, but they all suggest what the future could
look like. Prescriptions such
as better intercity linkages
(for electronic information
as well as physical travel), the
continued necessity of face-
to-face contact, facilitation of
global flows (again, through
both electronic and transport
systems), the importance of
“secondary centres,” and the
need for integrated policies are
ignored at our peril.
• Cross-linkages probably lacking—except in South East England: in fact there is limited evidence of functional linkages
within MCRs. South East England is the major exception:
here, London’s scale of global concentration masks signifi‑
cant functional connections not only between London and
secondary centres, but between those secondary centres.
• Globalization plays a key role: globalization is an ongoing spur
to consolidation, restructuring and specialization; industry
regulation and national legislation are key concerns in reduc‑
ing barriers to cross-border business.
• Clustering in First Cities still vital: locational concentration
and clustering remain key priorities for most global firms
across MCRs; there is no evidence that global functions are
deconcentrating from POLYNET First Cities.
• E-communication increasing, but face-to-face still critical: in
communications, the main change in all First Cities is the
massive increase in e-mail and use of intranet systems; but
this is not diminishing the absolute need for face-to-face
contact, which is particularly associated with high-value
exchanges.
• Intensity and value of communication crucial, but immeasurable: quantitative measurement of information flows can
never present an accurate picture of the volume and value of
interactions, many of which are ‘invisible’: the most intense
and important exchanges take place within globally net‑
worked First Cities.
• Travel from central offices essential: home-working is limited;
most skilled front-office staff remain ‘locked into’ clustered
central city locations with an increasing need for travel, espe‑
cially international travel.
• Infrastructure confirms First Cities’ role: e-infrastructure mir‑
rors the patterns of inter-city linkages, confirming the role of
First Cities as ‘information gateways’.
• Good transport essential, both within and out of MCRs: mobility
is crucial both within, and into and out of, MCRs—car travel
via motorway, as well as rail travel, are very important for
intra-regional travel and access to airports for international
travel, especially from First Cities.
• Top skills concentrate in First Cities: First Cities have a unique
regional role with respect to high-skill, specialized interna‑
tional labour supplies: competition for labour ties firms to
specific central city locations, which depend on the residen‑
tial preferences of employees.
• City ‘buzz’ vital for location: APS locational decisions are
not based solely on rational economic criteria. An attractive
‘city environment’ proves to be significant, bur this is more
about ‘city processes’—the ‘buzz’ of the place—than physical
infrastructure.
(Portland has got “city buzz”
down to a science, and that
goes a long way toward attracting “top skills.” But there is
much more to do.)
• Importance of the ‘right address’: mobile talented labour is
attracted to specific cities and places; office address and
status are critical to the credibility of APS firms, and urban
milieux are crucial for fostering innovation.
• Hub function vital—regionally, sometimes globally: while the
scale of concentration differs from one First City to another,
all have a distinctive ‘regional hub’ function; in addition,
London’s global concentration gives it a unique role as a cen‑
tral ‘meeting place’ in the APS ‘European region’.
• First Cities linked internationally: knowledge produced in—
and dispersed through—international networks helps to
build complementary functional relations, linking POLYNET
First Cities together.
• Boundaries irrelevant for APS: geographical or administrative
boundaries have little relevance to ‘natural’ APS markets;
national and international functions reside within a space
defined by relations between major cities, while regional
offices relate to local or sub-regional markets.
• But MCRs important for policy: the MCR concept has great
policy importance in addressing areas that require nonmarket interventions—transport infrastructure, education,
housing and urban planning.
• Polycentricity depends on scale: the concept of polycentricity
is scale-dependent and cannot be simply mapped on to fixed
MCR configurations, such as the ones used in this study—
policy needs to take into account the varying functions and
linkages that underlie regional urban geography.
• Need for integrated policies: integrated policy approaches are
needed to address and promote the cross-cutting processes
that help to build complementary (as opposed to competitive)
inter-urban relationships.
†
Key concepts—Key myths?
Certain key concepts have come to dominate policy discussions in
Europe, and often beyond its borders. Some indeed have come to
assume an almost mythical or spiritual character, to be repeated
as some kind of mantra without serious interrogation as to their
meaning. But such critical interrogation has been the essence of
POLYNET. Here we summarize our conclusions.
Among the most pressing
needs for a city like Portland
are the development of more
effective non-radial public
transport links; giving up “territorial competition” against
nearby cities, in favor of a
coordinated regional strategy of investments; focus on
“functional polycentricity”
(facilitating flows of information and the organization of
firms, rather than simple geographical dispersion); and,
relatedly, concentrating “global
• Polycentricity: ‘morphological polycentricity’, which refers to
the regional distribution of towns and cities of different sizes,
is not the same as ‘functional polycentricity’, which refers to
flows of information and the organization of firms. A bal‑
anced spatial distribution of development does not guarantee
an even distribution of complementary functions or a more
sustainable form of development in the POLYNET MCRs.
• Balanced development: indeed, the interview evidence paradox‑
ically suggested that in reality morphological polycentricity
is associated with rather weak intra-regional functional link‑
ages. Just as paradoxically, depth of global concentration in
London (regarded as a monocentric area in the NWMA Spa‑
tial Vision), was found to produce the most concrete evidence
of regional functional polycentricity. Yet this too is associ‑
ated with uneven development, in the form of an east-west
economic imbalance in South East England. The growth
of MCRs thus has implications for sustainable growth and
social equity.
• Sustainable development: in spite of advances in ICT, face-to-face
contact remains vital to the operation of advanced knowledgebased service functions. Polycentric regional development,
whether functional or morphological, is also found to create
‘criss-cross’ commuting that cannot be effectively supported
by public transport. Functional polycentricity in APS is addi‑
tionally associated with patterns of regional business travel
that cross-cut the hub-and-spoke regional transport infra‑
structure. Hence both types of polycentricity have possible
negative implications for environmental sustainability. How
to overcome this—for instance, by developing more effec‑
tive non-radial public transport links—represents a major
challenge.
functions and specialisms” in
primary cities (creative economy in Portland, say, or high
tech in Beaverton) because
dispersed concentrations make
the polycentric city “legible” in
global networks. Finally, “spatial governance” needs to be
imposed on markets, “for the
governance of flows requires
cross-jurisdictional and crosssectoral structure.”
• Economic competitiveness: in all MCRs, functional concentra‑
tion has been found to be essential to the development of
international APS agglomeration economies and global busi‑
ness flows. First Cities—Dublin, London, Paris, Brussels,
Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf and Zürich—play a vital
‘knowledge gateway’ role, articulating their MCRs into the
worldwide APS economy. Concentration of global functions
and specialisms in these primary cities remains essential for
high-complexity/high-value knowledge transfer, innovation
and production.
• Spatial scale: polycentricity was found to be a scale-sensitive
phenomenon. For example, Paris appears morphologically
monocentric at a regional and national scale but is function‑
ally polycentric at a global scale. Functional polycentricity in
APS at a national scale in Germany does not transfer across
to the MCR regional scale: RhineRuhr and Rhine-Main
have different spatial and functional configurations and
connectivity to global APS networks. National contexts are
important, but the MCR is identified as a vital spatial scale
for spatial development policy and for the Lisbon Agenda of
making Europe the world’s ‘most competitive and dynamic
knowledge-based economy’ by the year 2010.
• Sustainable management: the MCR scale is hard to define,
because APS flows are multi-scalar and do not coincide with
administrative and political boundaries. Sustainable man‑
agement of the MCR requires coordinated horizontal and
vertical inter-organizational and cross-sector approaches.
The concept of ‘economic competitiveness’ should not be
misconstrued as a ‘territorial competition’ for inward invest‑
ment. Cooperation is needed between cities and regions to
reflect the functional complementarities that result from
transnational knowledge-based networks; European policies
can help to promote this.
• Role of spatial planning: the ESDP addresses problems of social
and economic disparity by encouraging polycentric urban
development to promote growth in less developed regions
outside the ‘Pentagon’. The NWMA Spatial Vision aims to
spread growth concentrated in London, Paris and the rest of
the ‘Pentagon’ by improving accessibility and development of
trans-European networks (TENs). POLYNET policy analyses
for the eight MCRs suggest that spatial planning still places a
heavy emphasis on physical infrastructure, but policy-makers
recognize the need for this to be complemented by new eco‑
nomic development approaches and ‘functional thinking’.
• Territorial cohesion: the European Commission’s (EC) con‑
cept of ‘territorial cohesion’, developed in its Second and
Third Reports on Economic and Social Cohesion (European
Commission, 2004) focuses on issues of ‘spatial equity’ and
uneven European spatial development, and stresses the need
to promote social and economic balance across the EU terri‑
tory. But POLYNET findings on polycentricity suggest that
balanced spatial development does not necessarily result in
social equity and quality of life.
• Spatial governance: the globalization and liberalization of
North West European markets for APS, strongly promoted
by the EC, pose a challenge for the governance of flows which
requires cross-jurisdictional and cross-sectoral structures.
Over and above the specific spatial and functional features
of the eight MCRs, the research has revealed important
common policy dilemmas. In all cases senior policy-makers
have described a serious lack of governance and policy instru‑
ments at the level of the MCR.
Rem Koolhaas
The Generic City
1
Introduction
1.1 Is the contemporary city like the contemporary airport—“all
the same”? Is it possible to theorize this convergence? And
if so, to what ultimate configuration is it aspiring? Conver‑
gence is possible only at the price of shedding identity. That
is usually seen as a loss. But at the scale at which it occurs, it
must mean something. What are the disadvantages of iden‑
tity, and conversely, what are the advantages of blankness?
What if this seemingly accidental—and usually regretted—
homogenization were an intentional process, a conscious
movement away from difference toward similarity? What
if we are witnessing a global liberation movement: “down
with character!” What is left after identity is stripped? The
Generic?
1.2 To the extent that identity is derived from physical substance,
from the historical, from context, from the real, we some‑
how cannot imagine that anything contemporary—made
by us—contributes to it. But the fact that human growth is
exponential implies that the past will at some point become
too “small” to be inhabited and shared by those alive. We our‑
selves exhaust it. To the extent that history finds its deposit
in architecture, present human quantities will inevitably
Not everyone is Europe is happy
with the polycentric Mega-City
Region. Dutch architect Rem
Koolhaas (b.1944) is a notoriously provocative thinker
whose deeply informed essays
are never simply “in favor” of
or “opposed” to anything. He
shines a bright light on his
subjects, from multiple angles,
often unflattering, and forces
us to see implications that
many would rather ignore.
We look for beauty, but where
we live now is sometimes ugly,
unfair, and full of contradictions. So how to work and live
well here? Koolhaas is one of
our best guides.
History is an essential resource,
a tool for living that helps us
understand and imagine better
conditions. We can keep it
with us in stories, memory, in
habits of living. But we tend to
keep it in architecture. That’s
why we protect old buildings
and have huge fights about
rem koolhaas 343
development. And so, to the
extent that, as Koolhaas puts
it, “ history finds its deposit
in architecture,” design of the
built environment becomes at
least partly restricted by this
primary function: holding on
to the past. These are difficult
restrictions to design from,
like asking writers to only use
the language of Elizabethan
England. And Koolhaas has
a more radical point to make:
if meaning (or identity) rests
on a link to the past, on a history, it is doomed—there’s not
enough history to go around.
Further, the more history we
produce in service of these
meanings, the less our history
means.
burst and deplete previous substance. Identity conceived as
this form of sharing the past is a losing proposition: not only
is there—in a stable model of continuous population expan‑
sion—proportionally less and less to share, but history also
has an invidious half-life—as it is more abused, it becomes
less significant—to the point where its diminishing handouts become insulting. This thinning is exacerbated by the
constantly increasing mass of tourists, an avalanche that, in
a perpetual quest for “character”, grinds successful identi‑
ties down to meaningless dust.
1.3 Identity is like a mousetrap in which more and more mice
have to share the original bait, and which, on closer inspec‑
tion, may have been empty for centuries. The stronger
identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion,
interpretation, renewal, contradiction. Identity becomes
like a lighthouse—fixed, overdetermined: it can change its
position or the pattern it emits only at the cost of destabiliz‑
ing navigation. (Paris can only become more Parisian—it
is already on its way to becoming hyper-Paris, a polished
caricature. There are exceptions: London—its only identity
a lack of clear identity—is perpetually becoming even less
London, more open, less static.)
1.4 Identity centralizes; it insists on an essence, a point. Its
tragedy is given in simple geometric terms. As the sphere
of influence expands, the area characterized by the center
becomes larger and larger, hopelessly diluting both the
strength and the authority of the core; inevitably the dis‑
tance between center and circumference increases to the
breaking point. In this perspective, the recent, belated dis‑
covery of the periphery as a zone of potential value—a kind
of pre-historical condition that might finally be worthy of
architectural attention—is only a disguised insistence on
the priority of and dependency on the center: without center,
no periphery; the interest of the first presumably compen‑
sates for the emptiness of the latter. Conceptually orphaned,
the condition of the periphery is made worse by the fact that
its mother is still alive, stealing the show, emphasizing its
offspring’s inadequacies. The last vibes emanating from the
exhausted center preclude the reading of the periphery as a
critical mass. Not only is the center by definition too small
to perform its assigned obligations, it is also no longer the
real center but an overblown mirage on its way to implo‑
sion; yet its illusory presence denies the rest of the city its
legitimacy. (Manhattan denigrates as “bridge-and-tunnel
people” those who need infrastructural support to enter the
city, and makes them pay for it.) The persistence of the pres‑
ent concentric obsession makes us all bridge-and-tunnel
people, second-class citizens in our own civilization, disen‑
franchised by the dumb coincidence of our collective exile
from the center.
1.5 In our concentric programming (author spent part of his
youth in Amsterdam, city of ultimate centrality) the insis‑
tence on the center as the core of value and meaning, font of
all significance, is doubly destructive—not only is the everincreasing volume of dependencies an ultimately intolerable
strain, it also means that the center has to be constantly
maintained, i.e., modernized. As “the most important place,”
it paradoxically has to be, at the same time, the most old
and the most new, the most fixed and the most dynamic; it
undergoes the most intense and constant adaptation, which
is then compromised and complicated by the fact that it has
to be an unacknowledged transformation, invisible to the
naked eye. (The city of Zurich has found the most radical,
expensive solution in reverting to a kind of reverse archaeol‑
ogy: layer after layer of new modernities—shopping centers,
parking, banks, vaults, laboratories—are constructed under‑
neath the center. The center no longer expands outward or
skyward, but inward toward the center of the earth itself.)
From the grafting of more or less discreet traffic arteries,
bypasses, underground tunnels, the construction of ever
more tangentiales, to the routine transformation of housing
into offices, warehouses into lofts, abandoned churches into
nightclubs, from the serial bankruptcies and subsequent
reopenings of specific units in more and more expensive
shopping precincts to the relentless conversion of utilitar‑
ian space into “public” space, pedestrianization, the creation
of new parks, planting, bridging, exposing, the systematic
restoring of historic mediocrity, all authenticity is relent‑
lessly evacuated.
The city center can never be
challenged or superceded by
attention to the periphery,
Koolhaas says. “The belated
discovery of the periphery as a
zone of potential value” simply
reasserts the primacy of the
center. The only way out of this
is a paradigmatic shift, such
as the one Sieverts proposes,
in which there is no longer a
center or an edge … there is
only where we live now, a condition that obtains throughout
human settlement. Even to call
this condition “polycentric,” as
Hall and Pain do, retains the
contradictions of centeredness
and obscures relationships that
are not organized that way.
Perhaps where we live now is a
space of flows, not of places?
rem koolhaas 345
Koolhaas identifies the centralized city with history. He
presumes that other conditions
(Sieverts’s “where we live now”
or what Koolhaas calls “the
Generic City”) only emerge
when we give up history and
locate all of our concerns in
“present need and present
ability.” As this book attests,
I strongly disagree. There are
other histories, which should
not be forsaken. While the history of Marx or Braudel can
only produce the contradictions Koolhaas describes, an
urban history of indigenous
settlement in North Pacific
America can break them.
1.6 The Generic City is the city liberated from the captivity of
center, from the straitjacket of identity. The Generic City
breaks with this destructive cycle of dependency: it is noth‑
ing but a reflection of present need and present ability. It is
the city without history. It is big enough for everybody. It is
easy. It does not need maintenance. If it gets too small it just
expands. If it gets old it just self-destructs and renews. It is
equally exciting—or unexciting—everywhere. It is “super‑
ficial”—like a Hollywood studio lot, it can produce a new
identity every Monday morning.
Koolhaas speaks of “the
definitive move away from
agriculture.” But what if there
had been no agriculture to
move away from? What if
urbanism grew from other
relationships, other habits and
ideas? Would we have arrived
in the Generic City without
taking this long, destructive
detour into the contradictions
and violence of European history? And would that be a
good thing? Regarding the
virtue (or not) of the Generic
City, Koolhaas is characteristically silent.
2.2 Did the Generic City start in America? Is it so profoundly
unoriginal that it can only be imported? In any case, the
Generic City now also exists in Asia, Europe, Australia,
Africa. The definitive move away from the countryside, from
agriculture, to the city is not a move to the city as we knew
it: it is a move to the Generic City, the city so pervasive that
it has come to the country.
2 Statistics
2.1 The Generic City has grown dramatically over the past few
decades. Not only has its size increased, its numbers have
too. In the early seventies it was inhabited by an average of
2.3 million official (and 500,000 unofficial) residents; now
it hovers around the 15 million mark.
2.3 Some continents, like Asia, aspire to the Generic City;
others are ashamed by it. Because it tends toward the tropi‑
cal—converging around the equator—a large proportion
of Generic Cities is Asian—seemingly a contradiction in
terms: the over-familiar inhabited by the inscrutable. One
day it will be absolutely exotic again, this discarded product
of Western civilization, through the resemanticization that
its very dissemination brings in its wake…
2.4 Sometimes an old, singular city, like Barcelona, by oversim‑
plifying its identity, turns Generic. It becomes transparent,
like a logo. The reverse never happens… at least yet.
3 General
3.1 The Generic City is what is left after large sections of urban
life crossed over to cyberspace. It is a place of weak and
distended sensations, few and far between emotions, dis‑
creet and mysterious like a large space lit by a bed lamp.
Compared to the classical city, the Generic City is sedated,
usually perceived from a sedentary position. Instead of con‑
centration—simultaneous presence—in the Generic City
individual “moments” are spaced far apart to create a trance
of almost unnoticeable aesthetic experiences: the color vari‑
ations in the fluorescent lighting of an office building just
before sunset, the subtleties of the slightly different whites
of an illuminated sign at night. Like Japanese food, the sen‑
sations can be reconstituted and intensified in the mind, or
not—they may simply be ignored. (There’s a choice.) This
pervasive lack of urgency and insistence acts like a potent
drug; it induces a hallucination of the normal.
Koolhaas is a superb writer,
a poet more than a theorist.
He writes in many languages
(the English here is his, not a
translation). Where an incisive mind like that of Manuel
Castells comes up with
lengthy descriptions of “flow,”
Koolhaas alights on exactly
the same conditions—“what
is left after large sections
of urban life crossed over to
cyberspace”—and calls it
“mysterious, like a large space
lit by a bed lamp.” Koolhaas
writes poetry where Castells
writes theory.
3.2 In a drastic reversal of what is supposedly the major charac‑
teristic of the city—“business”—the dominant sensation of
the Generic City is an eerie calm: the calmer it is, the more
it approximates the pure state. The Generic City addresses
the “evils” that were ascribed to the traditional city before
our love for it became unconditional. The serenity of the
Generic City is achieved by the evacuation of the public
realm, as in an emergency fire drill. The urban plane now
only accommodates necessary movement, fundamentally
the car; highways are a superior version of boulevards and
plazas, taking more and more space; their design, seemingly
aiming for automotive efficiency, is in fact surprisingly sen‑
sual, a utilitarian pretense entering the domain of smooth
space. What is new about this locomotive public realm is
that it cannot be measured in dimensions. The same (let’s
say ten-mile) stretch yields a vast number of utterly differ‑
ent experiences: it can last five minutes or forty; it can be
shared with almost nobody, or with the entire population;
it can yield the absolute pleasure of pure, unadulterated
speed—at which point the sensation of the Generic City
may even become intense or at least acquire density—or
rem koolhaas 347
utterly claustrophobic moments of stoppage) at which point
the thinness of the Generic City is at its most noticeable.
3.3 The Generic City is fractal, an endless repetition of the
same simple structural module; it is possible to reconstruct
it from its smallest entity, a desktop computer, maybe even
a diskette.
Here is a bit of willful blindness on the part of the author.
The image of golf courses is
irresistible to the poet marshalling his images all in a row,
but it requires him to erase the
ocean of dispossessed poor who
flood the terrain of the Generic
City. Are they not a vast “otherness?” Sassen is the most
persuasive in reminding us of
these unlikely traveling companions—the mobile, global
poor who congregate, always,
in the same cities where “APS”
have concentrated their wealth.
And she sees their potential to
make meaning in the Generic
City, the space of flows. But
the image of these strangely
empowered poor has no place
in Koolhaas’s beautiful poem.
3.4 Golf courses are all that is left to otherness.
3.5 The Generic City has easy phone numbers, not the resis‑
tant ten-figure frontal-lobe crunchers of the traditional city
but smoother versions, their middle numbers identical, for
instance.
3.6 Its main attraction is its anomie.
4 Airport
4.1 Once manifestations of ultimate neutrality, airports now
are among the most singular, characteristic elements of the
Generic City, its strongest vehicle of differentiation. They
have to be, being all the average person tends to experience
of a particular city. Like a drastic perfume demonstration,
photomurals, vegetation, local costumes give a first con‑
centrated blast of the local identity (sometimes it is also the
last). Far away, comfortable, exotic, polar, regional, Eastern,
rustic, new, even “undiscovered”: those are the emotional
registers invoked. Thus conceptually charged, airports
become emblematic signs imprinted on the global collective
unconscious in savage manipulations of their non-aviatic
attractors—tax-free shopping, spectacular spatial qualities,
the frequency and reliability of their connections to other
airports. In terms of its iconography/performance, the
airport is a concentrate of both the hyper-local and hyperglobal—hyper-global in the sense you can get goods there
that are not available even in the city, hyper-local in the sense
you can get things there that you get nowhere else.
4.2 The tendency in airport gestalt is toward ever-greater
autonomy: sometimes they’re even practically unrelated
to a specific Generic City. Becoming bigger and bigger,
equipped with more and more facilities unconnected to
travel, they are on the way to replacing the city. The intransit condition is becoming universal. Together, airports
contain populations of millions—plus the largest daily
workforce. In the completeness of their facilities, they are
like quarters of the Generic City, sometimes even its reason
for being (its center?), with the added attraction of being
hermetic systems from which there is no escape—except to
another airport.
4.3 The date/age of the Generic City can be reconstructed from
a close reading of its airport’s geometry. Hexagonal plan
(in unique cases penta- or heptagonal): sixties. Orthogonal
plan and section: seventies. Collage City: eighties. A single
curved section, endlessly extruded in a linear plan: prob‑
ably nineties. (Its structure branching out like an oak tree:
Germany.)
4.4 Airports come in two sizes: too big and too small. Yet their size
has no influence on their performance. This suggests that the
most intriguing aspect of all infrastructures is their essential
elasticity. Calculated by the exact for the numbered—passen‑
gers per year—they are invaded by the countless and survive,
stretched toward ultimate indeterminacy.
5
Population
5.1 The Generic City is seriously multiracial, on average 8%
black, 12% white, 27% Hispanic, 37% Chinese/Asian, 6%
indeterminate, 10% other. Not only multiracial, also multi‑
cultural. That’s why it comes as no surprise to see temples
between the slabs, dragons on the main boulevards, Bud‑
dhas in the CBD (central business district).
rem koolhaas 349
5.2 The Generic City is always founded by people on the move,
poised to move on. This explains the insubstantiality of
their foundations. Like the flakes that are suddenly formed
in a clear liquid by joining two chemical substances, eventu‑
ally to accumulate in an uncertain heap on the bottom, the
collision or confluence of two migrations—Cuban emigrés
going north and Jewish retirees going south, for instance,
both ultimately on their way someplace else—establishes,
out of the blue, a settlement. A Generic City is born.
6 Urbanism
6.1 The great originality of the Generic City is simply to aban‑
don what doesn’t work—what has outlived its use—to break
up the blacktop of idealism with the jackhammers of real‑
ism and to accept whatever grows in its place. In that sense,
the Generic City accommodates both the primordial and the
futuristic—in fact, only these two. The Generic City is all
that remains of what used to be the city. The Generic City is
the post-city being prepared on the site of the ex-city.
6.2 The Generic City is held together, not by an over-demand‑
ing public realm—progressively debased in a surprisingly
long sequence in which the Roman Forum is to the Greek
agora what the shopping mall is to the high street—but by
the residual. In the original model of the moderns, the resid‑
ual was merely green, its controlled neatness a moralistic
assertion of good intentions, discouraging association, use.
In the Generic City, because the crust of its civilization is
so thin, and through its immanent tropicality, the vegetal
is transformed into Edenic Residue, the main carrier of its
identity: a hybrid of politics and landscape. At the same time
refuge of the illegal, the uncontrollable, and subject of end‑
less manipulation, it represents a simultaneous triumph of
the manicured and the primeval. Its immoral lushness com‑
pensates for the Generic City’s other poverties. Supremely
inorganic, the organic is the Generic City’s strongest myth.
6.3 The street is dead. That discovery has coincided with frantic
attempts at its resuscitation. Public art is everywhere—as if
two deaths make a life. Pedestrianization—intended to pre‑
serve—merely channels the flow of those doomed to destroy
the object of their intended reverence with their feet.
6.4 The Generic City is on its way from horizontality to ver‑
ticality. The skyscraper looks as if it will be the final,
definitive typology. It has swallowed everything else. It can
exist anywhere: in a rice field or downtown—it makes no
difference anymore. The towers no longer stand together;
they are spaced so that they don’t interact. Density in isola‑
tion is the ideal.
6.5 Housing is not a problem. It has either been completely
solved or totally left to chance; in the first case it is legal,
in the second “illegal”; in the first case, towers or, usually,
slabs (at the most, 15 meters deep), in the second (in perfect
complementarity) a crust of improvised hovels. One solution
consumes the sky, the other the ground. It is strange that
those with the least money inhabit the most expensive com‑
modity—earth; those who pay, what is free—air. In either
case, housing proves to be surprisingly accommodating—
not only does the population double every so many years,
but also, with the loosening grip of the various religions,
the average number of occupants per unit halves—through
divorce and other family-dividing phenomena—with the
same frequency that the city’s population doubles; as its
numbers swell, the Generic City’s density is perpetually on
the decrease.
6.6 All Generic Cities issue from the tabula rasa; if there was
nothing, now they are there; if there was something, they have
replaced it. They must, otherwise they would be historic.
6.7 The Generic Cityscape is usually an amalgam of overly
ordered sections—dating from near the beginning of its
development, when “the power” was still undiluted—and
increasingly free arrangements everywhere else.
6.8 The Generic City is the apotheosis of the multiple-choice
concept: all boxes crossed, an anthology of all the options.
Usually the Generic City has been “planned”, not in the
Koolhaas struggles with the
dichotomy between the historical (i.e., for him, the
“original”) and the replacement. The Generic City, he
says, must be “a replacement;”
otherwise it would be “historic.” But some histories have
no problem with replacement.
Many Japanese temples are
“preserved” by being entirely
rebuilt out of new wood. The
same was acceptable for indig-
rem koolhaas 351
enous monuments in North
Pacific America. A new one
could be carved, a replacement, and that would become
the original, preserving history. As digital media become
the primary ground of creative
work, displacing materials
like stone and paper, the same
logic displaces older European
myths of “originality.” Digital
art generates endlessly replicating originals. The space of
flows helps dissolve the dichotomies that were brought to
these shores by Europe.
usual sense of some bureaucratic organization controlling
its development, but as if various echoes, spores, tropes,
seeds fell on the ground randomly as in nature, took hold—
exploiting the natural fertility of the terrain—and now form
an ensemble: an arbitrary gene pool that sometimes pro‑
duces amazing results.
6.9 The writing of the city may be indecipherable, flawed, but
that does not mean that there is no writing: it may simply
be that we developed a new illiteracy, a new blindness.
Patient detection reveals the themes, particles, strands that
can be isolated from the seeming murkiness of this Wagne‑
rian ur-soup: notes left on a blackboard by a visiting genius
50 years ago, stenciled UN reports disintegrating in their
Manhattan glass silo, discoveries by former colonial think‑
ers with a keen eye for the climate, unpredictable ricochets
of design education gathering strength as a global launder‑
ing process.
6.10The best definition of the aesthetic of the Generic City is
“free style”. How to describe it? Imagine an open space,
a clearing in the forest, a leveled city. There are three ele‑
ments: roads, buildings, and nature; they coexist in flexible
relationships, seemingly without reason, in spectacular
organizational diversity. Any one of the three may dominate:
sometimes the “road” is lost—to be found meandering on
an incomprehensible detour; sometimes you see no building,
only nature; then, equally unpredictably, you are surrounded
only by building. In certain frightening spots, all three are
simultaneously absent. On these “sites” (actually, what is the
opposite of a site? They are like holes bored through the con‑
cept of city) public art emerges like the Loch Ness Monster,
equal parts figurative and abstract, usually self-cleaning.
6.11 Specific cities still seriously debate the mistakes of archi‑
tects—for instance, their proposals to create raised
pedestrian networks with tentacles leading from one block
to the next as a solution to congestion—but the Generic City
simply enjoys the benefits of their inventions: decks, bridges,
tunnels, motorways—a huge proliferation of the parapherna‑
lia of connection—frequently draped with ferns and flowers
as if to ward off original sin, creating a vegetal congestion
more severe than a fifties science-fiction movie.
6.12 The roads are only for cars. People (pedestrians) are led on
rides (as in an amusement park), on “promenades” that lift
them off the ground, then subject them to a catalog of exag‑
gerated conditions—wind, heat, steepness, cold, interior,
exterior, smells, fumes—in a sequence that is a grotesque
caricature of life in the historic city.
6.13 There is horizontality in the Generic City, but it is on the way
out. It consists either of history that is not yet erased or of
Tudor-like enclaves that multiply around the center as newly
minted emblems of preservation.
6.14Ironically, though itself new, the Generic City is encircled
by a constellation of New Towns: New Towns are like yearrings. Somehow, New Towns age very quickly, the way a
five-year-old child develops wrinkles and arthritis through
the disease called progeria.
6.15 The Generic City presents the final death of planning. Why?
Not because it is not planned—in fact, huge complementary
universes of bureaucrats and developers funnel unimagi‑
nable flows of energy and money into its completion; for the
same money, its plains can be fertilized by diamonds, its
mud fields paved in gold bricks… But its most dangerous
and most exhilarating discovery is that planning makes no
difference whatsoever. Buildings may be placed well (a tower
near a metro station) or badly (whole centers miles away
from any road). They flourish/perish unpredictably. Net‑
works become overstretched, age, rot, become obsolescent;
populations double, triple, quadruple, suddenly disappear.
The surface of the city explodes, the economy accelerates,
slows down, bursts, collapses. Like ancient mothers that still
nourish titanic embryos, whole cities are built on colonial
infrastructures of which the oppressors took the blue‑
prints back home. Nobody knows where, how, since when
the sewers run, the exact location of the telephone lines,
what the reason was for the position of the center, where
monumental axes end. All it proves is that there are infinite
Or, as Sieverts puts it, “analogies with reading texts of
modern literature, or with the
experience of listening to certain types of new music, will
perhaps lead us further than
futile attempts to impose order
with architecture.” Perhaps
that is why architects today
must also be superb poets
(or filmmakers or actors) to
succeed in their profession.
It is not enough to make
buildings.
rem koolhaas 353
hidden margins, colossal reservoirs of slack, a perpetual,
organic process of adjustment, standards, behavior; expec‑
tations change with the biological intelligence of the most
alert animal. In this apotheosis of multiple choice it will
never be possible again to reconstruct cause and effect. They
work—that is all.
6.16 The Generic City’s aspiration toward tropicality automati‑
cally implies the rejection of any lingering reference to the
city as fortress, as citadel; it is open and accommodating like
a mangrove forest.
7
Politics
7.1 The Generic City has a (sometimes distant) relationship with
a more or less authoritarian regime—local or national. Usu‑
ally the cronies of the “leader”—whoever that was—decided
to develop a piece of “downtown” or the periphery, or even to
start a new city in the middle of nowhere, and so triggered
the boom that put the city on the map.
7.2 Very often, the regime has evolved to a surprising degree
of invisibility, as if, through its very permissiveness, the
Generic City resists the dictatorial.
8 Sociology
8.1. It is very surprising that the triumph of the Generic City has
not coincided with the triumph of sociology—a discipline
whose “field” has been extended by the Generic City beyond
its wildest imagination. The Generic City is sociology, hap‑
pening. Each Generic City is a petri dish—or an infinitely
patient blackboard on which almost any hypothesis can be
“proven” and then erased, never again to reverberate in the
minds of its authors or its audience.
8.2. Clearly, there is a proliferation of communities—a sociologi‑
cal zapping—that resists a single overriding interpretation.
The Generic City is loosening every structure that made
anything coalesce in the past.
8.3 While infinitely patient, the Generic City is also persistently
resistant to speculation: it proves that sociology may be the
worst system to capture sociology in the making. It outwits
each established critique. It contributes huge amounts of
evidence for and—in even more impressive quantities—
against each hypothesis. In A tower blocks lead to suicide,
in B to happiness ever after. In C they are seen as a first step‑
ping stone toward emancipation (presumably under some
kind of invisible “duress,” however), in D simply as passé.
Constructed in unimaginable numbers in K, they are being
exploded in L. Creativity is inexplicably high in E, nonex‑
istent in F. G is a seamless ethnic mosaic, H perpetually
at the mercy of separatism, if not on the verge of civil war.
Model Y will never last because of its tampering with family
structure, but Z flourishes—a word no academic would ever
apply to any activity in the Generic City—because of it. Reli‑
gion is eroded in V, surviving in W, transmuted in X.
8.4 Strangely, nobody has thought that cumulatively the endless
contradictions of these interpretations prove the richness of
the Generic City; that is the one hypothesis that has been
eliminated in advance.
9 Quarters
9.1 There is always a quarter called Lipservice, where a minimum
of the past is preserved: usually it has an old train/tramway
or double-decker bus driving through it, ringing ominous
bells—domesticated versions of the Flying Dutchman’s
phantom vessel. Its phone booths are either red and trans‑
planted from London, or equipped with small Chinese roofs.
Lipservice—also called Afterthought, Waterfront, Too Late,
42nd Street, simply the Village, or even Underground—is an
elaborate mythic operation: it celebrates the past as only the
recently conceived can. It is a machine.
rem koolhaas 355
Koolhaas speaks of the past
that is embedded in architecture, with which the Generic
City has such a troubled relation. We preserve its corpse,
like a fetish, then mourn
the failure of our living
bodies—where we live now
—to resemble its perfect, still
form. But history leaves other
residues that can also be lost
or kept with us, such as stories and relationships. We live
inside a set of ideas, just as
certainly as we live inside of
architecture. They constitute
the history we seek to recover,
the one that needs preserving.
9.2 The Generic City had a past, once. In its drive for promi‑
nence, large sections of it somehow disappeared, first
unlamented—the past apparently was surprisingly unsani‑
tary, even dangerous—then, without warning, relief turned
into regret. Certain prophets—long white hair, gray socks,
sandals—had always been warning that the past was nec‑
essary—a resource. Slowly, the destruction machine grinds
to a halt; some random hovels on the laundered Euclidean
plane are saved, restored to a splendor they never had …
9.3 In spite of its absence, history is the major preoccupation,
even industry, of the Generic City. On the liberated grounds,
around the restored hovels, still more hotels are constructed
to receive additional tourists in direct proportion to the era‑
sure of the past. Its disappearance has no influence on their
numbers, or maybe it is just a last-minute rush. Tourism is
now independent of destination …
9.4 Instead of specific memories, the associations the Generic
City mobilizes are general memories, memories of memo‑
ries: if not all memories at the same time, then at least an
abstract, token memory, a déjà vu that never ends, generic
memory.
9.5 In spite of its modest physical presence (Lipservice is never
more than three stories high: homage to/revenge of Jane
Jacobs?) it condenses the entire past in a single complex.
History returns not as farce here, but as service: costumed
merchants (funny hats, bare midriffs, veils) voluntarily
enact the conditions (slavery, tyranny, disease, poverty,
colony)—that their nation once went to war to abolish. Like
a replicating virus, worldwide, the colonial seems the only
inexhaustible source of the authentic.
9.6 42nd Street: ostensibly the places where the past is preserved,
they are actually the places where the past has changed the
most, is the most distant—as if seen through the wrong end
of a telescope—or even completely eliminated.
9.7 Only the memory of former excess is strong enough to
charge the bland. As if they try to warm themselves at the
heat of an extinguished volcano, the most popular sites
(with tourists, and in the Generic City that includes every‑
one) are the ones once most intensely associated with sex
and misconduct. Innocents invade the former haunts of
pimps, prostitutes, hustlers, transvestites, and to a lesser
degree, artists. Paradoxically, at the same moment that the
information highway is about to deliver pornography by the
truckload to their living rooms, it is as if the experience of
walking on these warmed-over embers of transgression and
sin makes them feel special, alive. In an age that does not
generate new aura, the value of established aura skyrockets.
Is walking on these ashes the nearest they will get to guilt?
Existentialism diluted to the intensity of a Perrier?
9.8 Each Generic City has a waterfront, not necessarily with
water—it can also be with desert, for instance—but at least
an edge where it meets another condition, as if a position
of near escape is the best guarantee for its enjoyment. Here
tourists congregate in droves around a cluster of stalls.
Hordes of “hawkers” try to sell them the “unique” aspects
of the city. The unique parts of all Generic Cities together
have created a universal souvenir, scientific cross between
Eiffel Tower, Sacré Cœur, and Statue of Liberty: a tall build‑
ing (usually between 200 and 300 meters) drowned in a
small ball of water with snow or, if close to the equator, gold
flakes; diaries with pockmarked leather covers; hippie san‑
dals—even if real hippies are quickly repatriated. Tourists
fondle these—nobody has ever witnessed a sale—and then
sit down in exotic eateries that line the waterfront: they run
the full gamut of food today: spicy: first and ultimately maybe
most reliable indication of being elsewhere; patty: beef or
synthetic; raw: atavistic practice that will be very popular in
the third millennium.
9.9 Shrimp is the ultimate appetizer. Through the simplification
of the food chain—and the vicissitudes of preparation—they
taste like English muffins, i.e. nothingness.
rem koolhaas 357
10 Program
10.1 Offices are still there, in ever greater numbers, in fact. People
say they are no longer necessary. In five to ten years we will
all work at home. But then we will need bigger homes, big
enough to use for meeting. Offices will have to be converted
to homes.
10.2The only activity is shopping. But why not consider shop‑
ping as temporary, provisional? It awaits better times. It is
our own fault—we didn’t think of anything better to do.
The same spaces inundated with other programs—librar‑
ies, baths, universities—would be terrific; we would be awed
by their grandeur.
10.3 Hotels are becoming the generic accommodation of the
Generic City, its most common building block. That used to
be the office—which at least implied a coming and a going,
assumed the presence of other important accommodations
elsewhere. Hotels are now containers that, in the expansion
and completeness of their facilities, make almost all other
buildings redundant. Even doubling as shopping malls, they
are the closest we have to urban existence, 21st-century style.
10.4The hotel now implies imprisonment, voluntary house
arrest; there is no competing place left to go; you come
and stay. Cumulatively, it describes a city of ten million all
locked in their rooms, a kind of reverse animation—den‑
sity imploded.
11 Architecture
11.1 Close your eyes and imagine an explosion of beige. At its
epicenter splashes the color of vaginal folds (unaroused),
metallic-matte aubergine, khaki-tobacco, dusty pumpkin; all
cars on their way to bridal whiteness…
11.2 There are interesting and boring buildings in the Generic
City, as in all cities. Both trace their ancestry back to Mies
van der Rohe: the first category to his irregular Friedrich‑
sttadt tower (1921), the second to the boxes he conceived
not long afterward. This sequence is important: obviously,
after initial experimentation, Mies made up his mind once
and for all against interest, for boredom. At best, his later
buildings capture the spirit of the earlier work—sublimated,
repressed?—as a more or less noticeable absence, but he
never proposed “interesting” projects as possible building
again. The Generic City proves him wrong: its more daring
architects have taken up the challenge Mies abandoned, to
the point where it is now hard to find a box. Ironically, this
exuberant homage to the interesting Mies shows that “the”
Mies was wrong.
11.3 The architecture of the Generic City is by definition beauti‑
ful. Built at incredible speed, and conceived at even more
incredible pace, there is an average of 27 aborted versions
for every realized—but that is not quite the term—struc‑
ture. They are prepared in the 10,000 architectural offices
nobody has ever heard of, each vibrant with fresh inspi‑
ration. Presumably more modest than their well-known
colleagues, these offices are bonded by a collective aware‑
ness that something is wrong with architecture that can
only be rectified through their efforts. The power of num‑
bers gives them a splendid, shining arrogance. They are the
ones who design without any hesitation. They assemble,
from 1,001 sources, with savage precision, more riches than
any genius ever could. On average, their education has cost
30,000 dollars, excluding travel and housing. 23% have been
laundered at American Ivy League universities, where they
have been exposed—admittedly for very short periods—to
the well-paid elite of the other, “official” profession. It fol‑
lows that a combined total investment of 300 billion dollars
($300,000,000,000) worth of architectural education
($30,000 [average cost] x 100 [average number of work‑
ers per office] x 100,000 [number of worldwide offices]) is
working in and producing Generic Cities at any moment.
11.4 Buildings that are complex in form depend on the curtain—
wall industry, on ever more effective adhesives and sealants
rem koolhaas 359
that turn each building into a mixture of straitjacket and
oxygen tent. The use of silicone—“we are stretching the
facade as far as it will go”—has flattened all facades, glued
glass to stone to steel to concrete in a space-age impurity.
These connections give the appearance of intellectual rigor
through the liberal application of a transparent spermy com‑
pound that keeps everything together by intention rather
than design—a triumph of glue over the integrity of materi‑
als. Like everything else in the Generic City, its architecture
is the resistant made malleable, an epidemic of yielding no
longer through the application of principle but through the
systematic application of the unprincipled.
11.5 Because the Generic City is largely Asian, its architecture
is generally air-conditioned; this is where the paradox of
the recent paradigm shift—the city no longer represents
maximum development but borderline underdevelop‑
ment—becomes acute; the brutal means by which universal
conditioning is achieved mimic inside the building the cli‑
matic conditions that once “happened” outside—sudden
storms, mini-tornadoes, freezing spells in the cafeteria,
heat waves, even mist; a provincialism of the mechanical,
deserted by gray matter in pursuit of the electronic. Incom‑
petence or imagination?
11.6 The irony is that in this way the Generic City is at its most
subversive, its most ideological; it elevates mediocrity to a
higher level; it is like Kurt Schwitter’s Merzbau at the scale
of the city: the Generic City is a Merzcity.
11.7 The angle of the facades is the only reliable index of archi‑
tectural genius: 3 points for sloping backward, 12 points for
sloping forward, 2-point penalty for setbacks (too nostalgic).
11.8 The apparently solid substance of the Generic City is mis‑
leading. 51% of its volume consists of atrium. The atrium is
a diabolical device in its ability to substantiate the insubstan‑
tial. Its Roman name is an eternal guarantor of architectural
class—its historic origins make the theme inexhaustible. It
accommodates the cave-dweller in its relentless provision of
metropolitan comfort.
11.9 The atrium is void space: voids are the essential building
block of the Generic City. Paradoxically, its hollowness
insures its very physicality, the pumping up of the volume
the only pretext for its physical manifestation. The more
complete and repetitive its interiors, the less their essential
repetition is noticed.
11.1oThe style of choice is postmodern, and will always remain so.
Postmodernism is the only movement that has succeeded
in connecting the practice of architecture with the practice
of panic. Postmodernism is not a doctrine based on a highly
civilized reading of architectural history but a method, a
mutation in professional architecture that produces results
fast enough to keep pace with the Generic City’s develop‑
ment. Instead of consciousness, as its original inventors
may have hoped, it creates a new unconscious. It is modern‑
ization’s little helper. Anyone can do it—a skyscraper based
on the Chinese pagoda and/or a Tuscan hill town.
11.11 All resistance to postmodernism is anti-democratic. It cre‑
ates a “stealth” wrapping around architecture that makes it
irresistible, like a Christmas present from a charity.
11.12Is there a connection between the predominance of mirror
in the Generic City—is it to celebrate nothingness through
its multiplication or a desperate effort to capture essences
on their way to evaporation?—and the “gifts” that, for centu‑
ries, were supposed to be the most popular, efficient present
for savages?
11.13Maxim Gorky speaks in relation to Coney Island of “varied
boredom.” He clearly intends the term as an oxymoron.
Variety cannot be boring. Boredom cannot be varied. But
the infinite variety of the Generic City comes close, at
least, to making variety normal: banalized, in a reversal
of expectation, it is repetition that has become unusual,
rem koolhaas 361
therefore, potentially, daring, exhilarating. But that is for
the 21st century.
12 Geography
12.1 The Generic City is in a warmer than usual climate; it is on
its way to the south—toward the equator—away from the
mess that the north made of the second millennium. It is a
concept in a state of migration. Its ultimate destiny is to be
tropical—better climate, more beautiful people. It is inhab‑
ited by those who do not like it elsewhere.
12.2 In the Generic City, people are not only more beautiful than
their peers, they are also reputed to be more even-tempered,
less anxious about work, less hostile, more pleasant—proof,
in other words, that there is a connection between archi‑
tecture and behavior, that the city can make better people
through as yet unidentified methods.
12.3 One of the most potent characteristics of the Generic City is
the stability of its weather—no seasons, outlook sunny—yet
all forecasts are presented in terms of imminent change and
future deterioration: clouds in Karachi. From the ethical and
the religious, the issue of doom has shifted to the inescap‑
able domain of the meteorological. Bad weather is about the
only anxiety that hovers over the Generic City.
13 Identity
13.1 There is a calculated (?) redundancy in the iconography that
the Generic City adopts. If it is water-facing, then waterbased symbols are distributed over its entire territory. If
it is a port, then ships and cranes will appear far inland
(However, showing the containers themselves would make
no sense: you can’t particularize the generic through the
Generic.) If it is Asian, then “delicate” (sensual, inscruta‑
ble) women appear in elastic poses, suggesting (religious,
sexual) submission everywhere. If it has a mountain, each
brochure, menu, ticket, billboard will insist on the hill, as
if nothing less than a seamless tautology will convince. Its
identity is like a mantra.
14 History
14.1 Regret about history’s absence is a tiresome reflex. It
exposes an unspoken consensus that history’s presence is
desirable. But who says that is the case? A city is a plane
inhabited in the most efficient way by people and processes,
and in most cases, the presence of history only drags down
its performance …
14.2History presents/obstructs the pure exploitation of its theo‑
retical value as absence.
14.3 Throughout the history of humankind—to start a paragraph
the American way—cities have grown through a process of
consolidation. Changes are made on the spot. Things are
improved. Cultures flourish, decay, revive, disappear, are
sacked, invaded, humiliated, raped, triumph, are reborn,
have golden ages, fall suddenly silent—all on the same site.
That is why archaeology is a profession of digging: it exposes
layer after layer of civilization (i.e. city). The Generic City,
like a sketch which is never elaborated, is not improved but
abandoned. The idea of layering, intensification, comple‑
tion are alien to it: it has no layers. Its next layer takes place
somewhere else, either next door—that can be the size of
a country—or even elsewhere altogether. The archaeologue
(= archaeology with more interpretation) of the 20th century
needs unlimited plane tickets, not a shovel.
14.4In exporting/ejecting its improvements, the Generic City
perpetuates its own amnesia (its only link with eternity?). Its
archaeology will therefore be the evidence of its progressive
forgetting, the documentation of its evaporation. Its genius
rem koolhaas 363
will be empty-handed—not an emperor without clothes but
an archaeologist without finds, or a site even.
15 Infrastructure
15.1 Infrastructures, which were mutually reinforcing and
totalizing, are becoming more and more competitive and
local; they no longer pretend to create functioning wholes
but now spin off functional entities. Instead of network
and organism, the new infrastructure creates enclave and
impasse: no longer the grand récit but the parasitic swerve.
(The city of Bangkok has approved plans for three compet‑
ing airborne metro systems to get from A to B—may the
strongest one win.)
15.2 Infrastructure is no longer a more or less delayed response
to a more or less urgent need but a strategic weapon, a pre‑
diction: Harbor X is not enlarged to serve a hinterland of
frantic consumers but to kill/reduce the chances that harbor
Y will survive the 21st century. On a single island, southern
metropolis Z, still in its infancy, is “given” a new subway
system to make established metropolis W in the north look
clumsy, congested, and ancient. Life in V is smoothed to
make life in U eventually unbearable.
16 Culture
16.1 Only the redundant counts.
16.2In each time zone, there are at least three performances of
Cats. The world is surrounded by a Saturn’s ring of meow‑
ing.
16.3 The city used to be the great sexual hunting ground. The
Generic City is like a dating agency: it efficiently matches
supply and demand. Orgasm instead of agony: there is prog‑
ress. The most obscene possibilities are announced in the
cleanest typography; Helvetica has become pornographic.
17 End
17.1 Imagine a Hollywood movie about the Bible. A city some‑
where in the Holy Land. Market scene: from left and right
extras cloaked in colorful rags, furs, silken robes walk into
the frame yelling, gesticulating, rolling their eyes, starting
fights, laughing, scratching their beards, hairpieces drip‑
ping with glue, thronging toward the center of the image
waving sticks, fists, overturning stalls, trampling animals…
People shout. Selling wares? Proclaiming futures? Invok‑
ing Gods? Purses are snatched, criminals pursued (or is
it helped?) by the crowds. Priests pray for calm. Children
run amok in undergrowth of legs and robes. Animals bark.
Statues topple. Women shriek—threatened? Ecstatic? The
churning mass becomes oceanic. Waves break. Now switch
off the sound—silence, a welcome relief—and reverse
the film. The now mute but still visibly agitated men and
women stumble backward; the viewer no longer registers
only humans but begins to note spaces between them. The
center empties; the last shadows evacuate the rectangle of
the picture frame, probably complaining, but fortunately we
don’t hear them. Silence is now reinforced by emptiness: the
image shows empty stalls, some debris that was trampled
underfoot. Relief…it’s over. That is the story of the city. The
city is no longer. We can leave the theater now…
rem koolhaas 365
Aaron Betsky
“Nothing But Flowers: Against Public Space”
We live in fear of the shapeless, the void, the violence
that threatens our ability to stake a claim on a small plot of space.
Most people identify the sprawl of American cities as form‑
less—a contributing factor to the inconvenience, environmental
irresponsibility, all too easily manipulated reality, and lack of
controlling representation of everyday life.1 Living in Califor‑
nia especially, one is constantly confronted with demands for a
return to public space and public order. Motivated by a desire to
reintroduce a sense of order into the city, a search is on for form
that can shape and signify by means akin to traditional modes of
urban organization. This desire for order, largely functioning to
combat a sense of hopelessness, is generated out of a city that has
grown far beyond the bounds of traditional metropolitan agglom‑
erations. The desire appears in the political sphere as demands
for greater police protection and as immense growth in security
and control systems in the economic sphere. In its most con‑
crete embodiment, desire for order exists as massive prisons and
secured compounds for exurban living. Both have become pri‑
mary growth industries for formerly agricultural communities.
Such places of forceful framing represent nostalgia for imposed
forms of civic control. Both religious and secular centers have
provided the physical context for the exercise of this power, which
always has been mirrored by architecture.
Aaron Betsky (b. 1958)
directed the Netherlands
Architecture Institute for
ten years. “Buildings,” he
writes, “are not enough.
They are the tombs of
architecture, the residue of
the desire to make another
world, a better world, and
a world open to possibilities
beyond the everyday. In a
concrete sense, architecture
is that which allows us to
be at home in the world.”
“Nothing But Flowers”
was written in 1993 for
an anthology called slow
space, edited by the architect Michael Bell. When
he wrote it, Betsky was
curator of architecture and
design at the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art.
aaron betsky 367
I imagine these moments of
“temporary inhabitation”
transpiring in the spaces
Koolhaas described, that
part of the city where the
road, the buildings, and
nature all disappear and
“the Loch Ness Monster”
of public art alarms us by
surfacing. These interstitial, lost plazas are home
to all manner of surveillance. Microcameras and
retinal recognition transfer
our locations into the space
of flows, where they become
digital information, to be
shaped, shipped, and used.
If the events that circumscribe our actions transpire
largely within digital networks, where, exactly, are
we living?
These developments ironically result in the further dissolution
of clear urban form in their isolation of compounds, regardless
of whether those developments are prisons, anonymous tilt-up
concrete districts of commerce, isolated office-tower complexes,
or gated residential communities. In between such concentrated
structures, space sprawls formlessly, while the determination of
these objects by requirements—security, economy (value engi‑
neering), and seduction (sales)—elides all corners, removes
any sense of materiality, and dissolves space into evocations of
the continually curving and evenly lit worlds of science fiction.
Monuments that give form to such space are not places of wor‑
ship or culture, but are instead airports (such as the new Denver
International Airport), stadiums, and convention centers, acting
as economic and physical anchors for most developing American
cities. These large voids are activated only by temporary inhabita‑
tion and celebrate a simulation of the contest for space.
The most sophisticated security systems are invisible, as are
the contemporary ways in which we locate ourselves in the world,
by connecting to others with shared interests, and as are the
ways in which we construct a collective identity, by surrounding
ourselves with familiar images and sounds. Contained in wires,
microwave transmissions, or service contracts with local police or
security forces, these systems further dissolve a sense of physical
location and boundary, rendering real space even more difficult
to experience.
This increasingly incoherent and unarticulable urban form
has forced theorists who argue for “village formation” to propose
a pastiche of isolated moments of coherence.2 Their arguments
are buttressed by an expectation for community organization
that seems impractical except, as we are now seeing, as defensive
measures. The prevalence of self-protective neighborhood activ‑
ism leads one to imagine a world of science fiction “claves” of
warring factions taking care of their own and fending off others.3
The contemporary prototype of this model has been established
by Disney’s Celebration Community, newly built and complete
with its own experimental school. Although these New Urban‑
ists insist on the return of a “legible city” and a formed void called
“public space,” the quest for legibility and clarity destroys what we
historically have considered urban public space to be. A readable
city is a city reduced to a script that we must follow. Architectural
theoreticians confuse Hannah Arendt’s idea of public space with
the Greek notion of the agora, the place of public gathering. They
forget that the real action took place in the stoa where deals were
made and the state was run in sheltering shadows. 4 Public space
is a place where many activities overlap: rich confusion, com‑
merce, seduction, and filth. Public space works not as a designed
element, but is instead carved out by wheeling and dealing, cross‑
roads, and the chance at freedom, where a person emerges from
shadows into light that grows into the ever-extending space of
public gathering and demonstration, and seeps into every open
pore of the city.
Along with this truly public space comes meaning: the physi‑
cal context of actions itself signifies. This meaning does not exist
in the silence of an empty square or grand avenue, but emerges
in urban form, in all aspects of social life, as well as in the narra‑
tive richness of the everyday, and is crystallized into dense form
by those we call artists. It is the ability of useful form—whether a
skyscraper, bus stop, or pair of blue jeans—to take on the host of
shared associations, dreams, and fears that make the forms and
spaces of our collective experience cohere.5 Paradoxically, we need
dense spaces of layers, fractures, and confusion to find order.
The most logical place to find order in the city is on the street,
since it is the street that created the great urban spaces of places
such as California. The public square always had an ambivalent
purpose in American urbanism: centralized nodes of power
declined to express their means through a symbolic forecourt;
the gridded economy, aimed to use every inch of available space
for productive means, seldom guided urban strategy; and there
has long been a sense that the meaning of civic life should be
integrated into daily life rather than segregated into plazas.
Americans turn instead to the open road to find meaning. The
cities of California are, after all, the result of the great push into
the West, the end of the American road leading toward manifest
destiny. The conversion of lines of division into roads activates
nature into a Jeffersonian grid pregnant with democratic activi‑
ties. The road is the American society made real.6 In California,
the road is also the engine of growth, the place that allows the
logic of this particular concatenation of economic forces to work
its miracles; not only do freeways, strips, and cul-de-sacs make
the place visible, as Reyner Banham well understood, but so do
its spine, nerves, and overall structure.7 The road is clearly the
place to look for an order that might cohere and elaborate, rather
aaron betsky 369
than restrict, our sense of our place. The more intelligent urban
theorists do in fact look for order in the street. The one physi‑
cal element proposed by writers such as Doug Suisman is the
boulevard, which Suisman envisions as an imageable spine and
appropriate connective network for a city as expansive as Los
Angeles.8
Yet even this image, which would seem to hold the promise of
a place of authentic alternative urban form, is made up of highly
biased models. The grand metropolitan boulevard has become a
trope in the description of the modern city. Ever since Baudelaire
sang the praises of the new spaces of Paris, we have imagined
that these homogenized and rationalized voids, cutting through
the complexity of the urban corpus, form the true face (facade)
of the city. These road voids are where the modern city performs
its most important function—namely to appear.9 They are also
the visible embodiment of the vast system of infrastructural con‑
nections (mass transit, traffic, water and sewage distribution,
and later, telecommunications) that constitutes the bourgeois
body of the city—the skeleton of rationality on which the spec‑
tacle of self-definition can appear. The metropolitan boulevard is
thus the embodiment not of the city, but of the modern city as it
was built and used by the middle class. It is the place where the
logic of economics carves out a space that is neither functional
(of labor) nor controlling, but communicative and relational. It is
the middle realm that mediates between productive citizens and
the seductions of consumer society by providing a supposedly
neutral scaffolding for development. The boulevard represents
the most refined appearance of middle-class social space. This
characterization is not meant as an indictment, but rather as a
reminder of the programs that gave form to the spaces we regard
today as models of public spheres.10
The boulevard finds its most perfect embodiment, perhaps
ironically, in the American city, where it becomes a part of the
omnivalent grid: it is merely the first among equals, the place
where the middle class can display itself in a freedom guaran‑
teed and framed by, but also limited to, the rational conceits of
the modern city.11 The boulevard is also the American vector of
expansion, the embodiment of the principle of growth that justi‑
fies the cycle of production and consumption via the continual
subjugation of reality.12 Yet in cities like Los Angeles, the bou‑
levard, in the process of marching across the countryside, has
disintegrated. Its movement function has been taken over by the
freeway system, whose speed and isolation remove it from the
body politic. What is left of the boulevard is a formless void, its
edges eaten out by parking lots, its presence marked by signs, and
its rhythms so attenuated that it is difficult to see the boulevard
as belonging to, or making sense out of, any particular commu‑
nity. The boulevard has become the strip.
This transformation is not unexplainable or natural. It is the
direct result of an economic system allergic to the static and
unproductive accumulation of capital, a system that instead seeks
capital mobility at all costs—a system that effectively prevents
the formal configuration of the city because it must be continu‑
ally redeveloped. The new spaces of the boulevards emerge as
mere speculative fissures in the accumulated real worth of the
city to be found in new neighborhoods, subdivisions, and subur‑
ban landscapes beyond urban confines. Capitalism destroys the
space of labor—real space—as much as it destroys the individual.
Human beings and their locations in space and time are, after all,
resistant to the smooth flow of money and to the accumulation of
capital. The perfect human being would be a neutral screen that
would only consume; the perfect space would function only as
storage for memory or for the utopia of the frictionless world that
only money can buy.13
Thus the boulevard has become the strip whose formlessness,
despite Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s valiant efforts
in the late 1960s, still defies description.14 The strip has all the
grandeur of the boulevard in terms of its scale and economic
importance, but it has no true edge or border. Confined to a car,
one is always physically removed from the experience of the strip,
one experiences it solely as a spectacle. It is not only removed
from any sense of the body (the real), but also escapes from most
attempts to control it. The strip is empty because activities shrink
behind parking lots and large signs, collapsing the actual space of
the strip into those signs, whether of commerce or its lubrication
(traffic signs). The strip is the place where the middle class disin‑
tegrates as it tries to look at itself from within a bubble of curved
glass moving between forty-five and sixty miles per hour.
The real action, meanwhile, takes place within isolated interi‑
ors. The business of spectacle (or vice versa) now occurs inside the
shopping mall. In its disconnection from both the infrastructure
and the body politic, the mall makes it evident that the middleaaron betsky 371
class (or consumer) sphere is not the same as the open space of
cognition, the public sphere. In the shopping mall, the public
space is ersatz, appearing as the stage for such commercialized
rituals as yearly visits to Santa Claus, or as the gathering place
of teenagers and elderly people, who gravitate here by default
because there is no true public space.15
Bourgeois critics are understandably upset by the demise of
the boulevard as the prime locale for urban growth and self-dis‑
play. To them, the replacement of the metropolitan street by both
the high-speed highway and the enclosed shopping mall—way
stations toward electronic connectivity, the complete dissolution
of what we think of as public space—signals the withering away
of community.16 Yet when they cry for a return of public space—
viewed as having been destroyed by an alien element, whether
unbridled capitalism or uncontrolled and attenuating growth—
all they are lamenting is the loss of the space that had represented
and thus defined them. Again, the public space of the boulevard
or its predecessor, the rationalized square of the late eighteenth
century, is not a place where society as a whole defines itself, but
is instead where the middle class glorifies in consumption. This
consumption is made possible by a rational spatial structure that
promises an undefined and developable future rather than the
closure of monumental structures. Whether behind barricades
or in the sensuous caverns carved out behind their facades, such
disenfranchised groups as the working class and women carved
out spaces of resistance in opposition to the aggressive, grand
assertions of the boulevard. By theorizing such spaces, critics
created a space, an art, and a literature that justified them and in
some ways made them.17
What bothers reactionary critics most is the emergence of a
new kind of spatiality that defies traditional attempts to define it.
This space is not only typified by suburban and exurban expan‑
sion, but also by the electronic sphere. It is quite simply the space
that is left over: the space that is not. An emptying out implies the
growth of a void, but voids are invisible and, by their very nature,
formless. I speak here not of the defined spatiality that is made by
and makes possible the rational structure of the bourgeois city,
nor of the preexisting void that theorists of planned voids tend
to postulate as the original and thus authentic condition, but the
void that appears out of neglect or lack of focus.
This space is the opposite of the will to form. It is an inevi‑
table result of the systematic attempt to create closure, since any
such system sows the seeds of its own self-destruction. This
space is created when the self-refining logic of production and
consumption reduces physical barriers to ephemera that serve as
informational switching stations—facades become signs, signs
become systems of zeros and ones, and digits are turned into
icons of symbolic logic that float through a placeless void.
One is ultimately reminded that space is no more than a
socially determined form of measurement that, like time, allows
us to locate ourselves in the world according to commonly recog‑
nized criteria. It is, in other words, an artificial interpretation of
a particular relationship our body has to the physical world we
experience as other. This interpretation is conditioned by social
relations and, in turn, determines those relations.18 Thus, it is
not surprising that the transformation of a late-capitalist system
into something we can only vaguely define—still—as “postmod‑
ern” involves the emergence of new forms of spatiality that feel
as alien and formless to us as the metropolitan environment felt
to those who first faced it from the feudal space of the fields.19
Our notions of humanity, morality, and ethics are as bound up
with the capitalist metropolitan environment as feudal categories
were with the agricultural environment.20 The disappearance of
a space bounded by solid walls and defined by specific and static
activities may be as revolutionary as the death of the humanist
subject.21 This is not meant to imply we are approaching Arma‑
geddon or will experience some kind of reverse big bang; rather,
a socialized spatiality is emerging whose main characteristics are
completely alien and incomprehensible to us, but which we, ironi‑
cally, inhabit with great ease.22
The germ of a post-urban and post-Fordist world is thus located
in the peculiar spaces created not by design, but by constraints
that have emerged out of both the ruthless logic of our economic
system and our attempts to form that logic. It is the space made
by front lawns, driveways, turning radiuses, security perimeters,
lines of sight (for both signs and advertisements), landing pat‑
terns, noise abatement programs, concentrations of economic
energy into competitive arenas (speculative office parks), and
setback requirements. It is the unfenced front yard and the zone
lit by the television. It is the space of the parking lot that bleeds
Can cities shape or elicit
the art we need? If, as
Sieverts suggests, we need
better art and writing to
teach us the logic of where
we live now, where can we
find it? Not in planned
public space, Betsky suggests, nor from that old
wellspring of post-War culture, “the road” (whether
main street, boulevard, or
strip). The potentials of
both have been drained by
planning and surveillance.
Instead, we must look in
“the space that is left over
… typified by suburban
and exurban expansion,
but also by the electronic
sphere.” Stripped of will
or intention by its invisibility this is “the space of
potential, speculation, and
fantasy, not of rational
reality.”
aaron betsky 373
into the space of the highway. It is the space of the corner minimall or gas station. It is the uncertain depth of the screen. It is
the space between edge cities, the space we “fill” with develop‑
able lots, potential communities, and service roads. It is the space
of potential, speculation, and fantasy, not of rational reality. It is
the space of the shopping mall, where all traditional elements
of spatial control through structure—whether they are columns,
corners, or staircases—elide into endless planes of glass and
chrome, highlighted by the stage sets of postmodern recall. It is
the space of the car interior, which falls somewhere in between
a body suit, a prosthetic device, and the barrierless flow of high
modernism. It is the antiseptic space of the airport or the hospi‑
tal, where the reality of the body must be drowned by Muzak. It
is the space of MTV, sliding away in imperceptible jumps from
image to image.
This space does have certain characteristics, though not in
the sense of a signature. It is profoundly modern in a simple,
stylistic sense: it is planar and not volumetric; it is based on a
divorce between its context, girded in by machined materials,
and the artificial space it opens up; and it is extensive in its ten‑
dencies. Its planarity is predominantly horizontal and gridded,
and dissolves at the edges. This space is quite close to the Mie‑
sian beinahe nichts.
This space is, therefore, highly anonymous and abstract, and
difficult to picture. Invisible to the naked eye, this space only
appears as if in the shadows—implied between two fast-food
franchises, seeping out where servants wait for the bus in the
shadow of the walled compound where they work, emerging as
the space around one’s seat in an airplane, or appearing when
one turns on the electronic device that loads pixels on a screen.
In other cases, this space is highly unstable, emerging with those
same shadows or appearing only at night as the space created in
the pools of security lighting in empty parking lots. It is the space
of the empty lot waiting to be developed that now transforms into
a garden, revealing the original vegetation of California before
green grass was rolled over its rocky soil. It also appears in the
abandoned building as a new kind of porous, unstable commu‑
nity where the homeless are not so much at home as they are, to
use a telling phrase, hanging (out). It is also the place of illicit
activity and the geography of cruising, as mapped by John Rechy
and many perversely eager urban geographers: the space of the
crack house, for cruising in cars, and once again the space lurk‑
ing in the shadows.23 Finally, it is the space of the edge, where
urban form disintegrates and the desert or the space of the nomad
dominates.24
Many other such spaces exist, sharing at least one other char‑
acteristic: almost all are universally derided by urban theorists as
the detritus of modern society.25 These spaces do not answer to
any traditional notions of beauty, and serve no particular function;
they are ungovernable, perhaps because they are unknowable.26
They are supposed to be the very emblem of the dissolution of
civic authority. They mark the extreme threats that now face a
political system based on middle class values as it attempts to
adapt itself to a post-Fordist, fluid world economy that is the eco‑
nomic equivalent or engenderer of postmodern culture. These
are not pretty places or real places, only background noise that
threatens to drown out the polite forms of a built polity.
In a sense, the emergence of these spaces justifies itself. It
argues for the acceptance of the rhizomatic sprawl of a city like
Los Angeles, which implies an acceptance of its essential form‑
lessness. One can never really know or control this city, but can
only participate in its continual transformation in a thoughtful
manner. Rather than attempting to impose form on Los Angeles,
one must discover the inherent relational networks and coherent
markers or vectors within the sprawl and go, so to speak, with
the flow.
Unfortunately, this statement does not seem to lead to concrete
embodiment or action. It might lend itself to the liebestod of a
novel like Crash or the morphing of Michael Jackson, but it does
not seem to provide an architectural program.27 Yet I would argue
that there are three elements here that hold promise for engaging
this postmodern spatiality: position, state change, and resistance.
The first is the hic stans of modernist dogma. The second is the
uncertain constitution of the postmodern persona. The third is
the acceptance of the unformed, ugly void as a means of liber‑
ating oneself to a provisional awareness that might constitute
one’s essence.
Notions of position or pose have recently reemerged in the
work of theorists as diverse as Richard Sennett, Félix Guattari
and Donna Haraway.28 It is interesting to note, however, that such
thoughts go back at least as far as Siegfried Giedion, with his call
for “man in equipoise,” and thus lie at the very heart of the mod‑
These fecund spaces of
public invention, that
are “the opposite of the
will to form,” spring from
neglect—“almost all are
universally derided by
urban theorists as the
detritus of modern society.”
More or better planning is
not advised.
aaron betsky 375
Architecture is not beside
the point. Rather, it needs
to shed old habits. No
longer “a product to be
delivered by one creator
to a client,” the architecture Betsky calls for is “an
architecture of the event
space,” produced through
“a collaborative and continual effort.”
Planning, likewise, can
l e ar n n e w (or perh aps
mu ch o l d e r) p at t e r n s .
Betsky believes that “state
ernist enterprise of creating a free and open space in which we
may reveal ourselves to be whatever it is we are becoming.29 All
believe in a subjectivity that is embodied in the body in motion,
and in the process of taking a certain position that articulates
itself into either artistic or socially measured coordinates. This
body defines itself in action, creating a space for itself in the act
of appropriation. It cannot use frames, only the focal point of the
stage, whose edges bleed out beyond the spotlight. It dreams of
continual extension.
Whether the models for such a spatial positioning are the
dancer on the stage, the political persona acting, or the woman
who places her body in question, they all make an argument for
positioning one’s own reality in the here and now. It is as a pose, by
posing one’s self, that one exists.30 For architecture, this implies a
building practice that is composite, contrapuntal, and provisional.
This practice must refuse to solidify into a leaden-footed realiza‑
tion of one particular attitude, which inevitably becomes a tomb
of the individual’s position as soon as it is finished. It is as much
a living thing as any part of our environment may be, rather than
that to which we ascribe the function of object. This may be an
architecture of the “event space.”31
This position also implies the impossibility of architecture as
a product to be delivered by one creator to a client, and instead
sees it as a collaborative and continual effort.32 This contentious
and evolving position is not an easy thing to imagine within the
traditional urban environment, where buildings must both have
functions and contribute to the overall context of the community.
It may imply that we engage in a process of change, unbuilding,
and reconstruction, rather than creating recognizable objects.33
The notion of state change comes from the world of fluid
dynamics: one can imagine the properties of an object most clearly
at the moment when it is about to change state. Critics such as
Manuel De Landa and Sanford Kwinter have looked to the epigen‑
etic landscape—complete with its moments of crisis and nested
unfolding of forms—as the paradigm for the formal unfolding
of reality.34 Despite the strangely deterministic flavor of some of
their writing, their application of “high” science to aesthetics and
philosophy implies an argument for an understanding of space
as a fluid and nomadic phenomenon, and thus for a focus on
that which has not (yet) formed over the solidified detritus of the
process. Writers as diverse as Gilles Deleuze and Bruce Chatwin
have explored the theoretical significance of nomadic cultures
existing in a smooth and therefore idyllic space.35 Fluid space,
coupled with nomadic space, foregrounds qualities of mutability,
unhierarchical organization, collage, allegory, palimpsest, and
once again, lack of definition.36 The combination argues for the
kind of urban nomad William Gibson imagines inhabiting the
deserts (or seas) of cyberspace.37 This is not altogether a utopian
vision. One can understand architecture as a moment of crisis
that engenders an epigenetic landscape, and thus neither the act
nor the inconceivable result will be heuristic.
One is left with a spatiality that exists only as the chance inter‑
section of different positions, a spatiality that disappears as soon
as it is defined, and a space that has so many guises it becomes
uncatchable. Yet such a space is also liberating: it is the romantic
wide-open road that American culture built as an escape clause
into its myth of manifest destiny. It is a place of polymorphous
perversity where one can wallow in orgiastic self-realization. But
it is also the space of the shopping mall, the tract development,
and the screen. I am not saying that these spaces are beautiful,
meaningful, or desirable. Indeed, I am saying the exact oppo‑
site: they are anarchic spaces of self-presentation that cannot be
judged, at least within the hierarchy of values we have created
for architecture and urbanism. These spaces are the wide-open
plains once thought to be this country’s destiny where a new kind
of man (not woman) could define himself in a new relationship
to space and, according to Thomas Jefferson, to others.38 The
latter, however, turned into the bloodstained field of ethnic and
ecological massacre.
The destruction of the urban boulevard, the square, and the
bounded environment actually may be a good thing because it
dissolves the boundaries of thingness—but it also may lead to its
own peculiar forms of violence. One cannot help but feel a sense
of loss at the disappearance of good city form, just as the dissolu‑
tion of the civic entity it embodies is profoundly frightening. I
do not wish to comment on the desirability of this horror, but
instead I offer a bit of translucent cover.
One can, pace Gottfried Semper, conceptualize architecture
as a texture, a woven connective tissue that creates a commu‑
nal image.39 While cloth might cover and even shade, it neither
completely buries nor keeps out nor has its own form. It is only
a layer, a palimpsest, a weaving together of the many threads of
change” (a gestalt phenomena in which fluid and
contextual patterns move
into and out of sudden
coherence) helps to engender new art. Planning that
“foregrounds qualities of
mutability, unhierarchical
organization, collage, allegory, palimpsest, and once
again, lack of definition”
makes a home for state
change.
aaron betsky 377
Betsky directs our attention
to the fugitive resources,
fleeting moments, and
fragile, indefensible circumstances that give rise
to meaning in the urban
spaces we now inhabit, and
then cautions that purposeful action and scrutiny
threaten the very existence
of these things. They are
to be glanced at but never
life. One can think of urban form as connective tissue made up
of the sinuous threads that weave our lives together every day.
These threads, paradoxically, are voids: the streets, the data lines,
the open spaces that allow us to use the city and see ourselves
in that urban environment. 40 These voids cannot be made, but
they can be woven together by carving them out of objects. We
do not need to build a connective structure. Instead we need to
weave our structures together by burrowing into them, destroy‑
ing the false separations between inside and outside, reality and
appearance, function and form, and between places by turning
them into an amorphous web or landscape that may not look like
anything itself, but is a space of appearance. 41
There are different ways of creating such a space of libera‑
tion and uncertainty. This space would surely be Lars Lerup’s
“doublespace,” where the mask of appearance or control and
the mold of the body brush past each other, leaving something
untold, unseen, and unknowable, but certainly worth appearing.
It might also be, as outlined in the editorial scope of this book,
the “slow space” that puts the fast moves of capitalist development
into limbo. It is also the space of myths such as those invented
by Lebbeus Woods, Neil Denari, and Diller + Scofidio, a reen‑
acted space that traces normal life, but represents it as something
warped, deformed and wonderful. 42
Most profoundly, this might be a modernist space in which we
loosen ourselves from the clothes of civilization, from its walls
and its morality, in order to nakedly go wandering as new nomads.
Of course, it is not empty space, but something that slides out
between dense layers of economic, social, and physical determi‑
nation as if restaged by a film director. To design this space means
to direct the self-organizing systems of the city, as Sanford Kwin‑
ter has pointed out, and to wander through the real city along its
real spaces—the formless blobs of streets and parking lots. 43 To
be an architect in such a space might mean telling stories, having
sex, or cutting holes in the fabric of the acceptable.
Certain artists (Richard Serra, Robert Irwin, Gordon MattaClark, James Turrell, and Robert Ryman come to mind) have
perhaps been here already, providing us with markers as ephem‑
eral as those elusive and illusive street spaces. The wizards at
the Visual Language Workshop at MIT are mapping out blurred
and soft-focus spaces of a profound modernism, spaces in which
pieces of information, the building blocks of our reality, careen in
and out of one’s consciousness.
The most important characteristic of this space is that one
cannot focus on it: the appropriated parking lot becomes a func‑
tional place, the building lot becomes a building, the sign reveals
its limits. This space objectifies by subjecting us to the primacy
of its preexisting rules or by absorbing us into a certain position.
It is only seen in the rearview mirror and out of the corner of our
eyes as the space of distraction, in which we constitute our selves
as thinking subjects. 44 It is perhaps a space that is not a locus, not
a foundation for the exercise of power or understanding, but is
only what is left over after those actions have failed.
We need a cartography of this unknown and unknowable new
continent of continual slippage, this sea of liquid movement that
shapes so many of our experiences and sets us free in the modern
world while continually drowning us. We must invent a language
for Orange County, Orlando, Houston, and White Plains. We
have no terms to judge, evaluate, or even describe these spaces
or our behavior in them; thus we cannot behave. Some of the
most interesting work currently occurring at the fringes of archi‑
tectural theory is a drifting cataloging of exurban phenomena,
or the telling of stories about these spaces. 45 Geography, geology,
climate, economic statistics, the periodic rhythms of freeways,
and the vestiges of forms are all part of the boundaries of such
spaces. 46 It is only through an integrated, mythological narrative
that we can even hope to find them.
The brightness of public space has been bleached out of the
California landscape, replaced by the reflective glare of the strip.
The corrosive space of the strip is everywhere, spreading even
as we try to hem it in with such descriptions. This is not a dark
vision, but one tinged with irony, regret, and hope. This mythic,
in between, unstable, ephemeral, becoming, and pregnant space
is, in the words of David Byrne, filled with “nothing but flowers.”
It is an Edenic vision of urban decay in which our attempt to bury
the world under all the artifices of culture has disintegrated. Only
the delight in the absence of good form rather than the solace of
its presence can fill this modernist romance with all the joy of
spatial experience.
grasped. How to act, when
masterful action is inimical to what we’re grasping?
“To be an architect in such
a space might mean telling
stories, having sex, or cutting holes in the fabric of
the acceptable.”
aaron betsky 379
This used to be real estate
Now it’s only fields and trees
Where, where is the town
Now it’s nothing but flowers.
—David Byrne47
Notes
1
2
3
See Robert Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles 1850–
1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).
In City of Quartz (London: Verso, 1991), Mike Davis has proven
to be the most acute critic of this development, chronicling the
transformation of Anglo power from a centralizing force to neigh‑
borhood politics. See also Steve Flusty, Building Paranoia: The
Proliferation of Interdictory Space and the Erosion of Spatial Justice
(Los Angeles: Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban
Design, 1994). For a historical perspective on the emergence of
such spaces, see Evan McKenzie, Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1994).
Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash (New York: Bantam Books, 1992),
offers a compelling tale of the future of Los Angeles. Stephenson
develops his outlook on a global scale in The Diamond Age, or, A
Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (New York: Bantam Books, 1995).
He conceptualizes “claves” as a revival of tribal communities in
which dress, architecture, and custom create a coherent, but not
place-specific, reality that seems independent of the actual struc‑
tures of security. This sense is expanded in the second book by
the notion that whole realities can be created in a microwave-like
object, or by merely reading a book, so that many possible reali‑
ties unfold in layers of dreams, expectations, interpretations, and
experiences. Just as William Gibson predicted the Web, so did
Stephenson seem to presage a confluence of nanotechnology and
4
5
6
7
8
9
dispersed economics that will lead to a more fluid notion of our
physical landscape.
The New Urbanists’ writings reflect a certain blindness to the
exclusionary nature of Greek politics, which restricted political
decisions to male citizens.
See David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1996). Nye points out that such shared spaces evolved
from the space of traditional festivals. These festivals, in which
participatory events celebrated collective achievements, have been
replaced by permanent yet electronic spectacles in which we are
all just passive observers to a formless display.
The most brilliant chronicler of the influence of the road is John
Brinckerhoff Jackson, whose essays on the subject are collected
in A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1994). I relied heavily on his work in my essay “Emptiness
on the Range: Western Spaces,” in Crossing the Frontier: Images
of the Developing West (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, 1996), 54–65.
Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies
(New York: Penguin Books, 1971), 75.
Douglas R. Suisman, Los Angeles Boulevards: Eight X-Rays of the
Body Public (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Forum for Architecture
and Urban Design, 1989).
The city of appearance has been chronicled by Mark Girouard in
Cities & People: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1985). Walter Benjamin analyzed the importance
of urban form in the construction of the middle-class personal‑
ity in his “Passagen” fragments and especially “Paris, Capital of
the Nineteenth Century,” both in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,
Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York:
Schocken Books, 1978), 146–162. The notion of a clearly defined
urban space that would help to create a more rational construc‑
tion of the (middle-class) self, and therefore the ideal overall polity
has of course been central to the urban theories of most modern
masters, most importantly Le Corbusier in his calls for a “cité
d’affaires.” This notion continued beyond modernist styles into
Edmund Bacon’s exhortations for legible cities at a vast scale in
Design of Cities (New York: Viking Press, 1967); and into Oscar
Newman’s idea that we need to create a safer environment by cre‑
ating empty spaces, in Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through
Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1972). Only recently have
aaron betsky 381
urban theorists, starting with Kevin Lynch and continuing with
Colin Rowe and Peter Rowe, started to propose models in which a
degree of illegibility, enigma, or monumentality has a place. See
especially Peter G. Rowe, Making a Middle Landscape (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1991).
10 Paris has been used as a model for all urban growth in the theo‑
ries of most theoreticians, from Spiro Kostof to Manfredo Tafuri.
It remains a model for recent critiques of modernist traditions
such as those mentioned in the note above. Perhaps only Lewis
Mumford, in his The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1961), has offered a counter to such fixations by focusing on indus‑
trial and exurban growth phenomena. Feminist critics are also
beginning to look towards antimonumental, accretional spaces as
alternatives to the “slash and burn” clarity of the boulevard.
11 For an exploration of the role the boulevard has played in the
image of the sanitized and “progressive” American city, see Wil‑
liam H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1989). Even though this book con‑
centrates mainly on the formal achievements of the movement,
Wilson traces the attempt by the middle class to bring order to
an environment under threat from different urban models, both
imported by immigrants and emerging as the result of changing
technologies.
12 See especially Mario Manieri-Ella, “Toward an ‘Imperial City’:
Daniel H. Burnham and the City Beautiful Movement,” in Gior‑
gio Ciucci, Francesco Dal Co, Mario Manieri-Elia, and Manfredo
Tafuri, The American City from the Civil War to the New Deal, trans.
Barbara Luigia La Penta (London: Granada, 1979).
13 David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hop‑
kins University Press, 1989), provides the best synopsis of these
theories, which find philosophical counterpoints in the works
of Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard, though Harvey
remains equally rooted in Marxist theory. One could argue that
such notions of an economically transparent spatiality are implied
by Marx’s famous proclamation that “all that is solid melts into
air.” “Being the external, common medium and faculty for turn‑
ing an image into reality and reality into a mere image (a faculty
not springing from man as man or from human society as soci‑
ety), money transforms the real essential powers of man and
nature into what are merely abstract conceits and therefore imper‑
fections—into tormenting chimeras—just as it transforms real
14
15
16.
17
18
19
20
21
imperfections and chimeras—essential powers which are really
impotent, which exist only in the imagination of the individual—
into real powers and faculties.” The Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk J. Struik, trans. Martin Milligan
(New York: International Publishers, 1977), 168–169. Reprinted
in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R. C. Tucker (New York: Norton,
1978).
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, “Learning from Pop,” in
Casabella (December 1971), 15–23; and Signs of Life: Symbols in the
American City (New York: Aperture, 1976).
See Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park (London:
Verso, 1992).
See Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Towns and Town
Planning Principles (New York: Rizzoli, 1991); and Peter Calthorpe,
The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993).
See Aaron Betsky, Building Sex: Men, Women, Architecture, and the
Construction of Sexuality (New York: William Morrow, 1995).
See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nich‑
olson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991).
Notions of “late” or “post” modernity continue to battle for rec‑
ognition as the most adequate description of our current social,
cultural, and economic condition. Questions about whether we are
witnessing a fundamental shift in our situation, or only a future
development of capitalism, guide these deliberations. For purposes
of this essay, I have arbitrarily chosen the term “postmodern,”
though I do not believe that we are by definition able to have a cur‑
rent perspective on the absolute nature of these developments.
See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973).
This position is argued persuasively by Donna Haraway in Simians,
Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Rout‑
ledge, 1991), though several other critics have followed Foucault’s
questioning of the notion of humanity as an absolute. More recently,
Anthony Vidler has picked up on Haraway’s images and grounded
them in the history of architectural modernism in his book The
Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1992). Certainly the emergence of artificial life,
as well as the realization that traditional notions of humanity and
its freedom are both culturally conditioned and sometimes destruc‑
tive, forces us to reappraise what makes us human.
aaron betsky 383
22. For critics such as William Mitchell, these spaces might liberate
us into a kind of plugged-in posthumanism: “Once you break the
bounds of your bag of skin in this way, you will also begin to blend
into the architecture. In other words, some of your electronic
organs may be built into your surroundings. There is no great dif‑
ference, after all, between a laptop computer and a desktop model,
between a wristwatch and a clock on the wall, or between a hear‑
ing aid fitted into your ear and a special public telephone for the
hard-of-hearing in its little booth. It is just a matter of what the
organ is physically attached to, and that is of little importance in
a wireless world where every electronic device has some built-in
computation and telecommunications capacity. So ‘inhabitation’
will take on a new meaning—one that has less to do with parking
your bones in architecturally defined space and more with con‑
necting your nervous system to nearby electronic organs. Your
room and your home will become part of you, and you will become
part of them.” William J. Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the
Infobahn (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 30.
23 John Rechy, City of Night (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1988), and
The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary (New York: Grove Weidenfeld,
1977). See also Edward William Delph, The Silent Community:
Public Homosexual Encounters (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Pub‑
lications, 1978); or David Woodhead, ‘’’Surveillant Gays’: HIV,
Space, and the Constitution of Identities,” in David Bell and Gill
Valentine eds., Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities (London:
Routledge, 1995), 231–244. The first study of sexual cruising,
however, is Laud Humphreys, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in
Public Spaces (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1970). For a
perhaps more evocative text, see John Greyson, Urinal and Other
Stories (Toronto: Art Metropole and the Power Plant, 1993).
24 Joe Deal, Joe Deal: Southern California Photographs, 1976–86
(Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1992).
25 Though some recognize its inevitability, especially David Harvey,
in The Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1985).
26 These spaces are unknowable if one assumes, as most urban‑
ists do, that knowledge is only possible through direct sensory
experience—what Hannah Arendt calls “knowledge” versus
“understanding.” Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971).
27 J. G. Ballard, Crash (New York: Random House, 1985).
28 Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social
Life of Cities (New York: Knopf, 1990); Donna Haraway, Simians,
Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Rout‑
ledge, 1991); Felix Guattari, “Deterritorialized,” in Semiotext(e):
Architecture (New York: Semiotext(e), 1992), 116–54.
29 Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution
to Anonymous History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), 714–723.
30 This is a notion that I further explore in Queer Space: The Spaces
of Same Sex Desire (New York: William Morrow, 1997).
31 The best description of such theories is to be found in Bernard
Tschumi’s “Six Concepts” in Architecture and Disjunction (Cam‑
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 226–259, as well as in his Event
Cities (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).
32 See Dana Cuff, Architecture: The Story of Practice (Cambridge,
M’lss.: MIT Press, 1991).
33 It thus implies the death of the architectural profession as we
know it today.
34 Manuel De Landa, “Nonorganic Life,” in Zone 6: Incorporations,
eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone Books,
1992), 129–167.
35. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (New York: Penguin Books, 1987).
36 This is certainly a Derridean position. See Gregory Ulmer, “The
Object of Post-Criticism,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 83–110.
37 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984), Count
Zero (New York: Ace Books, 1987), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (New
York: Bantam Books, 1989). In more recent books, such as Virtual
Light (New York: Bantam Books, 1993), Gibson has translated this
nomadic life into a reinhabitation of existing urban structures.
38 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia [1787], in Merrill
D. Peterson, ed., The Portable Thomas Jefferson (New York: Pen‑
guin Books, 1975), 23–232.
39 Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture, trans. Harry
Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Hermann (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1989).
40 This position has been most eloquently and romantically phrased
by Aldo Rossi in Scientific Autobiography, trans. Lawrence Venuti
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981).
aaron betsky 385
41 I am aware of the Heideggerian uses of this term, especially in
his Early Greek Thinking: The Dawn of Western Philosophy, trans.
David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper
& Row, 1984).
42 Myth is understood here as a story about a world that may have
once existed, may come to exist at some point in the future, or may
currently exist in a place or form that one cannot experience. What
matters is that the story is possible and feasible, but not identical
to the world one experiences.
43 Sanford Kwinter, conversation with author, April 23, 1995.
44 This notion derives from Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” [1932] in Illuminations,
trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc,
1969), 217–251, 236–237. The space of distraction is the space
Benjamin claims for architecture and, by implication, for an anti‑
fascist art.
45 Much of this work is occurring at the Southern California Insti‑
tute of Architecture, where professors Margaret Crawford and
John Kaliski are directing studios that adapt Situationist Inter‑
national tactics of drift or “derive” to create interpretations and
intensifications of found fragments of urban fabric. For a more
prosaic, but evocative cataloging of such spaces, see also Grady
Clay, Real Places: An Unconventional Guide to America’s Generic
Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
46 See Lars Lerup, “Stim & Dross: Rethinking the Metropolis,” in
Assemblage 25 (1994), 82–101.
47 Talking Heads, “(Nothing But) Flowers” (Warner Brothers, 1988).
Stephanie Snyder
Notes on art and aesthetics where we live now
Stephanie Snyder (b.1965)
is the curator of the exhibitions called suddenly that
were conceived and carried
out in concert with the creation of this reader. She
is director of the Douglas
F. Cooley Memorial Art
Gallery at Reed College in
Portland, Oregon.
Suddenly
Awareness catalyzes suddenly. We turn our heads, our ears, our
eyes to the world, and our desire expresses itself toward under‑
standing. Suddenly we get it, we desire it. Otherwise, what?
Otherwise we go blank, anesthetic. Awareness catalyzes acutely
when the body mobilizes to the mind, which, brushed into con‑
sciousness of its own awareness, converses in turn with the body.
Children know, what is suddenly is playful, and what is playful
is pleasurable. Kant’s notion that the aesthetic is illogical, that it
is, instead, part of the sensus communis, suggests that aesthetic
experience has the potential to inspire us toward an enlightened
commonality. “Kant emphatically suggests that we must arrive
at a broadened way of thinking, to reflect on our own judgment
from a universal standpoint. According to Kant this is what
enlightenment is all about: to liberate ourselves from prejudice
and even superstition” (Antoon Van den Braembussche 2008). If
the common potential of art is taste, let us taste art. The objects
and discourses that circulate through the history and commerce
of art are now a depressed set of tools for aesthetic invigoration. It
is time for other possibilities, for art to reclaim an independent,
newly imaginative identity, not subjective in the philosophical
sense, but driven by the embrace of our subjectivity. We must
Like Betsky, Snyder’s
attention turns on the
body in motion through
urban space. The city’s
richness cannot be gleaned
from any critical distance,
but needs a body drawn
through it, like some kind
of wrecking ball, to crack
open its meanings. Insight
sparks from this collision,
or it adheres and returns
to us, like opium scraped
from the legs of naked children set running through
poppy fields.
stephanie snyder 387
believe in our ability to generate life through the humblest of
words and materials.
Autoerotic walk
If the body must move
through urban space to
birth new meanings, the
car is the prophylactic that
prevents it. While Betsky
finds some potential in
cars (particularly in their
estuarial interiors, those
ambivalent incubators of
public indecency) Snyder
asks us to recolonize automotive space with our
bodies. “Every highway will
be re-walked—re-charted,
re-invested with new surroundings, and where we
live now will be turned,
like compost, with the
motion of the body.”
To liberate aesthetics from the pressure of artistic capital, to wel‑
come aesthetics back to everyday life, let us walk and construct
without permission. The human body is automatic or it dies. The
human body is the autoerotic vehicle that will seed the places
where we live now with aesthetic velocity. Every space, every com‑
munication system constructed and reserved for the automobile
must be reconsidered and invested as aesthetic inventory—por‑
tals for the body in motion, spaces for taste. Suddenly, every gas
station, every franchise restaurant, every housing development,
and every highway will be re-walked—re-charted, re-invested
with new surroundings, and where we live now will be turned,
like compost, with the motion of the body. City planners thought
larger expanses would organize our health, our growing num‑
bers. Suddenly we realize that we are by nature fragmented,
that we must reorganize the semiurban/sprawling “city” into
a patchwork of “not necessarily temporary/not necessarily per‑
manent” spaces and walks that simultaneously enact and reflect
our desires. But an entire system of corporate legalities exists to
distract this from happening. An entire media monopoly exists
to anchor our desires to commerce. Automobiles will drive us
deeper into schizophrenia if we don’t start walking again. Within
this mutually assured destruction, at least now, we must parade
and feast and bare our breasts around what we cannot destroy
without repercussions.
Shacking up
We don’t really know what a city is any more than we know what
art is, except that we think we know it when we see it, or buy it.
The historic, bureaucratic city, the city that organizes, absorbs,
and expends our resources because it has been architected and
planned for permanence, that city is only one tiny piece of where
we live now. We think it begins and ends, automatically. The shack
interrupts the historic city’s nostalgia for permanence. A portable
commonality, it reveals origin by nature, cannot be franchised or
replicated. It is the humblest, most universal of singular dwell‑
ings. The shack is the future of common space. Suddenly artists
are building shacks, domes, underground dwellings, caves …
temporary urban spaces that can awaken us to hope through
playfulness and contingency. Temporary semiurban spaces will
populate where we live now in patchwork spontaneity … aesthetic
trading posts—sites for the exchange of information and materi‑
als on terms of our own making. I will give you three kisses for
that bouquet. We will deconstruct commerce as we crumble the
institution of fixed sexuality, shacking up.
Auto motives
Because you believe in erotic hope, explore the city within this
intention. Change direction suddenly, as suddenly as erotic hope.
Encountering the suddenness of your subjectivity, consciously
pursue the pleasure of art on its own terms. Really look at it. Find
it everywhere. Enlighten your neighbor to joy, forgiveness, and
fiction. Automatically make shit up.
Stop signs
Stop catering to the art world, stop sucking up to the money/
power relationships that constitute it. Money has nothing to do
with taste, except that, as Greenberg argues (circling his wagons
around Kant), taste requires time—aesthetic experience is the
product of leisure. If we’re selling our labor to survive, we have
less time to ourselves. So do we invest more of ourselves in our
work? What if every moment actually did count, no matter how
we sold our labor? It has to be more than daydreaming at the
Xerox machine or in line at the Baja Fresh. Some stop signs: Live
only where your friends can find you at leisure. Do not codify
your leisure time with documentation. Stop documenting your
life, burdening the future with so much unwanted information.
Snyder is alluding to the
work of Canadian poet
Lisa Robertson, who sometimes writes as the Office
for Soft Architecture (see
“Pure Surface,” below). In
her essay “Spatial Synthetics,” Robertson wrote “the
most pleasing civic object
would be erotic hope.”
Snyder’s advice to “live…
where your friends can find
you at leisure” is a savvy
bit of urban planning. The
economy of indigenous
North Pacific America
was among the most richly
endowed with leisure because
the necessities of life were so
easily procured. From out of
this vastness of conceptual
space came the patterns
and habits of their dispersed
and fluid urbanity. Artists
obliged to pay high rents are
also obliged to think within
the narrow confines of the
art market.
stephanie snyder 389
Notes
In the process of curating the exhibition suddenly: where we live
now, a multifaceted, multi-venue visual art exhibition that is part
of the larger project called suddenly—part of which you now hold
in your hands in the form of this book—I filled several notebooks
with thoughts about art, aesthetics, and cities. These paragraphs
are extractions from and formalizations of these musings. The
activities that inspired my writing occurred primarily in con‑
versation with Matthew Stadler, but were shaped by the work
of Thomas Sieverts, Lisa Robertson, Diana George, and Giorgio
Agamben, and in conversation with artists Hadley+Maxwell. I am
very grateful to each of them, and especially to Matthew Stadler.
Section Four: Art and Literature
These texts are where we
live now, at last free of
reactionary arguments. As
with all literature, nothing
more can be said to help
them and so there will be
no marginal commentary.
They are indefensible and
need no interpreter. Bibliographic and biographical
information will follow in
the back of the book.
author 391
Howard W. Robertson
Our anniversary trip to Passage and the visit to the wildlife museum
south of Weeks where two French poets seemed particularly relevant
We carefully though perhaps extravagantly
had decided during our first honeymoon the
previous August that six months later we
would take a second one a sort of third
anniversary actually in order to celebrate
properly the February when we met and that
we would drive up into the High Cascades to
the town of Passage at the foot of Mount
Whitman where I had not stayed with Kate
nor Anne nor Sarah nor with any other lover
ever nor wife our own place Hope’s and
mine in the town that marked the most direct
way for a wagon train a century and two
score before to cross over into what soon
enough became Campbell County the high
hard trail taken by only a few the many
others preferring to head instead north by
northwest to the Columbia Gorge then via
much gentler Barlow Road roundabout
south of Mount Hood to Oregon City from
there continuing further upstream along the
Willamette River if they had the great notion
but in the early 1850’s both her people and
mine had chosen the former way the more
howard w. robertson 393
difficult trail through the Central Oregon
desert and over the beautiful but brutish
mountains straight to farmer’s paradise in
the verdant valley as a consequence of all of
which there we were at the Lodgepole Inn in
mid-February of 1992 for one whole week
together without my two blossoming young
women nor her two restlessly sprouting boys
a sufficiently trusty grown-up having been
hired to hold down the little suburban fort in
the river valley while out amongst the
volcanoes we were reconnoitering the past
and making up a few rituals for our future
way out where our daily walks in the
constant presence of lofty Whitman were
coincidentally instilling in me this vague
urgency or at the least a definite intention to
re-read The Snows of Kilimanjaro though
what I actually had brought along was
Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Mr. Quin
so I read the latter instead about the passive
character who unobtrusively caused the
action to happen and who was inspiration
imagination intuition foresight insight
hindsight the Unconscious embodied
whereupon I somehow got to cogitating
about a book I maybe wanted to write in
which my process would be of a fictional
sort but my text more of a poetic nature a
texturedness like painting with acrylics or
gouache yet at the same time something like
playing Bolivian flute or jazz saxophone a
sort of novel that was also a collection of
poems with just a little added narrative in
between each piece like you might hear
perhaps at a poetry reading a work with
resonating shadow-selves a volume of
supreme fictions and when I discussed it
with my lovely and loving my highly
successful and high-paid wife who used
powerful computers and giant printers to
design colossal rock-crushing machines
gargantuan gravel-makers for quite a
handsome living she insisted again for the
umpteenth time that she wanted to be my
patron to support me so I could give up my
library job at the State University of New
Geneva after almost seventeen years there
and just write all the time like I had always
longed to do or at least ever since those
twenty-seven years ago when at the age of
seventeen while teaching myself to type I
had improvised a first poem and promptly
thereupon had given up football and the
other sports and the part-time job delivering
floral arrangements in order just to wander
around Fairfield and New Geneva dreaming
and composing and I yielded to Hope there
in the motel room in the high desert on the
eastern slope of the precipitous mountains
and confessed I found myself hankering
after and her seductive idea indeed.
Late Wednesday morning after three days
and four nights of all this profound bliss and
such utter unfetteredness we traveled the
twenty odd miles south by southeast through
scattered snow showers and past the several
full rainbows arcing over Central Oregon
down to the Tahmahnawis County Nature
Museum just below Weeks where we saw a
sequence of most remarkable things like the
three sleeping porcupines one of them so
near the circular concrete retaining wall we
could have touched him or her so I joked
that I guessed this was the petting zoo and
we did get close enough to hear its oblivious
snoring which for some reason immediately
reminded me of that time a decade earlier
when my two little girls and I had been tent
camping just outside of Passage and little
Eleanor had gotten a sudden dramatic eye
infection in the middle of the night as her
left eye swelled nearly shut with this beige
pus oozing out of it which she was bravely
unconcerned about but which nevertheless
necessitated my driving the three of us down
to Weeks at three a.m. to the nearest hospital
emergency room where we soon learned it
was not an infection at all but some kind of
allergic reaction to an insect bite that they
easily fixed right up and so okay maybe it
was not all that closely connected but it did
also occur to me that just the night before in
our room at the inn Hope and I had watched
a TV nature show where two inexperienced
young leopards were trying to figure out a
cornered porcupine the sister leopard having
already learned it was hopeless and busying
herself with licking her minor forearm
wounds but the brother leopard not being
willing yet to give up the attempt and in
frustration instead just plopping himself
down behind the porcupine who kept on
thrusting this big buttful of blindness and
starvation at the immature killer somehow
surviving adolescence and next after that we
moseyed over into the misleadingly named
Forestry Pavilion which actually was only
about various treecutting methods and their
specific utilization in Oregon and made me
feel suddenly desolate at the thought of the
countless little logging towns out by all the
clearcuts trapped between the owl-loving
eco-activists they knew were their enemies
and the overcutting timber companies they
thought were their benefactors but whose
corporation-raiding owners’ junk-bondfueled lust for high and quick yield would
soon leave loggers no future no more trees
to cut for decades no more logs or not nearly
enough to keep the mills running especially
not if they kept on sending shipload after
truckload of them across the great ocean to
somebody else’s mills and I thought of
Ronsard’s poem to the Forest of Gastine in
whose shelter he avowed the muses had
responded to him at all times much as the
woods behind my grandpa’s cabin out in the
Coast Range along Bald Mountain Road had
represented for me a passageway into purest
inspiration a place inhabited by divinity
where the meanings of life seemed to hover
about the brackens and salal and sing along
the creekbeds and rise up to the canopy of
alder and vine maple and Douglas fir and
when they had cut down Gastine Forest
some years later le bon Ronsard called the
wood cutter “sacrilège meurtrier” and said he
wanted to chain him up and torture him to a
slow death for slaughtering the goddesses a
sentiment I grimly sympathized with and yet
how easily were these somber and vengeful
thoughts dispelled at our following stop the
otter pond where two tired old otters were
sleeping deeply while an exuberant young
female otter put on quite the show for the
small crowd that we joined for a spell before
separating ourselves by sidling down around
the elliptical concrete retaining wall away
from the throng to the far focal point where
melodiously discoursed the little creek that
rushed out of the tiny pond and we fell to
gazing there on the eloquent stream that we
had all to ourselves and listened intently to
its living voices so that Hope commented,
“It’s the same water everywhere,” by which I
knew from our previous conversations she
meant there was this one big identical Water
in all the cells of all the plants and animals
and in all the seas and rivers and creeks and
in the clouds of the sky and in the moist dark
earth so I mentioned to her the panta ‘rei
of Heraclitus the flowing of all things and
further the never stepping twice in the same
stream but then considered that really her
thought was more like Parmenides’ one
same Being the unified whole in which
movement is illusion or maybe even more
like the universal water of Thales the
fundamental substance resolving stability
and change and soon after that she added,
“The water doesn’t end up anywhere, it
keeps flowing from thing to thing, and it’s
all really just the same water always and
everywhere,” which somehow called to
mind the serene last line of that wrathful
Ronsard ode about the vicious clearcutting
of Gastine Forest: “La matière demeure,
mais la forme se perd,” as I quoted aloud
impressing at least myself and while we
were thus speculating and ruminating and
confabulating other folks would drift down
from the crowd to see what exactly it was
we were watching with such rapt attention
but would take a look or two at the creek
and quickly decide there was nothing there
and so stroll along further which by and by
we did too coming in this way to the small
indoor zoo where they were keeping a bunch
of animals native to Central Oregon cooped
up inside plate-glass-and-plaster cells and I
stopped off at the barn owl cage and so did
Hope where a trio of enormous-eyed barn
owls sat in dim light appearing wide-awake
but quite motionless three identical emblems
of perfected contemplation calling to mind
Baudelaire’s poem “Les Hiboux” in which
the trio of owls were perching on the black
branches “comme des dieux étrangers” in
absolute meditation shunning all movement
these three immediately before us seeming
like that too and obviously not the virgin
Athena’s birds quite evidently knowing no
fierce and ruthless battle-goddess turned
protectrix of city and hearth these birds’
wisdom although inviolate dwelling rather
in a transcendent wood beyond the bounds
of reason’s town just sitting in immanence
on the branches there balanced and pacific
and I remembered the three monkeys from
childhood see no evil hear no evil speak
none and for their part these three uncanny
birds were manifestly mind like water stilled
to reflect the perfect moon of consciousness
and mind like moon shining its spiritual
light evenly on all beings and thought-deed
potential the undifferentiated simultaneous
becoming and thinking about becoming that
transformed ordinary life into a flowing
meditation which moved but did not budge,
changed but resided in changeless
Nonbeing;
we regarded the three owls for hundreds of
seconds of unperturbed sempiternity then
glided out self-forgetfully onto the space of
the parking lot where it really would not
have surprised me at all nor seemed at that
moment in any way inappropriate to have
heard but not seen in the steppelike distance
a full orchestra playing Musorgsky’s
Pictures at an Exhibition.
At the Café Gaia in downtown Weeks we
were relatively pensive over our matching
plates of radically vegetarian lasagna with
cheese made from bean curds and no pieces
of dead animals of any kind nor any dairy
products whatsoever and after this virtuous
afternoon meal we hiked up to the top of
adjacent Preacher Butte from which we
beheld a panorama adorned on the far left
and southward by Bachelor Butte, Broken
Top, and the Three Sisters and thence to the
right and northward by Mount Whitman,
Three-Fingered Jack, and Mount Jefferson
and through gazing long and longer in the
chill wind against which we were thermally
layered we became ourselves a bit owl-like
which is only to say impassively visionary
and to a certain extent spiritually at one with
the calm sublimity and distant serenity of
freshly fallen snow on the jagged peaks.
Lisa Robertson
Spatial Synthetics: A Theory
We want an intelligence that’s tall and silver, oblique and black,
purring and amplifying its decor; a thin thing, a long thing, a hundred videos,
a boutique. Because we are both passive and independent, we need to theorize.
We are studying the synthesis of sincerity, the synthetics of space because they
are irreducible and contingent. We are shirking the anxiety of origin because
we can. We want to really exercise fate with extremely normal things such as
our mind.
A city is a flat massive thing already. We’re out at the end of a lane looking
south with normal eyes. Here is what we already know: the flesh is lovely and
we abhor the prudery of monuments. But a pavilion is good. We believe a syn‑
thetic pavilion is really very good. Access would be no problem since we really
enjoy our minds. Everything is something. The popular isn’t pre-existent. It’s
not etiquette. We try to remember that we are always becoming popular.
Spatial synthetics irreparably exceed their own structure. For example:
Looking west, looking west, looking east by northeast, looking northwest, look‑
ing northeast, looking west, loading wool, looking west, looking north, looking
east, looking west, looking north, looking northeast, looking northeast, look‑
ing west, looking west, looking west, tracks are oldest, looking south, looking
north, looking north, looking east, looking west, looking west by southwest;
thus, space. And not by means other than the gestural. Pretty eyes. Winds.
Now the entire aim of our speculative cognition amplifies the synthetic
principle. Everything glimmers, delights, fades, goes. We drift through the
cognition with exceptional grace. Attached as we are to the senses, we mani‑
fest the sheer porousness of boutiques. The boutiques are categories. We have
lisa robertson 401
plenty of time. The problem is not how to stop the flow of items and surfaces
in order to stabilize space, but how to articulate the politics of their passage.
Every culture is the terrible gush of its splendid outward forms.
Although some of us love its common and at times accidental beauty, we’re
truly exhausted by identity. Then we sink to the ground and demand to be
entertained. We want to design new love for you because we are hungry for
imprudent, sensational, immodest, revolutionary public gorgeousness. We
need dignity and texture and fountains. What is the structure of freedom? It
is entirely synthetic.
The most pleasing civic object would be erotic hope. What could be more
beautiful than to compile it with our minds, converting complicity to synthe‑
sis? A synthetics of space improvises unthought shape. Suppose we no longer
call it identity. Spatial synthetics cease to enumerate how we have failed.
Enough dialectical stuttering. We propose a theoretical device which ampli‑
fies the cognition of thresholds. It would add to the body the vertiginously
unthinkable. That is, a pavilion.
Notes
Sources
Arakawa and Madeline Gins. Reversible Destiny. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1997.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.
Crompton, Dennis, ed. Concerning Archigram. London: Archigram Archives, 1999.
Lyon, Janet. Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern. Ithaca and London: Cornell Univer‑
sity Press, 1999.
Sam Lohmann
To Landscape
To landscape and to pink landscape
To cement seascape and to occasional landscape
To the gray haystack and to the analytical woodpile
To bad landscape conveying and obscuring a desire
To balancing a Picassoid tray as to criticism
melding the humid and glassy browns
To thick monumental hands on the scene
and to you, landscape:
I want you out of the house!
I want only exteriors
facing into the wind and a clumsy romanticism
laid out on a billboard
like an accident of body language,
the mountain thrown into the street
at once absent and excessive,
all curves and chasms adorably flattened:
sam lohmann 403
To a rose, alizarin and parchment park (closed for
resurfacing)
To a culvert, a drainage pond and a gravel embankment
and to easiest beauty
To blueprints and to the palouse west of the Rockies
To all the extensions of cubist anatomy
rebuilding the awkward constellations
and to landscape: get out of my face!
To a stark white famous and falsely famous canvas
repeatedly denuded by the sallies of random gorges
and bad geomorphic proclivities
and the half truth of one line
made eloquent humped landfill o Landscape
To you, made almost readable
by squinting and the grateful academy,
by heaps and a drunk’s pious geology,
the salons of refuse and the barbed zone
and one blank look, you are starving
o Landscape and you embarrass the state:
Its thinness tries to cover your thick bones,
its apologists rinse you distractingly with left-handed
drawing,
awkward and convincing and half uprooted from silt:
Landscape you have punctuation but no syntax
Landscape you have obverted volcanic graphic elements
Landscape a shivering of separate locales,
a free parking space it’s you Landscape
looking for an excuse, naked and gauche
among the picnic baskets
and pines and monumental oaks:
The starkness has fallen into doubt
The wind lisps one critical paragraph
I gently drape my one nice shirt over you Landscape
hoping nobody will notice
hills, sidewalks, trees,
a famous man-made lake
Landscape because there is nowhere we can meet.
sam lohmann 405
Sherman Alexie
What You Pawn I Will Redeem
One day you have a home and the next you don’t, but I’m not going to
tell you my particular reasons for being homeless, because it’s my secret story,
and Indians have to work hard to keep secrets from hungry white folks.
I’m a Spokane Indian boy, an Interior Salish, and my people have lived
within a hundred-mile radius of Spokane, Washington, for at least ten thou‑
sand years. I grew up in Spokane, moved to Seattle twenty-three years ago for
college, flunked out after two semesters, worked various blue- and bluer-collar
jobs, married two or three times, fathered two or three kids, and then went
crazy. Of course, crazy is not the official definition of my mental problem, but I
don’t think asocial disorder fits it, either, because that makes me sound like I’m
a serial killer or something. I’ve never hurt another human being, or, at least,
not physically. I’ve broken a few hearts in my time, but we’ve all done that, so
I’m nothing special in that regard. I’m a boring heartbreaker, too. I never dated
or married more than one woman at a time. I didn’t break hearts into pieces
overnight. I broke them slowly and carefully. And I didn’t set any land-speed
records running out the door. Piece by piece, I disappeared. I’ve been disap‑
pearing ever since.
I’ve been homeless for six years now. If there’s such a thing as an effective
homeless man, then I suppose I’m effective. Being homeless is probably the
only thing I’ve ever been good at. I know where to get the best free food. I’ve
made friends with restaurant and convenience-store managers who let me use
their bathrooms. And I don’t mean the public bathrooms, either. I mean the
employees’ bathrooms, the clean ones hidden behind the kitchen or the pantry
or the cooler. I know it sounds strange to be proud of this, but it means a lot
sherman alexie 407
to me, being trustworthy enough to piss in somebody else’s clean bathroom.
Maybe you don’t understand the value of a clean bathroom, but I do.
Probably none of this interests you. Homeless Indians are everywhere in
Seattle. We’re common and boring, and you walk right on by us, with maybe a
look of anger or disgust or even sadness at the terrible fate of the noble savage.
But we have dreams and families. I’m friends with a homeless Plains Indian
man whose son is the editor of a big-time newspaper back East. Of course,
that’s his story, but we Indians are great storytellers and liars and mythmak‑
ers, so maybe that Plains Indian hobo is just a plain old everyday Indian. I’m
kind of suspicious of him, because he identifies himself only as Plains Indian,
a generic term, and not by a specific tribe. When I asked him why he wouldn’t
tell me exactly what he is, he said, “Do any of us know exactly what we are?”
Yeah, great, a philosophizing Indian. “Hey,” I said, “you got to have a home to
be that homely.” He just laughed and flipped me the eagle and walked away.
I wander the streets with a regular crew—my teammates, my defenders,
my posse. It’s Rose of Sharon, Junior, and me. We matter to each other if we
don’t matter to anybody else. Rose of Sharon is a big woman, about seven feet
tall if you’re measuring over-all effect and about five feet tall if you’re only talk‑
ing about the physical. She’s a Yakama Indian of the Wishram variety. Junior
is a Colville, but there are about a hundred and ninety-nine tribes that make
up the Colville, so he could be anything. He’s good-looking, though, like he
just stepped out of some “Don’t Litter the Earth” public-service advertisement.
He’s got those great big cheekbones that are like planets, you know, with little
moons orbiting them. He gets me jealous, jealous, and jealous. If you put
Junior and me next to each other, he’s the Before Columbus Arrived Indian
and I’m the After Columbus Arrived Indian. I am living proof of the horrible
damage that colonialism has done to us Skins. But I’m not going to let you
know how scared I sometimes get of history and its ways. I’m a strong man,
and I know that silence is the best method of dealing with white folks.
This whole story really started at lunchtime, when Rose of Sharon, Junior,
and I were panning the handle down at Pike Place Market. After about two
hours of negotiating, we earned five dollars—good enough for a bottle of forti‑
fied courage from the most beautiful 7-Eleven in the world. So we headed over
that way, feeling like warrior drunks, and we walked past this pawnshop I’d
never noticed before. And that was strange, because we Indians have built-in
pawnshop radar. But the strangest thing of all was the old powwow-dance
regalia I saw hanging in the window.
“That’s my grandmother’s regalia,” I said to Rose of Sharon and Junior.
“How you know for sure?” Junior asked.
I didn’t know for sure, because I hadn’t seen that regalia in person ever.
I’d only seen photographs of my grandmother dancing in it. And those were
taken before somebody stole it from her, fifty years ago. But it sure looked like
my memory of it, and it had all the same color feathers and beads that my
family sewed into our powwow regalia.
“There’s only one way to know for sure,” I said.
So Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I walked into the pawnshop and greeted the
old white man working behind the counter.
“How can I help you?” he asked.
“That’s my grandmother’s powwow regalia in your window,” I said. “Some‑
body stole it from her fifty years ago, and my family has been searching for it
ever since.”
The pawnbroker looked at me like I was a liar. I understood. Pawnshops
are filled with liars.
“I’m not lying,” I said. “Ask my friends here. They’ll tell you.”
“He’s the most honest Indian I know,” Rose of Sharon said.
“All right, honest Indian,” the pawnbroker said. “I’ll give you the benefit of
the doubt. Can you prove it’s your grandmother’s regalia?”
Because they don’t want to be perfect, because only God is perfect, Indian
people sew flaws into their powwow regalia. My family always sewed one yellow
bead somewhere on our regalia. But we always hid it so that you had to search
really hard to find it.
“If it really is my grandmother’s,” I said, “there will be one yellow bead
hidden somewhere on it.”
“All right, then,” the pawnbroker said. “Let’s take a look.”
He pulled the regalia out of the window, laid it down on the glass counter,
and we searched for that yellow bead and found it hidden beneath the armpit.
“There it is,” the pawnbroker said. He didn’t sound surprised. “You were
right. This is your grandmother’s regalia.”
“It’s been missing for fifty years,” Junior said.
“Hey, Junior,” I said. “It’s my family’s story. Let me tell it.”
“All right,” he said. “I apologize. You go ahead.”
“It’s been missing for fifty years,” I said.
“That’s his family’s sad story,” Rose of Sharon said. “Are you going to give
it back to him?”
“That would be the right thing to do,” the pawnbroker said. “But I can’t
afford to do the right thing. I paid a thousand dollars for this. I can’t just give
away a thousand dollars.”
“We could go to the cops and tell them it was stolen,” Rose of Sharon said.
“Hey,” I said to her. “Don’t go threatening people.”
The pawnbroker sighed. He was thinking about the possibilities.
“Well, I suppose you could go to the cops,” he said. “But I don’t think they’d
believe a word you said.”
sherman alexie 409
He sounded sad about that. As if he was sorry for taking advantage of our
disadvantages.
“What’s your name?” the pawnbroker asked me.
“Jackson,” I said.
“Is that first or last?”
“Both,” I said.
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, it’s true. My mother and father named me Jackson Jack‑
son. My family nickname is Jackson Squared. My family
is funny.”
“All right, Jackson Jackson,” the pawnbroker said. “You wouldn’t happen to
have a thousand dollars, would you?”
“We’ve got five dollars total,” I said.
“That’s too bad,” he said, and thought hard about the possibilities. “I’d sell
it to you for a thousand dollars if you had it. Heck, to make it fair, I’d sell it to
you for nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars. I’d lose a dollar. That would be
the moral thing to do in this case. To lose a dollar would be the right thing.”
“We’ve got five dollars total,” I said again.
“That’s too bad,” he said once more, and thought harder about the possibili‑
ties. “How about this? I’ll give you twenty-four hours to come up with nine
hundred and ninety-nine dollars. You come back here at lunchtime tomorrow
with the money and I’ll sell it back to you. How does that sound?”
“It sounds all right,” I said.
“All right, then,” he said. “We have a deal. And I’ll get you started. Here’s
twenty bucks.”
He opened up his wallet and pulled out a crisp twenty-dollar bill and gave it
to me. And Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I walked out into the daylight to search
for nine hundred and seventy-four more dollars.
1 P.M.
Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I carried our twenty-dollar bill and our five dollars
in loose change over to the 7-Eleven and bought three bottles of imagination.
We needed to figure out how to raise all that money in only one day. Thinking
hard, we huddled in an alley beneath the Alaska Way Viaduct and finished off
those bottles—one, two, and three.
2 P.M.
Rose of Sharon was gone when I woke up. I heard later that she had hitchhiked
back to Toppenish and was living with her sister on the reservation.
Junior had passed out beside me and was covered in his own vomit, or
maybe somebody else’s vomit, and my head hurt from thinking, so I left him
alone and walked down to the water. I love the smell of ocean water. Salt always
smells like memory.
When I got to the wharf, I ran into three Aleut cousins, who sat on a wooden
bench and stared out at the bay and cried. Most of the homeless Indians in
Seattle come from Alaska. One by one, each of them hopped a big working boat
in Anchorage or Barrow or Juneau, fished his way south to Seattle, jumped off
the boat with a pocketful of cash to party hard at one of the highly sacred and
traditional Indian bars, went broke and broker, and has been trying to find his
way back to the boat and the frozen North ever since.
These Aleuts smelled like salmon, I thought, and they told me they were
going to sit on that wooden bench until their boat came back.
“How long has your boat been gone?” I asked.
“Eleven years,” the elder Aleut said.
I cried with them for a while.
“Hey,” I said. “Do you guys have any money I can borrow?”
They didn’t.
3 P.M.
I walked back to Junior. He was still out cold. I put my face down near his
mouth to make sure he was breathing. He was alive, so I dug around in his
bluejeans pockets and found half a cigarette. I smoked it all the way down and
thought about my grandmother.
Her name was Agnes, and she died of breast cancer when I was fourteen.
My father always thought Agnes caught her tumors from the uranium mine
on the reservation. But my mother said the disease started when Agnes was
walking back from a powwow one night and got run over by a motorcycle. She
broke three ribs, and my mother always said those ribs never healed right, and
tumors take over when you don’t heal right.
Sitting beside Junior, smelling the smoke and the salt and the vomit, I won‑
dered if my grandmother’s cancer started when somebody stole her powwow
regalia. Maybe the cancer started in her broken heart and then leaked out into
her breasts. I know it’s crazy, but I wondered whether I could bring my grand‑
mother back to life if I bought back her regalia.
sherman alexie 411
I needed money, big money, so I left Junior and walked over to the Real
Change office.
4 P.M.
Real Change is a multifaceted organization that publishes a newspaper, sup‑
ports cultural projects that empower the poor and the homeless, and mobilizes
the public around poverty issues. Real Change’s mission is to organize, edu‑
cate, and build alliances to create solutions to homelessness and poverty. It
exists to provide a voice for poor people in our community.
I memorized Real Change’s mission statement because I sometimes sell
the newspaper on the streets. But you have to stay sober to sell it, and I’m not
always good at staying sober. Anybody can sell the paper. You buy each copy
for thirty cents and sell it for a dollar, and you keep the profit.
“I need one thousand four hundred and thirty papers,” I said to the Big
Boss.
“That’s a strange number,” he said. “And that’s a lot of papers.”
“I need them.”
The Big Boss pulled out his calculator and did the math.
“It will cost you four hundred and twenty-nine dollars for that many,” he
said.
“If I had that kind of money, I wouldn’t need to sell the papers.”
“What’s going on, Jackson-to-the-Second-Power?” he asked. He is the only
person who calls me that. He’s a funny and kind man.
I told him about my grandmother’s powwow regalia and how much money
I needed in order to buy it back.
“We should call the police,” he said.
“I don’t want to do that,” I said. “It’s a quest now. I need to win it back by
myself.”
“I understand,” he said. “And, to be honest, I’d give you the papers to sell if
I thought it would work. But the record for the most papers sold in one day by
one vender is only three hundred and two.”
“That would net me about two hundred bucks,” I said.
The Big Boss used his calculator. “Two hundred and eleven dollars and
forty cents,” he said.
“That’s not enough,” I said.
“And the most money anybody has made in one day is five hundred and
twenty-five. And that’s because somebody gave Old Blue five hundred-dollar
bills for some dang reason. The average daily net is about thirty dollars.”
“This isn’t going to work.”
“No.”
“Can you lend me some money?”
“I can’t do that,” he said. “If I lend you money, I have to lend money to
everybody.”
“What can you do?”
“I’ll give you fifty papers for free. But don’t tell anybody I did it.”
“O.K.,” I said.
He gathered up the newspapers and handed them to me. I held them to my
chest. He hugged me. I carried the newspapers back toward the water.
5 P.M.
Back on the wharf, I stood near the Bainbridge Island Terminal and tried
to sell papers to business commuters boarding the ferry.
I sold five in one hour, dumped the other forty-five in a garbage can, and
walked into McDonald’s, ordered four cheeseburgers for a dollar each, and
slowly ate them.
After eating, I walked outside and vomited on the sidewalk. I hated to lose
my food so soon after eating it. As an alcoholic Indian with a busted stomach,
I always hope I can keep enough food in me to stay alive.
6 P.M.
With one dollar in my pocket, I walked back to Junior. He was still passed out,
and I put my ear to his chest and listened for his heartbeat. He was alive, so
I took off his shoes and socks and found one dollar in his left sock and fifty
cents in his right sock.
With two dollars and fifty cents in my hand, I sat beside Junior and thought
about my grandmother and her stories.
When I was thirteen, my grandmother told me a story about the Second
World War. She was a nurse at a military hospital in Sydney, Australia. For two
years, she healed and comforted American and Australian soldiers.
One day, she tended to a wounded Maori soldier, who had lost his legs to an
artillery attack. He was very dark-skinned. His hair was black and curly and
his eyes were black and warm. His face was covered with bright tattoos.
“Are you Maori?” he asked my grandmother.
“No,” she said. “I’m Spokane Indian. From the United States.”
“Ah, yes,” he said. “I have heard of your tribes. But you are the first Ameri‑
can Indian I have ever met.”
sherman alexie 413
“There’s a lot of Indian soldiers fighting for the United States,” she said. “I
have a brother fighting in Germany, and I lost another brother on Okinawa.”
“I am sorry,” he said. “I was on Okinawa as well. It was terrible.”
“I am sorry about your legs,” my grandmother said.
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” he said.
“What’s funny?”
“How we brown people are killing other brown people so white people will
remain free.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“Well, sometimes I think of it that way. And other times I think of it the
way they want me to think of it. I get confused.”
She fed him morphine.
“Do you believe in Heaven?” he asked.
“Which Heaven?” she asked.
“I’m talking about the Heaven where my legs are waiting for me.”
They laughed.
“Of course,” he said, “my legs will probably run away from me when I get
to Heaven. And how will I ever catch them?”
“You have to get your arms strong,” my grandmother said. “So you can run
on your hands.”
They laughed again.
Sitting beside Junior, I laughed at the memory of my grandmother’s story.
I put my hand close to Junior’s mouth to make sure he was still breathing.
Yes, Junior was alive, so I took my two dollars and fifty cents and walked to the
Korean grocery store in Pioneer Square.
7 P.M.
At the Korean grocery store, I bought a fifty-cent cigar and two scratch lottery
tickets for a dollar each. The maximum cash prize was five hundred dollars a
ticket. If I won both, I would have enough money to buy back the regalia.
I loved Mary, the young Korean woman who worked the register. She was
the daughter of the owners, and she sang all day.
“I love you,” I said when I handed her the money.
“You always say you love me,” she said.
“That’s because I will always love you.”
“You are a sentimental fool.”
“I’m a romantic old man.”
“Too old for me.”
“I know I’m too old for you, but I can dream.”
“O.K.,” she said. “I agree to be a part of your dreams, but I will only hold
your hand in your dreams. No kissing and no sex. Not even in your dreams.”
“O.K.,” I said. “No sex. Just romance.”
“Goodbye, Jackson Jackson, my love. I will see you soon.”
I left the store, walked over to Occidental Park, sat on a bench, and smoked
my cigar all the way down.
Ten minutes after I finished the cigar, I scratched my first lottery ticket and
won nothing. I could only win five hundred dollars now, and that would only
be half of what I needed.
Ten minutes after I lost, I scratched the other ticket and won a free ticket—a
small consolation and one more chance to win some money.
I walked back to Mary.
“Jackson Jackson,” she said. “Have you come back to claim my heart?”
“I won a free ticket,” I said.
“Just like a man,” she said. “You love money and power more than you love
me.”
“It’s true,” I said. “And I’m sorry it’s true.”
She gave me another scratch ticket, and I took it outside. I like to scratch my
tickets in private. Hopeful and sad, I scratched that third ticket and won real
money. I carried it back inside to Mary.
“I won a hundred dollars,” I said.
She examined the ticket and laughed.
“That’s a fortune,” she said, and counted out five twenties. Our fingertips
touched as she handed me the money. I felt electric and constant.
“Thank you,” I said, and gave her one of the bills.
“I can’t take that,” she said. “It’s your money.”
“No, it’s tribal. It’s an Indian thing. When you win, you’re supposed to
share with your family.”
“I’m not your family.”
“Yes, you are.”
She smiled. She kept the money. With eighty dollars in my pocket, I said
goodbye to my dear Mary and walked out into the cold night air.
8 P.M.
I wanted to share the good news with Junior. I walked back to him, but he was
gone. I heard later that he had hitchhiked down to Portland, Oregon, and died
of exposure in an alley behind the Hilton Hotel.
sherman alexie 415
9 P.M.
Lonesome for Indians, I carried my eighty dollars over to Big Heart’s in South
Downtown. Big Heart’s is an all-Indian bar. Nobody knows how or why Indi‑
ans migrate to one bar and turn it into an official Indian bar. But Big Heart’s
has been an Indian bar for twenty-three years. It used to be way up on Aurora
Avenue, but a crazy Lummi Indian burned that one down, and the owners
moved to the new location, a few blocks south of Safeco Field.
I walked into Big Heart’s and counted fifteen Indians—eight men and
seven women. I didn’t know any of them, but Indians like to belong, so we all
pretended to be cousins.
“How much for whiskey shots?” I asked the bartender, a fat white guy.
“You want the bad stuff or the badder stuff?”
“As bad as you got.”
“One dollar a shot.”
I laid my eighty dollars on the bar top.
“All right,” I said. “Me and all my cousins here are going to be drinking
eighty shots. How many is that apiece?”
“Counting you,” a woman shouted from behind me, “that’s five shots for
everybody.”
I turned to look at her. She was a chubby and pale Indian woman, sitting
with a tall and skinny Indian man.
“All right, math genius,” I said to her, and then shouted for the whole bar
to hear. “Five drinks for everybody!”
All the other Indians rushed the bar, but I sat with the mathematician and
her skinny friend. We took our time with our whiskey shots.
“What’s your tribe?” I asked.
“I’m Duwamish,” she said. “And he’s Crow.”
“You’re a long way from Montana,” I said to him.
“I’m Crow,” he said. “I flew here.”
“What’s your name?” I asked them.
“I’m Irene Muse,” she said. “And this is Honey Boy.”
She shook my hand hard, but he offered his hand as if I was supposed to
kiss it. So I did. He giggled and blushed, as much as a dark-skinned Crow can
blush.
“You’re one of them two-spirits, aren’t you?” I asked him.
“I love women,” he said. “And I love men.”
“Sometimes both at the same time,” Irene said.
We laughed.
“Man,” I said to Honey Boy. “So you must have about eight or nine spirits
going on inside you, enit?”
“Sweetie,” he said. “I’ll be whatever you want me to be.”
“Oh, no,” Irene said. “Honey Boy is falling in love.”
“It has nothing to do with love,” he said.
We laughed.
“Wow,” I said. “I’m flattered, Honey Boy, but I don’t play on your team.”
“Never say never,” he said.
“You better be careful,” Irene said. “Honey Boy knows all sorts of magic.”
“Honey Boy,” I said, “you can try to seduce me, but my heart belongs to a
woman named Mary.”
“Is your Mary a virgin?” Honey Boy asked.
We laughed.
And we drank our whiskey shots until they were gone. But the other Indi‑
ans bought me more whiskey shots, because I’d been so generous with my
money. And Honey Boy pulled out his credit card, and I drank and sailed on
that plastic boat.
After a dozen shots, I asked Irene to dance. She refused. But Honey Boy
shuffled over to the jukebox, dropped in a quarter, and selected Willie Nelson’s
“Help Me Make It Through the Night.” As Irene and I sat at the table and
laughed and drank more whiskey, Honey Boy danced a slow circle around us
and sang along with Willie.
“Are you serenading me?” I asked him.
He kept singing and dancing.
“Are you serenading me?” I asked him again.
“He’s going to put a spell on you,” Irene said.
I leaned over the table, spilling a few drinks, and kissed Irene hard. She
kissed me back.
10 P.M.
Irene pushed me into the women’s bathroom, into a stall, shut the door behind
us, and shoved her hand down my pants. She was short, so I had to lean over
to kiss her. I grabbed and squeezed her everywhere I could reach, and she was
wonderfully fat, and every part of her body felt like a large, warm, soft breast.
Midnight
Nearly blind with alcohol, I stood alone at the bar and swore I had been stand‑
ing in the bathroom with Irene only a minute ago.
“One more shot!” I yelled at the bartender.
sherman alexie 417
“You’ve got no more money!” he yelled back.
“Somebody buy me a drink!” I shouted.
“They’ve got no more money!”
“Where are Irene and Honey Boy?”
“Long gone!”
2 A.M.
“Closing time!” the bartender shouted at the three or four Indians who were
still drinking hard after a long, hard day of drinking. Indian alcoholics are
either sprinters or marathoners.
“Where are Irene and Honey Boy?” I asked.
“They’ve been gone for hours,” the bartender said.
“Where’d they go?”
“I told you a hundred times, I don’t know.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“It’s closing time. I don’t care where you go, but you’re not staying here.”
“You are an ungrateful bastard. I’ve been good to you.”
“You don’t leave right now, I’m going to kick your ass.”
“Come on, I know how to fight.”
He came at me. I don’t remember what happened after that.
4 A.M.
I emerged from the blackness and discovered myself walking behind a big
warehouse. I didn’t know where I was. My face hurt. I felt my nose and decided
that it might be broken. Exhausted and cold, I pulled a plastic tarp from a truck
bed, wrapped it around me like a faithful lover, and fell asleep in the dirt.
6 A.M.
Somebody kicked me in the ribs. I opened my eyes and looked up at a white
cop.
“Jackson,” the cop said. “Is that you?”
“Officer Williams,” I said. He was a good cop with a sweet tooth. He’d
given me hundreds of candy bars over the years. I wonder if he knew I was
diabetic.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked.
“I was cold and sleepy,” I said. “So I lay down.”
“You dumb-ass, you passed out on the railroad tracks.”
I sat up and looked around. I was lying on the railroad tracks. Dockworkers
stared at me. I should have been a railroad-track pizza, a double Indian pep‑
peroni with extra cheese. Sick and scared, I leaned over and puked whiskey.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Officer Williams asked. “You’ve never
been this stupid.”
“It’s my grandmother,” I said. “She died.”
“I’m sorry, man. When did she die?”
“Nineteen seventy-two.”
“And you’re killing yourself now?”
“I’ve been killing myself ever since she died.”
He shook his head. He was sad for me. Like I said, he was a good cop.
“And somebody beat the hell out of you,” he said. “You remember who?”
“Mr. Grief and I went a few rounds.”
“It looks like Mr. Grief knocked you out.”
“Mr. Grief always wins.”
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you out of here.”
He helped me up and led me over to his squad car. He put me in the back.
“You throw up in there and you’re cleaning it up,” he said.
“That’s fair.”
He walked around the car and sat in the driver’s seat. “I’m taking you over
to detox,” he said.
“No, man, that place is awful,” I said. “It’s full of drunk Indians.”
We laughed. He drove away from the docks.
“I don’t know how you guys do it,” he said.
“What guys?” I asked.
“You Indians. How the hell do you laugh so much? I just picked your ass off
the railroad tracks, and you’re making jokes. Why the hell do you do that?”
“The two funniest tribes I’ve ever been around are Indians and Jews, so I
guess that says something about the inherent humor of genocide.”
We laughed.
“Listen to you, Jackson. You’re so smart. Why the hell are you on the
street?”
“Give me a thousand dollars and I’ll tell you.”
“You bet I’d give you a thousand dollars if I knew you’d straighten up your
life.”
He meant it. He was the second-best cop I’d ever known.
“You’re a good cop,” I said.
“Come on, Jackson,” he said. “Don’t blow smoke up my ass.”
“No, really, you remind me of my grandfather.”
sherman alexie 419
“Yeah, that’s what you Indians always tell me.”
“No, man, my grandfather was a tribal cop. He was a good cop. He never
arrested people. He took care of them. Just like you.”
“I’ve arrested hundreds of scumbags, Jackson. And I’ve shot a couple in the
ass.”
“It don’t matter. You’re not a killer.”
“I didn’t kill them. I killed their asses. I’m an ass-killer.”
We drove through downtown. The missions and shelters had already
released their overnighters. Sleepy homeless men and women stood on street
corners and stared up at a gray sky. It was the morning after the night of the
living dead.
“Do you ever get scared?” I asked Officer Williams.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, being a cop, is it scary?”
He thought about that for a while. He contemplated it. I liked that about
him.
“I guess I try not to think too much about being afraid,” he said. “If you
think about fear, then you’ll be afraid. The job is boring most of the time. Just
driving and looking into dark corners, you know, and seeing nothing. But
then things get heavy. You’re chasing somebody, or fighting them or walking
around a dark house, and you just know some crazy guy is hiding around a
corner, and hell, yes, it’s scary.”
“My grandfather was killed in the line of duty,” I said.
“I’m sorry. How’d it happen?”
I knew he’d listen closely to my story.
“He worked on the reservation. Everybody knew everybody. It was safe. We
aren’t like those crazy Sioux or Apache or any of those other warrior tribes.
There’ve only been three murders on my reservation in the last hundred
years.”
“That is safe.”
“Yeah, we Spokane, we’re passive, you know. We’re mean with words. And
we’ll cuss out anybody. But we don’t shoot people. Or stab them. Not much,
anyway.”
“So what happened to your grandfather?”
“This man and his girlfriend were fighting down by Little Falls.”
“Domestic dispute. Those are the worst.”
“Yeah, but this guy was my grandfather’s brother. My great-uncle.”
“Oh, no.”
“Yeah, it was awful. My grandfather just strolled into the house. He’d been
there a thousand times. And his brother and his girlfriend were drunk and
beating on each other. And my grandfather stepped between them, just as he’d
done a hundred times before. And the girlfriend tripped or something. She
fell down and hit her head and started crying. And my grandfather kneeled
down beside her to make sure she was all right. And for some reason my greatuncle reached down, pulled my grandfather’s pistol out of the holster, and shot
him in the head.”
“That’s terrible. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, my great-uncle could never figure out why he did it. He went to
prison forever, you know, and he always wrote these long letters. Like fifty
pages of tiny little handwriting. And he was always trying to figure out why
he did it. He’d write and write and write and try to figure it out. He never did.
It’s a great big mystery.”
“Do you remember your grandfather?”
“A little bit. I remember the funeral. My grandmother wouldn’t let them
bury him. My father had to drag her away from the grave.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“I don’t, either.”
We stopped in front of the detox center.
“We’re here,” Officer Williams said.
“I can’t go in there,” I said.
“You have to.”
“Please, no. They’ll keep me for twenty-four hours. And then it will be too
late.”
“Too late for what?”
I told him about my grandmother’s regalia and the deadline for buying it
back.
“If it was stolen, you need to file a report,” he said. “I’ll investigate it myself.
If that thing is really your grandmother’s, I’ll get it back for you. Legally.”
“No,” I said. “That’s not fair. The pawnbroker didn’t know it was stolen.
And, besides, I’m on a mission here. I want to be a hero, you know? I want to
win it back, like a knight.”
“That’s romantic crap.”
“That may be. But I care about it. It’s been a long time since I really cared
about something.”
Officer Williams turned around in his seat and stared at me. He studied
me.
“I’ll give you some money,” he said. “I don’t have much. Only thirty bucks.
I’m short until payday. And it’s not enough to get back the regalia. But it’s
something.”
“I’ll take it,” I said.
sherman alexie 421
“I’m giving it to you because I believe in what you believe. I’m hoping, and
I don’t know why I’m hoping it, but I hope you can turn thirty bucks into a
thousand somehow.”
“I believe in magic.”
“I believe you’ll take my money and get drunk on it.”
“Then why are you giving it to me?”
“There ain’t no such thing as an atheist cop.”
“Sure, there is.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not an atheist cop.”
He let me out of the car, handed me two fivers and a twenty, and shook my
hand.
“Take care of yourself, Jackson,” he said. “Stay off the railroad tracks.”
“I’ll try,” I said.
He drove away. Carrying my money, I headed back toward the water.
8 A.M.
On the wharf, those three Aleuts still waited on the wooden bench.
“Have you seen your ship?” I asked.
“Seen a lot of ships,” the elder Aleut said. “But not our ship.”
I sat on the bench with them. We sat in silence for a long time. I wondered
if we would fossilize if we sat there long enough.
I thought about my grandmother. I’d never seen her dance in her regalia.
And, more than anything, I wished I’d seen her dance at a powwow.
“Do you guys know any songs?” I asked the Aleuts.
“I know all of Hank Williams,” the elder Aleut said.
“How about Indian songs?”
“Hank Williams is Indian.”
“How about sacred songs?”
“Hank Williams is sacred.”
“I’m talking about ceremonial songs. You know, religious ones. The songs
you sing back home when you’re wishing and hoping.”
“What are you wishing and hoping for?”
“I’m wishing my grandmother was still alive.”
“Every song I know is about that.”
“Well, sing me as many as you can.”
The Aleuts sang their strange and beautiful songs. I listened. They sang
about my grandmother and about their grandmothers. They were lonesome
for the cold and the snow. I was lonesome for everything.
10 A.M.
After the Aleuts finished their last song, we sat in silence for a while. Indians
are good at silence.
“Was that the last song?” I asked.
“We sang all the ones we could,” the elder Aleut said. “The others are just
for our people.”
I understood. We Indians have to keep our secrets. And these Aleuts were
so secretive they didn’t refer to themselves as Indians.
“Are you guys hungry?” I asked.
They looked at one another and communicated without talking.
“We could eat,” the elder Aleut said.
11 A.M.
The Aleuts and I walked over to the Big Kitchen, a greasy diner in the Inter‑
national District. I knew they served homeless Indians who’d lucked into
money.
“Four for breakfast?” the waitress asked when we stepped inside.
“Yes, we’re very hungry,” the elder Aleut said.
She took us to a booth near the kitchen. I could smell the food cooking. My
stomach growled.
“You guys want separate checks?” the waitress asked.
“No, I’m paying,” I said.
“Aren’t you the generous one,” she said.
“Don’t do that,” I said.
“Do what?” she asked.
“Don’t ask me rhetorical questions. They scare me.”
She looked puzzled, and then she laughed.
“O.K., Professor,” she said. “I’ll only ask you real questions from now on.”
“Thank you.”
“What do you guys want to eat?”
“That’s the best question anybody can ask anybody,” I said. “What have you
got?”
“How much money you got?” she asked.
“Another good question,” I said. “I’ve got twenty-five dollars I can spend.
Bring us all the breakfast you can, plus your tip.”
She knew the math.
“All right, that’s four specials and four coffees and fifteen per cent for
me.”
sherman alexie 423
The Aleuts and I waited in silence. Soon enough, the waitress returned and
poured us four coffees, and we sipped at them until she returned again, with
four plates of food. Eggs, bacon, toast, hash-brown potatoes. It’s amazing how
much food you can buy for so little money.
Grateful, we feasted.
Noon
I said farewell to the Aleuts and walked toward the pawnshop. I heard later
that the Aleuts had waded into the salt water near Dock 47 and disappeared.
Some Indians swore they had walked on the water and headed north. Other
Indians saw the Aleuts drown. I don’t know what happened to them.
I looked for the pawnshop and couldn’t find it. I swear it wasn’t in the place
where it had been before. I walked twenty or thirty blocks looking for the
pawnshop, turned corners and bisected intersections, and looked up its name
in the phone books and asked people walking past me if they’d ever heard of
it. But that pawnshop seemed to have sailed away like a ghost ship. I wanted
to cry. And just when I’d given up, when I turned one last corner and thought
I might die if I didn’t find that pawnshop, there it was, in a space I swear it
hadn’t occupied a few minutes ago.
I walked inside and greeted the pawnbroker, who looked a little younger
than he had before.
“It’s you,” he said.
“Yes, it’s me,” I said.
“Jackson Jackson.”
“That is my name.”
“Where are your friends?”
“They went travelling. But it’s O.K. Indians are everywhere.”
“Do you have the money?”
“How much do you need again?” I asked, and hoped the price had
changed.
“Nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars.”
It was still the same price. Of course, it was the same price. Why would it
change?
“I don’t have that,” I said.
“What do you have?”
“Five dollars.”
I set the crumpled Lincoln on the countertop. The pawnbroker studied it.
“Is that the same five dollars from yesterday?”
“No, it’s different.”
He thought about the possibilities.
“Did you work hard for this money?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
He closed his eyes and thought harder about the possibilities. Then he
stepped into the back room and returned with my grandmother’s regalia.
“Take it,” he said, and held it out to me.
“I don’t have the money.”
“I don’t want your money.”
“But I wanted to win it.”
“You did win it. Now take it before I change my mind.”
Do you know how many good men live in this world? Too many to count!
I took my grandmother’s regalia and walked outside. I knew that solitary
yellow bead was part of me. I knew I was that yellow bead in part. Outside, I
wrapped myself in my grandmother’s regalia and breathed her in. I stepped
off the sidewalk and into the intersection. Pedestrians stopped. Cars stopped.
The city stopped. They all watched me dance with my grandmother. I was my
grandmother, dancing.
sherman alexie 425
Danielle Dutton
excerpts from S P R A W L
Halfway through the morning news they show a fox trapped on a
grassy median of the highway. I get back in bed. I play solitaire. I listen to
folk songs and file my nails and finish off last night’s meatloaf. One of my
favorite leisure activities is to stare at the gate. I estimate that twelve-thousand
people have passed through it; I break them into categories based on lines of
race, class, and creed. They come from airport lounges, malls, and high-tech
urban environments. This, in turn, heightens my sense of civic involvement.
Maybe I’ll run for mayor and theorize relations between gated communities,
their political or jurisdictional construct, or the way you can sit in them all
afternoon. It has to do with obsolete social traditions, the “friendliest towns
in America,” and studies performed in what the book calls “residential or
social enclaves.” It’s part of a crucial project for expanding cities, semi-rural
zones, and nurturing desirable, straight, regular spaces—houses with space
on all sides of them. For now, beds of daffodils and other lawnscaping features
have first-hand knowledge of the most highly significant private worlds of the
family. There’s a kind of sprightly gayness expressed on the sidewalk between
bushes, from bush to bush. “Would you like a sandwich?” one person asks.
This place is not a ghost town; mothers, businessmen, bus drivers, all sorts of
people dream at night in the spaces between driveways, the houses between
rows of bushes, all at the same time, dreaming about girl cousins and guns,
sailing and London broil, and sprinklers ticking, and hidden cameras, and
panoramas, and axes. In the morning, we eat breakfast beside a small green
vase bursting with orange mums. On the other side of the sliding-glass door is
a flagstone path leading to a pretty walk between ferns. There are strawberry
danielle dutton 427
stems on the tablecloth, several juice glasses, a half-eaten bran muffin, a pink
napkin, a net. There are crumbs and stains and the morning light devours
what it sees. I take a walk in the garden, which is just like the countryside.
I write letters to people elsewhere in America, idealizing simple faith, fidel‑
ity, and pastoral elements from the past. Then I look out for woodchucks.
I sit behind a door in my house and put a jacket around my shoulders and
think about a collapsing consecutiveness. Another day I have especially sexual
wants. Hate and fear rise out of the metropolis; I glimpse it from my bath‑
room window when the wind blows the trees just right. These are the feverish
excitements of the place. We identify with metaphors about need and space.
It is central to our values, which range from sexual depravity to temperance
to melodrama. Then, in the middle of the afternoon, someone sends a rake
against the asphalt as a signal. I grab my hat, full of enthusiasm, and head
outside to seek kinship with others, but the street is deserted. Instead, I con‑
tinue to function alone in the house. I am essentially productive and genuine
and important. I bake banana bread and paint the ceiling. On the TV is an
interview with a young woman saying loudly, “Could I? Could I?” Later, a
little boy in a driveway tells me he has three super powers: eating yogurt with
his eyes closed, reading upside-down, and breathing warm air. A smaller boy
drops a plastic gun and runs over to say: “Even my super power is jumping
on one foot.” But anybody can do that. So I jump on one foot for what must
be fifteen years, and he jumps too, and the other boy watches blandly from
the seat of his bike, and no one walks down the sidewalk or drives down the
street at all. I might as well think of this as the period of jumping. Once upon
a time, there was a whole period when housewives were dying. Sons came
home and found their mothers face down and blue on the kitchen table. Later
there was an era of divorce. This coincided with an upsurge in the popular‑
ity of crock-pots. Today multi-colored pinwheels blow on a lawn, also holiday
bouquets and banners, also flags, and there is a mailbox shaped like a giant
trout. Mrs. Lancing tells me when she moved in there was just a field behind.
“But you’ll get used to anything,” she says. Then one day the sun is so bright
I have to close all the blinds and curtains. This is an incessant labor with my
hands. The sun makes research impossible. I leave the morning paper and
whatever books or cookbooks and go outside to hoe beans in my fashionable
kitchen garden. On TV I learn the French word for this is potager. Over fences
I see other women hoeing beans without danger or dissipation in their own
well-appointed backyards and one woman is floating on water with a wrinkled
infant in her arms. Some of the women stand upright and look me straight in
the eye, and other women are hardly visible anywhere. Some women wave and
some women go inside and other women bring casseroles or pies. Later in the
day, I set out to place coffee cups in peculiar positions, and then to combine
myself, in slow fashion, with objects that are off balance. I stand on the edge
of the dining room table, all bathed in light, for nearly twenty minutes, which
seems to freeze time. I balance nectarines on my arms and head, as well as
mildewed peaches, which have not lost their fresh scent. I combine oatmeal
and honey and slather it on my thighs to firm skin. I move backward as I set
the table for dinner. I place dishes upside-down on top of glasses and frost a
cake and place it upside-down on a plate. In this way, I am able to create a dis‑
order on the table that measures routine gestures and the utilization of routine
gestures. It’s a subtle gradation. When Haywood gets home I present him with
a spectacular feast, rich in color and juices.
†
The whole town is interchangeable. Everyone listens to the same song at the
same time, so we dance together under the stars (gold flecks in the ceiling).
Roast beef for dinner, then Haywood tells a story about walking home on dry
snow. Meanwhile, in bed, I imagine a floral design with thin places and some
complete holes. I crank my arm faster and faster without brakes. Haywood
says, “You are the victim of some mechanical metaphors.” He has many possi‑
bilities available to him, things to talk through, and reasons to be suspicious. In
the morning, I go outside and turn on the sprinklers. I stand in the driveway
and imagine a morning just like this one, over one-hundred years ago, when
little Stella Duck ran past Mr. Edwin Stephens, so serious in his morning
carriage, his glossy moustache and hat. She had a rag doll in one hand and a
sack of flour at her feet. She was running into a house for protection from the
rain. She had a round greasy face and a mop. Nearby were a rock and a log.
There was a pine tree and a bluebird and a dog waking up. On the sidewalk a
kid rolls past with the smell of bubblegum. I go inside and somewhere near
the living room I remember a time when Lisle and I fell asleep with giant
wads of bubblegum in our mouths only to find ourselves later in a pink sticky
web. She wrapped herself in a blue-striped sheet in the double bed. She looked
“bedroomish.” The question was whether the sun would dry the gum on our
skin or if we’d have to sit tightly and wait for someone to peel it off. In the end
we had to stamp to keep warm. We went swimming in the lake and made
tracks in the green grass. On the way home a car accident slowed traffic for
nearly an hour. A dozen people stood around a dead body on the side of the
road covered in a drab blanket except for its feet, and one shoe was missing.
But I become distracted. Again, it’s night. From somewhere upstairs Hay‑
wood says, “Beside the point,” then “Bucket,” then “Wish.” I wake to make
demands on myself: feed orange peels to the garbage disposal for one hour. I
visit the public library and pore over manuscripts and innumerable periodical
danielle dutton 429
charts and other books. I learn to appreciate the small green lamps, and then
I write aggressive letters of extraordinary vividness and humor. I write about
the world and more, facts that impose themselves on our features, until it sud‑
denly becomes clear this is like software running on a machine in my brain,
so I return to my house (where really everyone has an equal chance of getting
through the gate) and I’m useful for what must be a thousand years (vacu‑
uming, paying bills, making smoothies, etc.). Haywood says, “Your body is a
machine.” He can’t distinguish between what’s real and his own falsehoods.
I don’t even wait for him to finish. I walk to the train station. In the dark I
find a new and interesting swagger; it’s a kind of moral resistance and there
might be other versions. So I think: now the whole town is asleep, everything.
I observe it in third person. Dear Mrs. Pitt, If it wasn’t such an important stage
in this dramatic breakdown I’d tell you a secret, such as: this town is preoc‑
cupied with the dregs of society, with cosmic determinism, bondage, corsets,
all sort of confinement, scrotums, bats. No one concerns himself with the
truth because no one is worried about being absolutely important. We grow
nostalgic. We sing songs and shout at strangers. This is incredibly sexy for us.
Afterwards we retreat to outdoor grills and the smell of commemoration fills
the air. Dear Mrs. Sharp, I am one of the best letter writers in this town, if not
the best. I was born here and never strayed. That’s a lie. No one was born here.
I am a rugged individualist and a sage. That’s not really true either. I hold my
tongue but suspect my feelings are no secret. Thank you for attending my
Tupperware Parties. Sincerely, etc. Dear Mrs. Smith, A generation ago, family
members were trained to stand at mantelpieces and lean casually on one leg
and talk about tennis. One aunt purchased a monumental painting meant to
evoke modernization. She confronted her husband in his pajamas. Warmly,
etc.
†
We bulldoze small and inconvenient fields of strawberries or corn and replace
them with the increasing complexity of everyday life: promised lands, the right
of “choice,” boundaries, color-schemes, paper mills, etc. There are golf courses,
chain restaurants, six brand-new gated communities, and, in the edge-towns to
the north, there is a debate about public housing and how to shift responsibil‑
ity for the poor. The book calls it “suburbanizing the conventional inner city,”
and argues that it is “excessively intentional.” But this place is a flat surface.
This place is distinct from other places and at the same time isn’t. This place is
really convenient. There are all sorts of differences that already exist. The book
tells us we resemble virtual neighborhoods and according to the experts the
virtual is “more compelling” than we are. I walk through the streets and look
in windows to witness cheerfully painted walls and vertical lamps, high tech‑
nical quality and surround-sound, mystery, beauty, fry baskets, fried chicken
legs, joy sticks, shelves, ovens, beans. Over and over I encounter specific signs,
such as Prepare to Merge or Adopt a Highway. I stand in front of a public mural
entitled “The Evolution of Dishes.” I consider merging or adopting a highway,
but a blue heron flies over my car and then just disappears. I carry on for
weeks after this. I squeeze oranges into paper cups for vitamins. I cluster near
the base of bedside lamps. As if I can’t rest confident in the political circum‑
stance of one small space, this one, or right outside the window, or across the
street, or over by the train station. As if I’m delicate. As if I’m an endangered
ocelot or a farmer on a stamp. As if I identify randomly with people on the
street. As if I’m named Yvonne or Yvette. As if my refrigerator is bright pink.
As if I’m vulgar or superstitious or aggressively sexualized and armed with an
assortment of lasers or guns. I don’t feel a thing. In the morning, over coffee
and eggs, I’m exhorted to be an individual. In the afternoon we wash our cars.
At night I’m restricted to a relatively confined social circle. The cat climbs in
and out of empty boxes in the hall. I sleep alone with the window open and
imagine. Tonight a celebrity on TV mentions his wife and kids. He spent last
year riding a motorcycle around the world. His favorite color is purple and his
card is American Express. Tonight I deny my ordinary life. I converse with the
very words. I impress myself on men’s hands as I make my way toward the
restrooms at the back.
†
For lunch I eat several olives, two quail, three loaves of bread, and a roast, and
then I read through old letters in full view of the city, or in the garage. My
views move to another room, always different, sometimes, or individual, a
pull of some history (tonight the presence of a storm). But the letters carry on,
hoping to probe our smoothed-out-sense-of-self. They augment an unstatic
perception. I watch the city through the gaps in trees. The city is an actualiz‑
ing background for all kinds of arbitrary treatments. On the edge of my view is
a communication, a light, a quick boom. I pretend to be increasingly deaf—in
this way I put Haywood in a little book in the dark. I can’t pass it. I can’t pos‑
sess it. I defeat myself during an afternoon by the pool, so I stalk monarchs
across the lawn with a net. One kid says, “Happy birthday!” Another kid says,
“Trick or treat.” The social-historical importance of this place is tenuous, and
thus, necessarily, has a clear and definite aim. I produce documentary objects:
Historical Varieties (i.e., Verities), apple pies, sexual feelings. I make a diaper
out of plastic wrap and ask Haywood to wear it, but he won’t. He is one resi‑
dent who supports social distinctions. He says, “What do you have to say for
danielle dutton 431
yourself?” We sip green cocktails and wait. Family meanings inflect these
conversations. We listen to one member of the family who talks about airport
safety. Then we go into hidden parts of the house or yard and cross-fertilize
like birds and squirrels or like the work in any bean-field. Pesky neighbors
show up on our lawn after dinner. This is evidence of the demise of my easy
world, which seems like it’s easy. For dinner I serve roots, pumpkins, radishes,
and kale. I garnish it all with red onions and parsley and mint. We are cul‑
pable, hateful. We sit back and pick off spiders walking the circumference
of our town during the autumn months. But sometimes we share a vision,
we pick out a criticism, we plunge ourselves into compassions of indistinct
sensation: change, transfer, dazzling. Dear Mrs. Moor, You are marvelously
entertaining. For more than thirty years you have beguiled us. Mrs. Moor, you
are scandalous and a monster. You are our classiest delinquent. The way you
sit, Mrs. Moor, the way you eat noodles or curry, the way you serve a large piece
of meat, and the way you always look so fresh. Mrs. Moor, you remind me of a
girl I knew who woke up one night with a strange tingling in her mouth. She
walked down the hall to the bathroom and opened her mouth and spit out a
bee. What is your secret, Mrs. Moor? What is your favorite color? Warmly, etc.
I am absorbed into a place where people make themselves up out of certain
images or mediated public phenomena. I lose control of my speech and am
forced to disentangle myself from organized group activities. With the sun‑
light behind them, the leaves on the trees are awkward shapes. Someone in
the town thinks of me while eating boiled potatoes, and then someone thinks
of me while folding paper cranes. In this way the neighborhood is as entertain‑
ing as kittens or a cultural exhibition or the derivation of the word engastration
(the stuffing of one bird inside another). Dear Mr. Surgeon General, I saw a
puppy stuff his nose into the green grass. Everyone loved it. I stuffed my nose
in the grass, Mr. Surgeon General, and it sunk down, motionless, and lay for a
second on something vaguely round right down there near the path. I wanted
to tell you, my body is an inhospitable host for any living thing—even colds.
When my neighbors turn spotted and yellow and loll around with thick waxen
bodies, I feel great. Sincerely, etc. I’m shocked to discover I don’t even want to
accomplish my goals. I associate myself with the American frontier and sort of
want to enclose myself in some small nomadic unit. I migrate over sidewalks
and lawns. Then I supply sexually constipated and hypocritical natives with all
kinds of bonuses and obligatory rituals. For example, there’s the fact that the
most important part of me will never even be seen. I can say about it: “This is
my own primary interest,” or “I’d rather be a goose in Canada.” This is what
it means to be a national grown up.
†
Dear Mrs. Marcus, I am sorry to hear you won’t be able to come again, but
don’t mistake this for a different type of apology. Let us consider another
threshold: a creature with claws. Of course I don’t mean it. I appreciate the
fruit you brought from your tree. Please accept these flowers as represent‑
ing the nature of my sensibility regarding your tragic, or should I say ironic,
hesitation. Yours, etc. Seen from above, there is a peculiar pattern to our
expansion; neighborhoods snake around supermarkets, hospitals, airports,
malls. It’s wanting to not be left behind. All the houses shimmer together
with the weather. There’s a kind of earthy gravity to the weather. I uncover
this fact by accidental research. I figure I might have an internal architec‑
ture, with buttresses, abundance, possibility, or an intestinal space in which
nothing works the way it should, like buildings built on botanical models, or
buildings based on your own DNA, or whole rooms built to laugh in, or sticky
gardens with the usual material but brighter, or more dull. I could offer ripe
fruit to the nameless kids, or mini-quiches, or scarves, or I could take them by
the hand. On the kitchen counter are faded lily stems, white-faded, translucent
in water, and tipped over, with yellow-orange spores streaking the cabinet to
the floor. Nothing I do can deceive; the curtain is rendered convincingly in
relation to the stereo with its red blinking lights, the heavy desk, the rug, the
couch. It’s all in the eye, the beauty of the suburbs, its sharp whitish light, the
lack of logical relationships; it’s been written about in local circles or schools.
It’s a corner of nature demonstrated by bulldozers, machines, tractors, etc. It’s
been recorded on accident, on film or video to preserve the years, the human
marks, signs of light and air, an intuitive kind of creativity. Meanwhile, Hay‑
wood is undergoing subtle changes. He mumbles quietly in unknown parts of
rooms. I watch from the shrubs. Though I try to maintain a certain reserve it’s
impossible to look “cool” searching for someone in a darkened movie theatre or
walking through a web. Dear Mr. President, Hello. The month is not celebra‑
tory. The changes are suspicious. I am tempted to offer a general abstraction
as my excuse: one part preoccupation and three parts ongoing debate. You
know what I mean, Mr. President. I am particularly involved in learning to
do things for the first time. What would you recommend? In the news today
they reported that women with heart-shaped faces look particularly good with
a bob. Also, I learned that it’s better to do your shopping when you have a clear
idea of what you want. Sincerely, etc. I stand in front of the washing machine
and eat a blood orange off a small white plate. I leave the plate and peel on the
edge of the counter and drink water from a tumbler and wipe my hands on
danielle dutton 433
my pants. Then I take the warm laundry out of the dryer and carry it into the
living room. This is a program inaugurated over a century ago and handed
down, which may help to account for its differences from other work that it
resembles. These are private routines not visible in census data. I locate my
body by grounding it against the bodies of others. I am interested in knowing
about all the possible thresholds. Walking through the mall there is a scene of
trade in which a woman in red leans forward to hand an item of purchase to
a man in a brown coat who stands behind a table covered in folded sweaters
of various colors and wicker baskets filled with rolled silk ties under which a
small child sticks his hand into a plastic bag until his arm disappears. It might
signify a larger trend in American culture: lawn-mower racing is becoming a
regular sport—the importance of putting the pedal to the metal, deafening,
this special race, geared-up, drawing millions, the magnitude of lawn-care, its
own kind of prim-and-proper. One kid says, “Haven’t I built a good thing?”
Another kid says, “Take that one off.” Today on the kitchen table there’s one
side of beef, yogurt, canned peaches, rice, pancakes, butter, a loaf of bread, a
coffee maker, a salt shaker, S.O.S., canned corn, and several shiny apples and
peppers; the refrigerator door is open and inside is a frosted chocolate cake;
above the refrigerator is a clock in the shape of an owl; behind the table is an
open window covered in gauzy white curtains through which can be seen
several mown lawns, deciduous trees, potted plants, and a skyscraper in the
far, far distance. I drizzle beans with vinegar and work with side dishes and
main dishes, such as chicken with thinly sliced carrots and parsley. This is a
good dish to bring as a guest, if you follow my tips and advice.
†
I remember afternoon turning into evening. I think the last thing I’d like to
do is love nine thousand people. I walk in fog, then rain, then snow. The side‑
walk takes me past driveways, water, weather, rivers. The sidewalk is an
extreme form of dwelling in the river. I pick my way over sleeping cats, rocks,
and sticks. I hear bluebirds and squirrels and I strip to the waist and stand in
at least six inches of pretty warm water; it laps at my calves and ankles. My
skirt is saturated like a day after a warm rain. It was a day in July, on the 1st, or
another day in July, or an evening in June on the 22nd, or about the 7th of July.
Lisle wanted to forget about it. In any event, this place has grown over with a
spongy kind of moss. I set my feet down in it. There are large fires and miss‑
ing people and other things have broken up or floated off or just completely
disappeared. The table is beautiful but it can be hard to recognize. It holds an
amaryllis in a pot and a white saucer and a chocolate bar and two raspberries
and a glass of wine. I part ways with it. With all the houses. With all the agree‑
able suburban parkways, I part. The following day we address ourselves with
smiles and hidden purpose. It’s like someone standing in the hallway or the
tiny guest bathroom, just out of sight, holding a script, prompting lines or
movements across the stage in a whisper. It’s a creative form of alienation and
one I look forward to as a personal kind of masterpiece. We see similar tenden‑
cies at the Williams’s party. This sort of gathering gives the audience a closer
view. The setting includes tinkling bells. Everyone eats with a great deal of
hand gestures while holding small arrangements of crackers or pie. Or else
I’m making it up. Like the example of the donkey and the detective—I begin
to find what I tell myself I will. I move along the street and am infinitely flat.
My shadow is a line on the asphalt under the shaded light of lampposts. A local
man is sentenced to life in prison. Someone will probably write a movie about
his crimes, unmotivated, the holy sinner, who brings us an awareness of our‑
selves. Meanwhile, on the street outside, two men shout congratulatory
remarks in regards to the outcome of some game. They say “Alright! and
“Okay!” Dear Mrs. McLuhan, The end of a tube of toothpaste can cause guilty
feelings and a sense of alienation from progress. There are support networks
for these sorts of things—feminine, domesticating—these parades of objects
up and down, such as control-top pantyhose, handbags, lemon-scented versus
unscented detergent. It’s a question of family values. It’s tempting to over-sim‑
plify these things, to associate them with syndromes or ailments. The opposing
view stresses convenience and individuality. You make the call, Mrs. McLu‑
han. You consider the conceptualization of apples, acid peels, cereal boxes, and
the virtues of commercial packaging that works like still-life painting on the
fronts and tops of boxes. Warmly, etc. Dear Mrs. Green, This is a neighbor‑
hood I know very well. When I arrive at a door, I ring the bell. I start
conversations based on motivations, things that attract me, such as situations
for discovery or frogs or food for fire. Also, I assimilate blank stares and could
almost be said to be happening. You know it already, Mrs. Green. In this sense
I could almost be said to have happened. It’s difficult to calculate the amount
of time spent expressing ourselves strongly enough to be overheard. One
hardly sees oneself. For example, one never sees one’s own eyes. Do you see
what I mean? I think you do, Mrs. Green. Mrs. Green, you are a person who
invites compliments. You have a bird’s house painted blue in your maple. You
have a bowl of cherries on your kitchen table. You are like a familiar restau‑
rant, and patient. However, I can’t stop thinking about you and your worn-out
leather shoes. I can easily provide the name of a reliable peddler. Yours, etc.
Dear Mrs. Pixley, I recall a remarkable walk we took one afternoon. It was a
rainy afternoon in March or April. Or was it the summer? Was it June or
August? All the same, Mrs. Pixley, it was a warm rain, and the walk resulted
in a series of astonishing revelations. Don’t you recall? Don’t you remember
danielle dutton 435
the boy with balloons and the bizarre things that appeared—the plate of
peaches, the lemon-yellow book on the edge of the sidewalk, the cucumber
balancing on two turnips, the beautiful crystal vase with flowers and no water?
Don’t you remember these items? Don’t you remember walking with me in
the rain? It was a walk that led us north-west-north through familiar scenery.
When I got home I waited for a few minutes in front of my own door. Always,
etc. Dear Mr. Mayor, You were right. You can’t stop it. You can’t even act as if
it were simply a gateway. The only practicable solution is to go on with the
movement, day after day, just as we have seen. Mr. Mayor, I’ve been meaning
to tell you that you came too late. I ordered various small salads and sat there
perverted by an illusion of clarity or bliss. That is, a stupid realism eventually
descended upon me, a kind of parody of the usual lunchtime entertainment
only much, much funnier. You are a political stooge, Mr. Mayor. I’m sorry, but
it’s better to end it this way than to come up with some new theory about the
wise and kindly father figure. I wish you the best of luck with the wall you are
building around your house. Sincerely, etc. Tonight on television people
applaud furniture. They can’t stop applauding it. They clap their hands together
and then they open their mouths and shout. They say, “Woo!” and “Yeah!” and
“Ah!” They applaud a lampshade and pillows ranging from $8.50 to $19.95.
People don’t know where to begin. The book says, “You can have it all,” which
might be what’s so confusing. There’s danger of a kind of disintegration. I
shape and manipulate it. I set it on a cutting board. I pick it up and turn it over
and then I desert it. After a while, it loses its special freshness. Then my life
unfolds in reverse for a time. There is no other authority. I ask myself ques‑
tions. I measure my memories and gestures and meditate on decay. One day
rolls back on the next, and that one is covered in a rich color that has drained
into it overnight. It has its origins in some event, hours prior, a breakfast or
banquet, a scene at a table or on a sidewalk, or some sort of routine handling
of sugar, dough, crops. Twenty years after the fact, I remember every piece of
china I’ve ever broken. The one with grayish lines on the bottom, and the one
shaped like a seashell, and the one that was holding the fruit, and the one with
the spirals of red and pink, and how I sat there staring at it on the ground. So
in this way I almost interview myself and experience my whole life story and
the story of people adjacent to me, or before me, and how people actually cope
with opening up the land, and cats or clothes, and X-rays, and how they said
that Tupperware was “the nicest thing that could happen to your kitchen.” On
the television a man says the bathroom should be filled with things that are
tactile, beautiful, and large. This is no doubt due to his appreciation of some
new luxury item. I bathe in a soft light because of the seemingly innocuous
nature of this arrangement. I feel modern and full of life. I dust myself with
candied fruits and stand on the edge of the tub from six to eight, or sometime
even for nine hours. I do it in an anachronistic way. It is a remarkably photo‑
graphic setting. On the bathroom countertop are several aspirin cut in half, a
glass of water, pink and blue cotton puffs, a golden bottle of perfume, and
small soaps shaped like snails. Tonight, Haywood’s breath is a mixture of
beans and ice cream. The cat is thinking about dogs. I buy him tiny mice
stuffed with catnip, but he doesn’t care. He’s like a familiar uniform when he
comes into the room. I sit in the sun and absorb the weak rays and view the
earth. All sorts of events happen at the same time but don’t have to. On the
kitchen counter are three glasses, two spoons, half a pecan pie, a box of deter‑
gent, a folded blue dishtowel, and an unopened package of sponges (yellow,
blue, pink, green, pink). Haywood plays cards for a variety of reasons. Mean‑
while, I watch a film involving a murder mystery and someone lying about a
murder. There are ghosts who actually hurt people, and ghosts who just
chronicle what they know: foxes, gangrene, the peeping of frogs, the building
of houses and the tearing down of houses, Easter parades, confinement,
mother-o’-pearl tints, games, sounds, ponds, trap-doors. Some ghosts carry
faded marriage photos and a timeless sense of years, the ravages of years, of
weaknesses, grassy knolls, high-school yearbooks, marching bands, and other
important points in history. Later, I watch a movie about a group of women in
ancient China. It inspires me to re-imagine my life, as if I’m standing in a
pagoda in the woods, and there are shrines, and it’s misty and green in the
summer and the winter. On the dining-room table is a dish of melted ice
cream, a bag of candy, and two spoons. On the kitchen table: a butcher knife,
a plastic cup, a kiwi. On the kitchen counter: a metal strainer, a green glass
bowl with two peaches inside, a plastic cutting board, several jars, plastic bags,
paper towels, a knife, a spoon, a bottle cap, a piece of cheese, and an apple. Out
on the street four kids in bright colors run with a small brown dog on a leash.
The children are of various ages and sizes. One kid says, “Stop, stop, stop,
stop.” At another house I pass a red dog in a black sweater, and then I find a
cracked side-view mirror in the grass. I stand above it and look down at myself
and my head against the sky, and then I stand on one foot on the edge of the
sidewalk. I stand on my right foot, balancing, while I look down at myself
looking back up. Then I turn my right buttock under my left and open my hips
to the north. I turn my torso north as well and place my right hand in the grass
about six inches in front of my right foot. Also, I raise my left arm above my
head. It takes a long time, maybe eighty-five years, and is the opposite of a
snapshot.
danielle dutton 437
Notes
Laura Letinsky’s still lifes, in Laura Letinsky: Hardly More Than Ever 1997-2004
(The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 2004), were instrumental
to the imagining of S P R A W L.
Others who unknowingly provided words and ideas for use in the writing of S P
R A W L: Henry David Thoreau in Walden; Georges Perec in Species of Spaces and
Other Pieces; Lyn Hejinian in “Two Stein Talks”; Hanneke Grootenboer in “The
Posthumous Lives of Leftovers”; Carla Harryman in “How I Wrote Gardener of
Stars, a Novel”; Norbert Schneider in Still Life; Alison J. Clarke in “Tupperware:
Suburbia, sociality and mass consumption”; Nan Freeman in “Tom Wesselmann:
Still-Life Painting and American Culture, circa 1962”; Virginia Woolf in Moments
of Being; Alan Wearne in The Nightmarkets; Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu in
“Emblems for a Modern Age: Vincent Van Gogh’s Still Lifes and the NineteenthCentury Vignette Tradition”; Charlotte Brontë in Vilette; John Cheever in The
Journals of John Cheever; Vicky Lebeau in “The Worst of All Possible Worlds?”;
William James in Principles of Psychology; Nancy G. Duncan and James S. Duncan
in “Deep Suburban Irony”; John Berger in Ways of Seeing; Thomas Hobbes in
Leviathan; Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel; Robert Messia in “Lawns as Artifacts:
The Evolution of Social and Environmental Implications of Suburban Residential
Land Use”; Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Compensation”; Rikki Ducornet in The
Monstrous and the Marvelous; Ludwig Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations;
Milton Curry in “Racial Critique of Public Housing Redevelopment Strategies”;
John Archer in “Colonial Suburbs in South Asia, 1700-1850, and the Spaces
of Modernity”; Amanda Rees in “New Urbanism: Visionary Landscapes in
the Twenty-First Century”; Josh Protas in “The Straw That Broke the Camel’s
Back: Preservation of an Urban Mountain Landscape”; Brian Kiteley in The 3am
Epiphany; John Hartley in “The Sexualization of Suburbia”; Lynn Spigel in “From
Theatre to Space Ship: Metaphors of suburban domesticity in postwar America”;
Gertrude Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Modest Mouse on their
album Good News for People Who Love Bad News; Michele Byers in “Waiting at the
Gate: The New, Postmodern Promised Lands”; Reindert Falkenburg in “Matters of
Taste: Pieter Aertsen’s Market Scenes, Eating Habits, and Pictorial Rhetoric in the
Sixteenth Century”; Robert Urquhart in Ordinary Choices; Laura (Riding) Jackson
in Anarchism Is Not Enough; James Howard Kunstler in “Home from Nowhere”;
Northrop Frye in The Modern Century; John Hartley in “The Sexualization of
Suburbia”; Roland Barthes in “The World as Object”; Steve Featherstone in “The
Line Is Hot: A history of the machine gun, shot”; Diane Williams in Romancer
Erector; Wilton & Wilton in Pictorial Encyclopedia of Modern Cake Decorating.
D. J. Waldie
excerpt from Holy Land
1
That evening he thought he was becoming his habits, or even more—he
thought he was becoming the grid he knew.
He knew his suburb’s first 17,500 houses had been built in less than three
years. He knew what this must have cost, but he did not care.
The houses still worked.
He thought of them as middle class even though 1,100-square-foot tract
houses on streets meeting at right angles are not middle class at all.
Middle-class houses are the homes of people who would not live here.
2
In a suburb that is not exactly middle class, the necessary illusion is predict‑
ability.
3
When he thinks of his parents, he remembers them as they were in their
early middle age—energetic, strong, and more capable than any other adult
he knew.
d. j. waldie 439
He is older now than his parents had been then, and he is less competent
than his father and mother seemed to him, even less competent than they
were in fact.
This thought rarely troubles him.
4
Whether liked or disliked, it is for himself, and not for what he has done, that
others judge him. He has generally done nothing at all.
5
It rained once for an entire week in 1953, when I was five. The flat streets flooded.
Schools closed. Only the rain happened, while I waited at the window.
Waiting was one of the first things I understood fully. Rain and the hydro‑
gen bomb were two aspects of the same loss.
6
Moral choice does not enter his thinking.
He believes, however, that each of us is crucified. His own crucifixion is
the humiliation of living the life he has made for himself.
7
You and I grew up in these neighborhoods when they were an interleaving of
houses and fields that were soon to be filled with more houses.
A particular sound marked the boundary of the neighborhood. It was the
barking of dogs near full dark in summer. Do you remember it?
The flat barking skipped from block to block, unhinged from causes, not
necessarily your neighbors’ dog, but their dog too.
That sound became the whole neighborhood clearing its throat before
going to bed and sleep.
8
At some point in your story grief presents itself.
Now, for the first time, your room is empty, not merely unoccupied.
9
Before they put a grid over it, and restrained the ground from indifference, any
place was as good as any other.
10
There were only a few trees here, eighty years ago. They were eucalyptus trees
near some farm buildings, deliberately planted for shade. Men waited under
them before their work began.
The men’s faces were brown on the jaw and chin, and pale above.
In the fields, only the upper part of a man’s face is shaded by his hat, saltstained along the base of the crown.
Work began for the men when each man pulled himself to a high wooden
seat above a harvester’s moving rack of teeth.
This contraption was pulled by twenty mules, straining as the men joked.
11
The grid is the plan above the earth. It is a compass of possibilities.
12
In 1949, three developers bought 3,500 acres of Southern California farm‑
land.
They planned to build something that was not exactly a city.
In 1950, before the work of roughing the foundations and pouring concrete
began, the three men hired a young photographer with a single-engine plane
to document their achievement from the air.
The photographer flew when the foundations of the first houses were poured.
He flew again when the framing was done and later, when the roofers were
d. j. waldie 441
nearly finished. He flew over the shell of the shopping center that explains this
and many other California suburbs.
The three developers were pleased with the results. The black-and-white
photographs show immense abstractions on ground the color of the full
moon.
Some of the photographs appeared in Fortune and other magazines. The
developers bound enlargements in a handsome presentation book. I have sev‑
eral pages from one of the copies.
The photographs celebrate house frames precise as cells in a hive and stucco
walls fragile as an unearthed bone.
Seen from above, the grid is beautiful and terrible.
13
Four of the young man’s photographs became the definition of this suburb,
and then of suburbs generally.
The photographs look down before the moving vans arrived, and before you
and I learned to play hide-and-seek beneath the poisonous oleander trees.
Architectural critics and urban theorists reprinted the photographs in
books with names like God’s Own Junkyard. Forty years later, the same four
photographs still stand for the places in which most of us live.
The photographs were images of the developers’ crude pride. They report
that the grid, briefly empty of associations, is just a pattern predicting itself.
The theorists and critics did not look again, forty years later, to see the
intersections or calculate in them the joining of interests, limited but attain‑
able, like the leasing of chain stores in a shopping mall.
14
In the Los Angeles basin, the possibility of rain is ignored until the rain falls.
Since it hardly ever rains, ignorance has prevailed as climate.
15
The local newspaper in 1956 used a picture to show how much had changed.
This picture “Harvesting, 1900.”
It shows a team of mules, a combine harvester, the field, and the men. The
mules are sawteeth of black; the combine is a grand contraption in gray; the
field is all design.
You cannot make out the men. They are patterns in the photograph.
16
My father’s kindness was as pure and indifferent as a certain kind of saint’s.
My father did not have a passion for his giving; it came from him, perhaps
after much spiritual calculation, as a product might come from a conveyor
belt.
The houses in this suburb were built the same way. As many as a hundred
a day were begun between 1950 and 1952, more than five hundred a week. No
two floor plans were built next to each other; no neighbor had to stare into his
reflection across the street.
Teams of men built the houses.
Some men poured concrete into the ranks of foundations from mixing
trucks waiting in a mile-long line. Other men threw down floors nailed with
pneumatic hammers, tilted up the framing, and scaled the rafters with cedar
shingles lifted by conveyer belts from the beds of specially built trucks.
You are mistaken if you consider this a criticism, either of my father or the
houses.
17
Construction crews in thirty-man teams built the rows of houses. Each team
of workmen was subdivided by specialty.
One man with a pneumatic hammer nailed subfloors on five houses a
day. The framers finished lengths of precut lumber with new, electric saws.
Another crew operated a power door hanger.
Rough plaster laid by one crew was smoothed a few minutes later by
another.
Subcontractors delivered construction materials in exact amounts directly
to each building site. Expediters coordinated the work from radio-equipped
cars.
The foreman used a loudspeaker to direct the movement of his men.
d. j. waldie 443
18
Mr. F laid rafters for hundreds of these houses. According to Mr. F, it didn’t
take much skill.
The most experienced men did the framing, by assembling pieces that had
been precut at the mill. Laying rafters only required knowing how to swing a
hammer all day.
By 1951, the construction bosses had hired more than four thousand work‑
men. They were mostly unskilled veterans still in their twenties. They learned
how to lay rafters—or they didn’t learn—in a day or two.
The men who put up with the pace and the monotony stayed on. They
earned about a dollar an hour.
19
According to Mr. F, the speed of the work depended on a gimmick called a
“scaffold jack.” The jack made it possible for two men to begin laying rafters
with no time wasted in setting up a freestanding scaffold.
Instead, braces cut from channel iron, each fitted with two bars of sawteeth
that bit into the wood stud, could be nailed up quickly on the skeletal frame
of the house.
Each jack held a short length of two-by-four. On these projecting arms the
roofers laid the planks on which they stood to work.
The jacks transmitted the weight of the cantilevered scaffold planks to the
studs of the house frame. The planks and the men themselves made the jack
bite securely into the wood.
Simple forces supported the planks, the men, and the scaffold jacks hang‑
ing about six feet above the ground.
20
The scaffold jacks were ingenious and economical. A pair could be cut and
welded together from a single, eighteen-inch length of channel iron.
The process of setting the jacks up on the studs and laying the scaffold
planks took the men only a few minutes.
The jack let each completed house supply the support for the next construc‑
tion step. It was like lifting yourself by your bootstraps, Mr. F said.
The scaffold jack didn’t last.
In the 1960s, the standard two-by-four stud was pared down to reduce
lumber costs. Today, a two-by-four is one-and-a-half inches by three-and-a-half
inches.
Mr. F says a scaffold jack would snap one of these new studs in two.
21
If the workmen looked up from laying rafters, they saw a row of houses with
bundles of shingles being lifted by conveyor belts to shinglers on the roof.
Beyond them was a row of house frames being sheathed in tar paper and
chicken wire. Beyond them was another row of houses gray with new stucco.
Beyond that row would be another row of houses, only a few days older, being
painted.
Behind them, nearly out of sight, would be a street of finished houses,
forty-six to a block.
To the workmen, suspended on the scaffold, these finished houses must
have seemed out of place and very still.
22
The Los Angeles Daily News described the construction of the houses as a huge
assembly line.
23
Mr. F made the city a detailed scale model of a garage being framed.
He wanted to show school children, who sometimes tour city hall, how
efficiently he had laid rafters as a young man.
His model includes a set of full-size scaffold jacks mounted on two uprights
with a short length of scaffold plank between them.
The model garage is mounted on a table Mr. F built. The entire display,
including the table and model, is about five-and-a-half feet high.
The roof of the scale model is about half laid, so that the pattern of rafters
can be seen.
Mr. F put a Ken doll on the model scaffold to show how the roofers worked.
Ken is holding a tiny hammer.
d. j. waldie 445
24
Daily life here has an inertia that people believe in.
In the city’s most recent opinion survey, 92 percent of the residents believe
this suburb is a desirable place in which to live.
Such is the attraction of suburbs. You look out your kitchen window to the
bedroom window of your neighbor precisely fifteen feet away.
25
The distance between my house and yours is a separation the suburb’s
designers carefully planned. It is one of the principal factors in determining
the number of houses per acre in a subdivision.
The number of houses per acre is the subdivision’s yield.
This is a measure of its profitability, which is not the number of houses that
can be sold, but the subdivision’s population density.
Density is what developers sell to the builders of shopping centers.
26
The average number of houses per acre in prewar subdivisions had been about
five.
In the suburb where I live, begun in 1950, the number of houses per acre
is eight.
The houses were designed by an architect named Paul Duncan.
27
You leave the space between the houses uncrossed. You rarely go across the
street, which is forty feet wide.
You are grateful for the distance. It is as if each house on your block stood
on its own enchanted island, fifty feet wide by one hundred feet long.
People come and go from it, your parents mostly and your friends. Your
parents arrive like pilgrims.
But the island is remote. You occasionally hear the sounds of anger. You
almost never hear the sounds of love.
You hear, always at night, the shifting of the uprights, the sagging of ceil‑
ing joists, and the unpredictable ticking of the gas heater.
28
What is beautiful here?
The calling of a mourning dove, and others answering from yard to yard.
Perhaps this is the only thing beautiful here.
29
What more can you expect of me than the stories I am now telling?
d. j. waldie 447
Biographies of literary contributors
Thomas Sieverts is an urban planner and historian. He was one of the
principal planners of the Emscher region in Germany’s Ruhrgebiet and has
worked and taught around the world. His 1997 book Zwischenstadt, translated
in this book as Where We Live Now, has become a central part of European and
other discussions about the new forms of cities.
Diana George’s fiction has appeared in Chicago Review, 3rd Bed, and Golden
Handcuffs Review. She is currently studying English literature at Brandeis
University.
Howard W. Robertson is a poet and fiction writer who lives in Eugene,
Oregon. He has published three books of poems: The Bricolage of Kotegaeshi
(The Backwaters Press, 2007); Ode to certain interstates and Other Poems (Clear
Cut Press, 2004); and to the fierce guard in the Assyrian Saloon (Ahsahta Press,
1987). He was named 2007 Jack Straw Writer by Jack Straw Productions in
Seattle. He was the winner of the 2006 Elizabeth R. Curry Prize for Poetry
(SLAB of Slippery Rock University, PA) and the 2003 Robinson Jeffers Prize
for Poetry (Tor House of Carmel, CA). His poems have been published in
many literary journals, including most recently in SLAB, Square Lake, Nest,
Literal Latté, Nimrod, Fireweed, and Ergo. His poetry is anthologized in The
Literal Latté Anthology (Literal Latté, 2008); the Jack Straw Writers Anthology
(Jack Straw Productions, 2007); The Clear Cut Future (Clear Cut Press, 2003);
The Emily Dickinson Awards Anthology (Universities West Press, 2002); and
the Ahsahta Anthology: Poetry of the American West (Ahsahta Press, 1996).
biographies & acknowledgments 449
He has been among the winners of various other poetry awards, including
the Bumbershoot Award, the Emily Dickinson Award, the Robert Frost Foun‑
dation Award, the Intown Award, the Literal Latté Award, the Pablo Neruda
Award, and the Pacifica Award.
Canadian poet and essayist Lisa Robertson currently lives in Oakland
and works as artist-in-residence at California College of the Arts. Her books
include Debbie: An Epic, The Men, and The Weather (poetry), and Occasional
Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (essays). A frequent
collaborator across genres and media, she is currently making a video with the
Vancouver artist Allyson Clay, and constructing new works in digital sound
with the San Francisco poet Stacy Doris. In Spring 2009, Coach House Books,
in Toronto, will publish Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip.
Sam Lohmann edits a yearly zine called Peaches and Bats. He has self-pub‑
lished several chapbooks, most recently Unless As Stone Is. The poem in this
anthology is part of a group of poems on landscape that he has been working
since he moved to Portland a year ago. He exists on the internet at www.peach‑
bats.blogspot.com.
Sherman Alexie is a poet, screenwriter, and novelist. His work has won
many prizes, including O Henry and Pushcart prizes for the story reprinted
here, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” (first published in the New Yorker
magazine in 2003). He is a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian and grew up on
the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington, about fifty miles
northwest of Spokane, Washington.
Danielle Dutton is the author of Attempts at a Life (Tarpaulin Sky Press,
2007), and her writing has recently appeared in magazines including Harper’s, the Brooklyn Rail, and Shiny. She teaches in the Jack Kerouac School of
Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University and is managing editor at Dalkey
Archive Press.
D. J. Waldie is a poet and essayist who lives in Lakewood, California, in the
house his parents bought in 1946. He has been the Public Information Officer
of the city of Lakewood since 1978. He is the author of Holy Land: A Suburban
Memoir (1996), excerpted here; Real City: Downtown Los Angeles Inside/Out
(2001); Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles (2004); and Close to Home:
An American Album (2004).
Permissions and acknowledgments:
Where We Live Now is a translation of portions of Zwischenstadt: zwischen Ort
und Welt, Raum und Zeit, Stadt und Land by Thomas Sieverts (Braunschweig:
Vieweg 1997), translated by Diana George and first published here.
Excerpts from The German Ideology by Karl Marx are reprinted from the first
English translation of the work, issued by Progress Publishers, Moscow (1964),
and can be found at the Marx & Engels Internet Archive, online at http://www.
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/chora.htm.
Excerpts from “Towns and Cities,” in The Structures of Everyday Life by Fernand
Braudel, translated by Sian Reynolds, are reprinted from the 1992 University
of California Press edition (University of California Press: Berkeley).
Excerpts from Topophilia by Yi-Fu Tuan are reprinted from the 1970 PrenticeHall edition (Prentice-Hall: New York).
Excerpts from The Country and the City by Raymond Williams are reprinted
from the 1972 Oxford University Press edition (Oxford University Press: New
York).
“Nuu-chah-nulth account of First Contact 1778” by Gillette Chipps is reprinted
from the B.C. First Nations Studies Teachers Guide (British Columbia Ministry
of Education: Victoria, B.C.), printed in 1978, which can be found online at
http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/irp/resdocs/bcfns.htm.
Excerpts from the Journal of the Third Voyage by Captain James Cook are
reprinted from the 1987 Penguin edition (Penguin Books: London).
Excerpts from Native American Architecture by Peter Nabokov and Robert
Easton are reprinted from the 1989 Oxford University Press edition (Oxford
University Press: London).
Excerpts from Peoples of the Northwest Coast by Kenneth M. Ames and Herbert
D. G. Maschner are reprinted from the 2000 Thames and Hudson edition
(Thames and Hudson: London).
Excerpts from “Before Lewis and Clark, Lt. Broughton’s River of Names, The
Columbia River Exploration of 1792” by Jim Mockford are reprinted from the
Oregon Historical Quarterly (Winter 2005).
“The Four Myth Ages” by Louis Kenoy is extracted from Kalapuya Texts,
transcribed and edited by Melville Jacobs and published by the University of
Washington in 1944.
Excerpts from Indians in the Making by Alexandra Harmon are reprinted from
the 1994 University of California Press edition (University of California Press:
Berkeley).
Excerpts from “The Glittering Plain” by Robert L. Benson are reprinted
from Land of Tuality, published by the Washington County Historical Society
(WCHS: Hillsboro, Oregon) in 1975.
Excerpts from Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition by Lieuten‑
ant Charles Wilkes are reprinted from the 1856 G. P. Putnam edition (G. P.
Putnam: New York), which is available online at http://soda.sou.edu/awdata/
030430i1.pdf.
Excerpts from Washington County: Politics and Community in Antebellum
America by Paul Bourke and Donald DeBats are reprinted from the 1995
Johns Hopkins University Press edition (Johns Hopkins University Press:
Baltimore).
Excerpts from Portland: The Metropolis of the Pacific Northwest are reprinted
from the pamphlet printed by the Oregon Immigration Board, Portland,
Oregon, in 1889.
Excerpts from Samuel’s Directory of Portland by L. Samuel are reprinted from
the directory published in Portland, Oregon, in 1873.
Excerpts from Native Seattle by Coll Thrush are reprinted from the 2007
University of Washington Press edition (University of Washington Press:
Seattle).
Excerpts from Boomburbs: The Rise of America’s Accidental Cities by Robert E.
Lang and Jennifer LeFurgy are reprinted from the 2007 Brookings Institu‑
tion Press edition (Brookings Institution Press: Washington D.C.).
Excerpts from Territory Authority Rights by Saskia Sassen are reprinted from
the 2007 Princeton University Press edition (Princeton University Press:
New York).
Excerpts from “An Introduction to the Information Age” by Manuel Castells
are reprinted from The Blackwell City Reader (Blackwell Publishing: New York,
2002).
Excerpts from The Polycentric Metropolis by Peter Hall and Kathy Pain are
reprinted from the 2000 Earthscan edition (University of Michigan: Ann
Arbor, MI).
“The Generic City” by Rem Koolhaas is reprinted from the 1997 Taschen edi‑
tion of S, M, L, XL (Taschen: New York).
“Nothing But Flowers: Against Public Space” by Aaron Betsky is reprinted
from the 1998 Monacelli Press edition of Slow Space, edited by Michael Bell
and Sze Tsung Leong (Monacelli Press: New York).
“Notes on art and aesthetics where we live now” by Stephanie Snyder is pub‑
lished for the first time here.
“Our anniversary trip to Passage and the visit to the wildlife museum south of
Weeks where two French poets seemed particularly relevant” by Howard W.
Robertson is reprinted from the 2003 Clear Cut Press edition of Ode to certain
interstates and Other Poems (Clear Cut Press: Astoria, Oregon).
“Spatial Synthetics: A Theory” by Lisa Robertson is reprinted from the 2003
Clear Cut Press edition of Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for
Soft Architecture (Clear Cut Press: Astoria, Oregon).
“To Landscape” by Sam Lohmann is published for the first time here.
“What You Pawn I Will Redeem” by Sherman Alexie is reprinted from the
2004 Grove Press edition of Ten Little Indians (Grove Press: New York).
Excerpts from S P R A W L by Danielle Dutton are published for the first time
here.
Excerpts from Holy Land by D. J. Waldie are reprinted from the 1996 Buzz
Books edition (Buzz Books: Los Angeles).
All reasonable efforts have been made to obtain permissions from the authors
and publishers of the work reprinted here.
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