 | Theorizing the Absent Object: Industrial Transportation Infrastructure Decline as Narrative Symbol in the American Rust Belt |
“This used to be the parking lot,” Jesús laughed, as we piled out of his car. He and his friend Marcos pulled me into the large field of prairie grass and scrawny trees that I had been driving by, oblivious, for months while conducting fieldwork in the southeastern most neighborhood of Chicago. “There’s the dock,” Marcos said, guiding us to the edge of a watery parking spot for ships that for nearly a century delivered iron ore pellets from sources across the Great Lakes. Jesús picked up a taconite iron pellet from the edge of the dock and handed it to me. “I remember my father, when he would hear the ore boats in the [dock], he would always say, ‘That’s the sound of money.’”
Cultural meaning—signs and the kinds of things they signify—derives not only from cognition or social interaction; it is entangled in the matter of everyday life. What happens to meaning when an entire system of objects degrades and disappears? What are the mechanisms through which objects that are no longer there still signify meaning? And why might people want to negotiate the meaning of an absent object at all? Bridging cultural sociology with a thematic, narrative analysis of interviews conducted in deindustrialized communities, I ask how and why actors negotiate meanings of decayed, malfunctioning, or absent material objects. I suggest that interrogating the life and death of a specific web of objects—industrial transportation infrastructures—illuminates the relationship between place, time, storytelling, and meaning-making.
Constructed for practical and often mundane purposes and emplaced in specific locations, few material objects construct lasting, symbolic, and layered meanings as infrastructures. Infrastructures are series of technologies that connect, delimit, and control resource flows in order to deliver commodities, information, or services that sustain social reproduction (Graham & Marvin, 2001; Star, 1999). A muddy blend of logistics, policies, culture, and finances, infrastructures are much more than the sum of their parts, as classical sociologists and contemporary scholars alike observe. From 19th-century train systems (Marx 1867/1990) to water purification systems (Silver, 2019), infrastructures are interconnected systems of objects simultaneously reflecting and producing material culture. What might sociologists interested in the production and negotiation of cultural meanings gain from analyzing infrastructures in post-industrial America? Object-centered analyses of meaning-making (see Benzecry and Rubio 2018; McDonnell 2010) involves materials that, in general, can be displaced and individualized, infrastructures are inherently emplaced in historically-specific webs of material flows. Each node in a system is experienced as a whole even when actors only interact with a part; the meaning of each node is contingent on its intended function and place-dependent even in connection to elsewhere. Thus, studying infrastructural decline enables insights into how the passage of time and the instabilities of the physical world inform the experiences, interpretations, and accounts of on-the-ground actors.
Specifically, taking an infrastructural lens grants us leverage to answer two questions: what are mechanisms through which absent objects do meaning-making work? And to what ends do actors themselves readjust meanings in reaction to material entropy, decay, or disappearance? To answer these questions and contribute insight into how meanings attached to specific objects change as the object changes, I offer an exemplar case of transportation infrastructure decline in the American Rust Belt. I draw from two years of archival work, ethnographic study, and thematic narrative analysis of more than ninety interviews with long-term residents of a former iron mining community in Wisconsin and a steel mill neighborhood in Chicago, Illinois. Both communities were settled as sites of labor reproduction for the steel industry in the late 19th century; in the second half of the 20th century, the anchor industries and primary employers closed, inciting economic depression, outmigration, and the material decay inherent to lack of maintenance. While scholarship on deindustrialization centers primarily on political economic causes, social and emotional consequences, and demographic losses (e.g. Broughton 2015; Cowie and Heathcott 2003; Wuthnow 2018), little is known about how the degradation and disappearance of material objects are interpreted by people who still live the Rust Belt. This gap in knowledge was highlighted by my interviewees as, unbidden, one of every three brought up the rise or fall of industrial modes of transportation and a dozen drove me to a former steel mill site in southeast Chicago or disappeared railroad tracks in the forests of Wisconsin. More than merely the backwards gaze of nostalgia, I suggest that these accounts of material decline are important forms of meaning renegotiation.
From thick descriptions of these interviewee stories and ethnographic field walks, I make two arguments. First, I propose that because infrastructures are objects whose meanings are contingent both on their function and emplacement, their absences facilitate meaning-making through comparison. While comparative stories are characteristic of nostalgic narratives (“a kind of mourning for the impossibility of return because the longed‐for object of one’s desire exists” in the past, according to May (2017)), I suggest that these object-focused contrasts of past and present are undervalued mechanisms of meaning-negotiation. Material change in infrastructures, specifically, can be a narrative tool “through which people interpret large-scale change and develop a picture of their wider environment,” as Angelo & Hentschel (2015, p. 307) put it. Second, I contend that actors can leverage these comparative narratives to diagnose the structural problems of disinvestment, marginalization, and disconnection characterizing regions of post-industrial societies. What to outsiders looks like an empty field to long-term residents represents financial disinvestments and intransigent political marginalization causing the reproduction of persistent, economic precarity decades after iron and steel companies closed. Stories about lost transportation infrastructure render legible, both to speakers and to the listener, the often-opaque processes, timeframes, and consequences of economic restructuring.
Bringing the materiality and meaning of infrastructures into the deindustrialization story can help us understand how and why actors work to negotiate the meanings of absent objects. Taking seriously objects as key to cultural meaning-making—even in their absence—opens space for questions too easily overlooked in contexts too often ignored by scholars of material culture.
References
Angelo, Hillary and Christine Hentschel. 2015. “Interactions with Infrastructure as Windows into Social Worlds: A Method for Critical Urban Studies: Introduction.” City 19(2–3):306–12.
Benzecry, Claudio E. and Fernando Domínguez Rubio. 2018. “The Cultural Life of Objects.” Routledge Handbook of Cultural Sociology: Second Edition (1966):322–29.
Broughton, Chad. 2015. Boom, Bust, Exodus. New York, N.Y: Oxford University Press.
Cowie, Jefferson and Joseph Heathcott. 2003. Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization. edited by J. Cowie and J. Heathcott. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.
Graham, Stephen and Simon Marvin. 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge.
Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. Translation. New York, N.Y: Penguin Classics.
May, Vanessa. 2017. “Belonging from Afar: Nostalgia, Time and Memory.”
McDonnell, Terence E. 2010. “Cultural Objects as Objects: Materiality, Urban Space, and the Interpretation of AIDS Campaigns in Accra, Ghana.” American Journal of Sociology 115(6):1800–1852.
Silver, Jonathan. 2019. “Decaying Infrastructures in the Post-Industrial City: An Urban Political Ecology of the US Pipeline Crisis.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 0(0):251484861989051.
Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43(3):377–91.
Wuthnow, Robert. 2018. The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Constructed for practical and often mundane purposes and emplaced in specific locations, few material objects construct lasting, symbolic, and layered meanings as infrastructures. Infrastructures are series of technologies that connect, delimit, and control resource flows in order to deliver commodities, information, or services that sustain social reproduction (Graham & Marvin, 2001; Star, 1999). A muddy blend of logistics, policies, culture, and finances, infrastructures are much more than the sum of their parts, as classical sociologists and contemporary scholars alike observe. From 19th-century train systems (Marx 1867/1990) to water purification systems (Silver, 2019), infrastructures are interconnected systems of objects simultaneously reflecting and producing material culture. What might sociologists interested in the production and negotiation of cultural meanings gain from analyzing infrastructures in post-industrial America? Object-centered analyses of meaning-making (see Benzecry and Rubio 2018; McDonnell 2010) involves materials that, in general, can be displaced and individualized, infrastructures are inherently emplaced in historically-specific webs of material flows. Each node in a system is experienced as a whole even when actors only interact with a part; the meaning of each node is contingent on its intended function and place-dependent even in connection to elsewhere. Thus, studying infrastructural decline enables insights into how the passage of time and the instabilities of the physical world inform the experiences, interpretations, and accounts of on-the-ground actors.
Specifically, taking an infrastructural lens grants us leverage to answer two questions: what are mechanisms through which absent objects do meaning-making work? And to what ends do actors themselves readjust meanings in reaction to material entropy, decay, or disappearance? To answer these questions and contribute insight into how meanings attached to specific objects change as the object changes, I offer an exemplar case of transportation infrastructure decline in the American Rust Belt. I draw from two years of archival work, ethnographic study, and thematic narrative analysis of more than ninety interviews with long-term residents of a former iron mining community in Wisconsin and a steel mill neighborhood in Chicago, Illinois. Both communities were settled as sites of labor reproduction for the steel industry in the late 19th century; in the second half of the 20th century, the anchor industries and primary employers closed, inciting economic depression, outmigration, and the material decay inherent to lack of maintenance. While scholarship on deindustrialization centers primarily on political economic causes, social and emotional consequences, and demographic losses (e.g. Broughton 2015; Cowie and Heathcott 2003; Wuthnow 2018), little is known about how the degradation and disappearance of material objects are interpreted by people who still live the Rust Belt. This gap in knowledge was highlighted by my interviewees as, unbidden, one of every three brought up the rise or fall of industrial modes of transportation and a dozen drove me to a former steel mill site in southeast Chicago or disappeared railroad tracks in the forests of Wisconsin. More than merely the backwards gaze of nostalgia, I suggest that these accounts of material decline are important forms of meaning renegotiation.
From thick descriptions of these interviewee stories and ethnographic field walks, I make two arguments. First, I propose that because infrastructures are objects whose meanings are contingent both on their function and emplacement, their absences facilitate meaning-making through comparison. While comparative stories are characteristic of nostalgic narratives (“a kind of mourning for the impossibility of return because the longed‐for object of one’s desire exists” in the past, according to May (2017)), I suggest that these object-focused contrasts of past and present are undervalued mechanisms of meaning-negotiation. Material change in infrastructures, specifically, can be a narrative tool “through which people interpret large-scale change and develop a picture of their wider environment,” as Angelo & Hentschel (2015, p. 307) put it. Second, I contend that actors can leverage these comparative narratives to diagnose the structural problems of disinvestment, marginalization, and disconnection characterizing regions of post-industrial societies. What to outsiders looks like an empty field to long-term residents represents financial disinvestments and intransigent political marginalization causing the reproduction of persistent, economic precarity decades after iron and steel companies closed. Stories about lost transportation infrastructure render legible, both to speakers and to the listener, the often-opaque processes, timeframes, and consequences of economic restructuring.
Bringing the materiality and meaning of infrastructures into the deindustrialization story can help us understand how and why actors work to negotiate the meanings of absent objects. Taking seriously objects as key to cultural meaning-making—even in their absence—opens space for questions too easily overlooked in contexts too often ignored by scholars of material culture.
References
Angelo, Hillary and Christine Hentschel. 2015. “Interactions with Infrastructure as Windows into Social Worlds: A Method for Critical Urban Studies: Introduction.” City 19(2–3):306–12.
Benzecry, Claudio E. and Fernando Domínguez Rubio. 2018. “The Cultural Life of Objects.” Routledge Handbook of Cultural Sociology: Second Edition (1966):322–29.
Broughton, Chad. 2015. Boom, Bust, Exodus. New York, N.Y: Oxford University Press.
Cowie, Jefferson and Joseph Heathcott. 2003. Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization. edited by J. Cowie and J. Heathcott. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.
Graham, Stephen and Simon Marvin. 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge.
Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. Translation. New York, N.Y: Penguin Classics.
May, Vanessa. 2017. “Belonging from Afar: Nostalgia, Time and Memory.”
McDonnell, Terence E. 2010. “Cultural Objects as Objects: Materiality, Urban Space, and the Interpretation of AIDS Campaigns in Accra, Ghana.” American Journal of Sociology 115(6):1800–1852.
Silver, Jonathan. 2019. “Decaying Infrastructures in the Post-Industrial City: An Urban Political Ecology of the US Pipeline Crisis.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 0(0):251484861989051.
Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43(3):377–91.
Wuthnow, Robert. 2018. The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
 | Cultural Tourism and Race as a Dependable Commodity |
“This used to be the parking lot,” Jesús laughed, as we piled out of his car. He and his friend Marcos pulled me into the large field of prairie grass and scrawny trees that I had been driving by, oblivious, for months while conducting fieldwork in the southeastern most neighborhood of Chicago. “There’s the dock,” Marcos said, guiding us to the edge of a watery parking spot for ships that for nearly a century delivered iron ore pellets from sources across the Great Lakes. Jesús picked up a taconite iron pellet from the edge of the dock and handed it to me. “I remember my father, when he would hear the ore boats in the [dock], he would always say, ‘That’s the sound of money.’”
Cultural meaning—signs and the kinds of things they signify—derives not only from cognition or social interaction; it is entangled in the matter of everyday life. What happens to meaning when an entire system of objects degrades and disappears? What are the mechanisms through which objects that are no longer there still signify meaning? And why might people want to negotiate the meaning of an absent object at all? Bridging cultural sociology with a thematic, narrative analysis of interviews conducted in deindustrialized communities, I ask how and why actors negotiate meanings of decayed, malfunctioning, or absent material objects. I suggest that interrogating the life and death of a specific web of objects—industrial transportation infrastructures—illuminates the relationship between place, time, storytelling, and meaning-making.
Constructed for practical and often mundane purposes and emplaced in specific locations, few material objects construct lasting, symbolic, and layered meanings as infrastructures. Infrastructures are series of technologies that connect, delimit, and control resource flows in order to deliver commodities, information, or services that sustain social reproduction (Graham & Marvin, 2001; Star, 1999). A muddy blend of logistics, policies, culture, and finances, infrastructures are much more than the sum of their parts, as classical sociologists and contemporary scholars alike observe. From 19th-century train systems (Marx 1867/1990) to water purification systems (Silver, 2019), infrastructures are interconnected systems of objects simultaneously reflecting and producing material culture. What might sociologists interested in the production and negotiation of cultural meanings gain from analyzing infrastructures in post-industrial America? Object-centered analyses of meaning-making (see Benzecry and Rubio 2018; McDonnell 2010) involves materials that, in general, can be displaced and individualized, infrastructures are inherently emplaced in historically-specific webs of material flows. Each node in a system is experienced as a whole even when actors only interact with a part; the meaning of each node is contingent on its intended function and place-dependent even in connection to elsewhere. Thus, studying infrastructural decline enables insights into how the passage of time and the instabilities of the physical world inform the experiences, interpretations, and accounts of on-the-ground actors.
Specifically, taking an infrastructural lens grants us leverage to answer two questions: what are mechanisms through which absent objects do meaning-making work? And to what ends do actors themselves readjust meanings in reaction to material entropy, decay, or disappearance? To answer these questions and contribute insight into how meanings attached to specific objects change as the object changes, I offer an exemplar case of transportation infrastructure decline in the American Rust Belt. I draw from two years of archival work, ethnographic study, and thematic narrative analysis of more than ninety interviews with long-term residents of a former iron mining community in Wisconsin and a steel mill neighborhood in Chicago, Illinois. Both communities were settled as sites of labor reproduction for the steel industry in the late 19th century; in the second half of the 20th century, the anchor industries and primary employers closed, inciting economic depression, outmigration, and the material decay inherent to lack of maintenance. While scholarship on deindustrialization centers primarily on political economic causes, social and emotional consequences, and demographic losses (e.g. Broughton 2015; Cowie and Heathcott 2003; Wuthnow 2018), little is known about how the degradation and disappearance of material objects are interpreted by people who still live the Rust Belt. This gap in knowledge was highlighted by my interviewees as, unbidden, one of every three brought up the rise or fall of industrial modes of transportation and a dozen drove me to a former steel mill site in southeast Chicago or disappeared railroad tracks in the forests of Wisconsin. More than merely the backwards gaze of nostalgia, I suggest that these accounts of material decline are important forms of meaning renegotiation.
From thick descriptions of these interviewee stories and ethnographic field walks, I make two arguments. First, I propose that because infrastructures are objects whose meanings are contingent both on their function and emplacement, their absences facilitate meaning-making through comparison. While comparative stories are characteristic of nostalgic narratives (“a kind of mourning for the impossibility of return because the longed‐for object of one’s desire exists” in the past, according to May (2017)), I suggest that these object-focused contrasts of past and present are undervalued mechanisms of meaning-negotiation. Material change in infrastructures, specifically, can be a narrative tool “through which people interpret large-scale change and develop a picture of their wider environment,” as Angelo & Hentschel (2015, p. 307) put it. Second, I contend that actors can leverage these comparative narratives to diagnose the structural problems of disinvestment, marginalization, and disconnection characterizing regions of post-industrial societies. What to outsiders looks like an empty field to long-term residents represents financial disinvestments and intransigent political marginalization causing the reproduction of persistent, economic precarity decades after iron and steel companies closed. Stories about lost transportation infrastructure render legible, both to speakers and to the listener, the often-opaque processes, timeframes, and consequences of economic restructuring.
Bringing the materiality and meaning of infrastructures into the deindustrialization story can help us understand how and why actors work to negotiate the meanings of absent objects. Taking seriously objects as key to cultural meaning-making—even in their absence—opens space for questions too easily overlooked in contexts too often ignored by scholars of material culture.
References
Angelo, Hillary and Christine Hentschel. 2015. “Interactions with Infrastructure as Windows into Social Worlds: A Method for Critical Urban Studies: Introduction.” City 19(2–3):306–12.
Benzecry, Claudio E. and Fernando Domínguez Rubio. 2018. “The Cultural Life of Objects.” Routledge Handbook of Cultural Sociology: Second Edition (1966):322–29.
Broughton, Chad. 2015. Boom, Bust, Exodus. New York, N.Y: Oxford University Press.
Cowie, Jefferson and Joseph Heathcott. 2003. Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization. edited by J. Cowie and J. Heathcott. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.
Graham, Stephen and Simon Marvin. 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge.
Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. Translation. New York, N.Y: Penguin Classics.
May, Vanessa. 2017. “Belonging from Afar: Nostalgia, Time and Memory.”
McDonnell, Terence E. 2010. “Cultural Objects as Objects: Materiality, Urban Space, and the Interpretation of AIDS Campaigns in Accra, Ghana.” American Journal of Sociology 115(6):1800–1852.
Silver, Jonathan. 2019. “Decaying Infrastructures in the Post-Industrial City: An Urban Political Ecology of the US Pipeline Crisis.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 0(0):251484861989051.
Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43(3):377–91.
Wuthnow, Robert. 2018. The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Cultural meaning—signs and the kinds of things they signify—derives not only from cognition or social interaction; it is entangled in the matter of everyday life. What happens to meaning when an entire system of objects degrades and disappears? What are the mechanisms through which objects that are no longer there still signify meaning? And why might people want to negotiate the meaning of an absent object at all? Bridging cultural sociology with a thematic, narrative analysis of interviews conducted in deindustrialized communities, I ask how and why actors negotiate meanings of decayed, malfunctioning, or absent material objects. I suggest that interrogating the life and death of a specific web of objects—industrial transportation infrastructures—illuminates the relationship between place, time, storytelling, and meaning-making.
Constructed for practical and often mundane purposes and emplaced in specific locations, few material objects construct lasting, symbolic, and layered meanings as infrastructures. Infrastructures are series of technologies that connect, delimit, and control resource flows in order to deliver commodities, information, or services that sustain social reproduction (Graham & Marvin, 2001; Star, 1999). A muddy blend of logistics, policies, culture, and finances, infrastructures are much more than the sum of their parts, as classical sociologists and contemporary scholars alike observe. From 19th-century train systems (Marx 1867/1990) to water purification systems (Silver, 2019), infrastructures are interconnected systems of objects simultaneously reflecting and producing material culture. What might sociologists interested in the production and negotiation of cultural meanings gain from analyzing infrastructures in post-industrial America? Object-centered analyses of meaning-making (see Benzecry and Rubio 2018; McDonnell 2010) involves materials that, in general, can be displaced and individualized, infrastructures are inherently emplaced in historically-specific webs of material flows. Each node in a system is experienced as a whole even when actors only interact with a part; the meaning of each node is contingent on its intended function and place-dependent even in connection to elsewhere. Thus, studying infrastructural decline enables insights into how the passage of time and the instabilities of the physical world inform the experiences, interpretations, and accounts of on-the-ground actors.
Specifically, taking an infrastructural lens grants us leverage to answer two questions: what are mechanisms through which absent objects do meaning-making work? And to what ends do actors themselves readjust meanings in reaction to material entropy, decay, or disappearance? To answer these questions and contribute insight into how meanings attached to specific objects change as the object changes, I offer an exemplar case of transportation infrastructure decline in the American Rust Belt. I draw from two years of archival work, ethnographic study, and thematic narrative analysis of more than ninety interviews with long-term residents of a former iron mining community in Wisconsin and a steel mill neighborhood in Chicago, Illinois. Both communities were settled as sites of labor reproduction for the steel industry in the late 19th century; in the second half of the 20th century, the anchor industries and primary employers closed, inciting economic depression, outmigration, and the material decay inherent to lack of maintenance. While scholarship on deindustrialization centers primarily on political economic causes, social and emotional consequences, and demographic losses (e.g. Broughton 2015; Cowie and Heathcott 2003; Wuthnow 2018), little is known about how the degradation and disappearance of material objects are interpreted by people who still live the Rust Belt. This gap in knowledge was highlighted by my interviewees as, unbidden, one of every three brought up the rise or fall of industrial modes of transportation and a dozen drove me to a former steel mill site in southeast Chicago or disappeared railroad tracks in the forests of Wisconsin. More than merely the backwards gaze of nostalgia, I suggest that these accounts of material decline are important forms of meaning renegotiation.
From thick descriptions of these interviewee stories and ethnographic field walks, I make two arguments. First, I propose that because infrastructures are objects whose meanings are contingent both on their function and emplacement, their absences facilitate meaning-making through comparison. While comparative stories are characteristic of nostalgic narratives (“a kind of mourning for the impossibility of return because the longed‐for object of one’s desire exists” in the past, according to May (2017)), I suggest that these object-focused contrasts of past and present are undervalued mechanisms of meaning-negotiation. Material change in infrastructures, specifically, can be a narrative tool “through which people interpret large-scale change and develop a picture of their wider environment,” as Angelo & Hentschel (2015, p. 307) put it. Second, I contend that actors can leverage these comparative narratives to diagnose the structural problems of disinvestment, marginalization, and disconnection characterizing regions of post-industrial societies. What to outsiders looks like an empty field to long-term residents represents financial disinvestments and intransigent political marginalization causing the reproduction of persistent, economic precarity decades after iron and steel companies closed. Stories about lost transportation infrastructure render legible, both to speakers and to the listener, the often-opaque processes, timeframes, and consequences of economic restructuring.
Bringing the materiality and meaning of infrastructures into the deindustrialization story can help us understand how and why actors work to negotiate the meanings of absent objects. Taking seriously objects as key to cultural meaning-making—even in their absence—opens space for questions too easily overlooked in contexts too often ignored by scholars of material culture.
References
Angelo, Hillary and Christine Hentschel. 2015. “Interactions with Infrastructure as Windows into Social Worlds: A Method for Critical Urban Studies: Introduction.” City 19(2–3):306–12.
Benzecry, Claudio E. and Fernando Domínguez Rubio. 2018. “The Cultural Life of Objects.” Routledge Handbook of Cultural Sociology: Second Edition (1966):322–29.
Broughton, Chad. 2015. Boom, Bust, Exodus. New York, N.Y: Oxford University Press.
Cowie, Jefferson and Joseph Heathcott. 2003. Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization. edited by J. Cowie and J. Heathcott. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.
Graham, Stephen and Simon Marvin. 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge.
Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. Translation. New York, N.Y: Penguin Classics.
May, Vanessa. 2017. “Belonging from Afar: Nostalgia, Time and Memory.”
McDonnell, Terence E. 2010. “Cultural Objects as Objects: Materiality, Urban Space, and the Interpretation of AIDS Campaigns in Accra, Ghana.” American Journal of Sociology 115(6):1800–1852.
Silver, Jonathan. 2019. “Decaying Infrastructures in the Post-Industrial City: An Urban Political Ecology of the US Pipeline Crisis.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 0(0):251484861989051.
Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43(3):377–91.
Wuthnow, Robert. 2018. The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
 | Adding Culture in Scenes to the Demography of Urbanization |
Is urbanization a simple demographic concept, based on counting the number or percent of persons in large cities in a nation or the world? This continues, but has lost much of its meaning as global and national cultural patterns have diffused into rural areas from Siberia to the Brazilian jungle, spurring Claude Levi-Strauss to lament the loss of all closed, isolated, unglobalized local groups (in Tristes Tropiques – Sad Tropics as English translation 1955). Clifford Geertz and Mary Douglas spread the same message further.
Cultural dimensions of the urban emerged in the nineteenth century and were central elements of sociology. They were integral to mapping world-wide descriptive differences via typologies like Toennies’ Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft, Durkheim’s mechanical and organic solidarities, the more subtle urbanity of Simmel, or later the five pattern variables of Parsons.
The interwar Chicago sociologists stressed broad concepts less, adding more local specificity. They featured distinctive neighborhoods, which encouraged stressing homogeneity, to create more ideal types like the Burgess concentric zones, books on The Gold Coast and The Slum and the Chicago handbooks describing fifty or so “community areas”. Lloyd Warner identified sub-national cultural types from New England to the Midwest and Southern towns.
This changed after World War II with incorporation of more individualistic concerns in voting surveys and focused interviews of individual citizens led by Lazarsfeld and Merton (People’s Choice, Personal Influence).
An intermediary level between the neighborhood and individual is the primary group, “rediscovered” by Edward Shils, Janowitz and others, elaborated in examples like Whyte’s Street Corner Society. These are varied ways of reshaping the simpler Louis Wirth cold and impersonal urban imagery.
With the 1960s emerged a more explicit, increasing cultural recognition of subgroups: African-Americans with the civil rights movement, followed by white Catholic ethnic groups, and national and international debates leading to new concepts like diversity, authenticity, and pride rather than simple assimilation.
The toppling of the Berlin wall in 1989 marked the symbolic end of the Cold War. It opened more nations to multiple exchanges of people, money, products, and ideas.
These heightened the salience of international migration and globalization concepts which combined with domestic migration brought further psychological challenges by persons experiencing migration. These in turn encouraged concepts like cultural hybrid and cosmopolitanism, countered in turn by reactions like populist nationalism and resistance to new immigration when it came in larger numbers. This was visible earlier in Europe and other countries where nationalism was stronger than in immigrant societies like the US, Canada, or Australia. The French and Italians voiced open political opposition to immigrant workers and cultural challenges like fast food restaurants which were countered by slow food organizations and websites. Specific processes like McDonaldization and Hollywoodization brought increasingly conflictual reactions, including actions staged to generate immediate emotional counter-reactions on TV and the internet, like the Twin Towers attack in New York or ISIS and other guerilla/terrorist group beheadings especially in the Middle East after 2000. Massive migrations have followed, and massive opposition to what some migrants bring.
Thus urbanization includes instead of simply rural to urban, also global international migration with profound consequences. Such international exchanges transform meaning: traditional neighborhoods and ethnic groups often become less closed, fixed, homogeneous and distant. Rather they grow more divided by age, assimilation and more complex patterns variously mix within and across neighborhoods, especially in obvious international destinations like big cities and their suburbs in much of the world.
Thus, urbanization means less moving from a rural area where you know your neighbors to a cold impersonal urban neighborhood. It can now include being with your rural former neighbors who can live on one floor of a high-rise apartment or are connected through phone calls, church, and other institutions.
Children may preserve or break these patterns. Invoking primordial factors like parent’s occupation or ethnic background as explanations assumes that older children and even adults do not make original choices. Piaget, DNA and neuroscience research have detailed increasingly how such patterns vary and change with age and more. Personal taste, culture, jobs and migration all interpenetrate and are mutually dependent. Causality grows more complex as people pursue more options, from becoming yuppies, bobos, feminists, or Black Lives Matter activists. At least the leaders of these movements all explicitly reject their own primordial backgrounds. They openly attack many classic sociological interpretations from capitalism to racism to local police practices.
Joining current discussions on urbanization in the global urban age, we recently contributed a chapter on urbanization theorizing to the Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory edited by Seth Abrutyn, University of British Columbia and Omar Lizardo, UCLA.
The chapter made three main points. First, we discuss the traditional sociological writings on urbanization in the nineteenth century and how they shaped sociological urbanization research until present. We contrast the major theoretical perspectives on urbanization of the twentieth century. We illustrate how new dimensions of urban life have emerged, encouraging divergent culture perspectives like bohemia, the counter-culture, post-modernism and diversity. Further, we highlight the importance of adding culture to the demographic process in theorizing urbanization as the world becomes more global and cultural factors more salient. Finally, we propose that, rather than assuming uniform global urbanity, further investigation can productively study the variability of urbanization in different places and the dynamics of how these operate and are changing. We introduce a scenic approach to capture some of these new changes. It shows how traditional class, ethnic, and religious primordial groups can variously combine in distinct neighborhood scenes. We find that 15 scenes dimensions (like neighborliness and transgression) which are more cultural and chosen than primordial, in turn foster distinct patterns of economic development, migration, lifestyle, and political activism. These new scenic divisions have grown stronger in each of the five last U.S. presidential elections. Traditional parties and ethnic groups have declined. Production and jobs have receded while consumption, lifestyle, social media and new issue politics have risen (cf. Dan Silver and Terry Clark, Scenescapes and 10 other books on scenes internationally, http://scenescapes.weebly.com).
We thus make several contributions. Many suggest that core elements of past sociological theory are obsolete. Instead, by adding new culturally-based scenes, we provide a new way to synthesize centuries of urbanization (and other) theories based on historical changes of what is urban. Second, we illustrate how to identify more subtle and specific dimensions of urbanization than most work using more narrow demographic concepts and data. We capture these changes by considering a broader range of cultural dimensions that update the historical classics like class and ethnicity to join with others like LGBQ groups, environmentalists, and diversity. New forms of data and types of analysis join units like the nation with combinations of other levels, like cities and zip codes. Finally, the scenic approach links global urbanization and migration with more diverse combinations and overlaps among old and new dimensions and dynamics across nations and neighborhoods to permit richer interpretation and link to other themes in sociological work. The classics of sociology need continual updating as the world changes, but often this means more reframing and contextualizing than simply discarding. We sketch this general point here with urbanization theory, but the Handbook and other recent work pursue these themes more generally.
Cultural dimensions of the urban emerged in the nineteenth century and were central elements of sociology. They were integral to mapping world-wide descriptive differences via typologies like Toennies’ Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft, Durkheim’s mechanical and organic solidarities, the more subtle urbanity of Simmel, or later the five pattern variables of Parsons.
The interwar Chicago sociologists stressed broad concepts less, adding more local specificity. They featured distinctive neighborhoods, which encouraged stressing homogeneity, to create more ideal types like the Burgess concentric zones, books on The Gold Coast and The Slum and the Chicago handbooks describing fifty or so “community areas”. Lloyd Warner identified sub-national cultural types from New England to the Midwest and Southern towns.
This changed after World War II with incorporation of more individualistic concerns in voting surveys and focused interviews of individual citizens led by Lazarsfeld and Merton (People’s Choice, Personal Influence).
An intermediary level between the neighborhood and individual is the primary group, “rediscovered” by Edward Shils, Janowitz and others, elaborated in examples like Whyte’s Street Corner Society. These are varied ways of reshaping the simpler Louis Wirth cold and impersonal urban imagery.
With the 1960s emerged a more explicit, increasing cultural recognition of subgroups: African-Americans with the civil rights movement, followed by white Catholic ethnic groups, and national and international debates leading to new concepts like diversity, authenticity, and pride rather than simple assimilation.
The toppling of the Berlin wall in 1989 marked the symbolic end of the Cold War. It opened more nations to multiple exchanges of people, money, products, and ideas.
These heightened the salience of international migration and globalization concepts which combined with domestic migration brought further psychological challenges by persons experiencing migration. These in turn encouraged concepts like cultural hybrid and cosmopolitanism, countered in turn by reactions like populist nationalism and resistance to new immigration when it came in larger numbers. This was visible earlier in Europe and other countries where nationalism was stronger than in immigrant societies like the US, Canada, or Australia. The French and Italians voiced open political opposition to immigrant workers and cultural challenges like fast food restaurants which were countered by slow food organizations and websites. Specific processes like McDonaldization and Hollywoodization brought increasingly conflictual reactions, including actions staged to generate immediate emotional counter-reactions on TV and the internet, like the Twin Towers attack in New York or ISIS and other guerilla/terrorist group beheadings especially in the Middle East after 2000. Massive migrations have followed, and massive opposition to what some migrants bring.
Thus urbanization includes instead of simply rural to urban, also global international migration with profound consequences. Such international exchanges transform meaning: traditional neighborhoods and ethnic groups often become less closed, fixed, homogeneous and distant. Rather they grow more divided by age, assimilation and more complex patterns variously mix within and across neighborhoods, especially in obvious international destinations like big cities and their suburbs in much of the world.
Thus, urbanization means less moving from a rural area where you know your neighbors to a cold impersonal urban neighborhood. It can now include being with your rural former neighbors who can live on one floor of a high-rise apartment or are connected through phone calls, church, and other institutions.
Children may preserve or break these patterns. Invoking primordial factors like parent’s occupation or ethnic background as explanations assumes that older children and even adults do not make original choices. Piaget, DNA and neuroscience research have detailed increasingly how such patterns vary and change with age and more. Personal taste, culture, jobs and migration all interpenetrate and are mutually dependent. Causality grows more complex as people pursue more options, from becoming yuppies, bobos, feminists, or Black Lives Matter activists. At least the leaders of these movements all explicitly reject their own primordial backgrounds. They openly attack many classic sociological interpretations from capitalism to racism to local police practices.
Joining current discussions on urbanization in the global urban age, we recently contributed a chapter on urbanization theorizing to the Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory edited by Seth Abrutyn, University of British Columbia and Omar Lizardo, UCLA.
The chapter made three main points. First, we discuss the traditional sociological writings on urbanization in the nineteenth century and how they shaped sociological urbanization research until present. We contrast the major theoretical perspectives on urbanization of the twentieth century. We illustrate how new dimensions of urban life have emerged, encouraging divergent culture perspectives like bohemia, the counter-culture, post-modernism and diversity. Further, we highlight the importance of adding culture to the demographic process in theorizing urbanization as the world becomes more global and cultural factors more salient. Finally, we propose that, rather than assuming uniform global urbanity, further investigation can productively study the variability of urbanization in different places and the dynamics of how these operate and are changing. We introduce a scenic approach to capture some of these new changes. It shows how traditional class, ethnic, and religious primordial groups can variously combine in distinct neighborhood scenes. We find that 15 scenes dimensions (like neighborliness and transgression) which are more cultural and chosen than primordial, in turn foster distinct patterns of economic development, migration, lifestyle, and political activism. These new scenic divisions have grown stronger in each of the five last U.S. presidential elections. Traditional parties and ethnic groups have declined. Production and jobs have receded while consumption, lifestyle, social media and new issue politics have risen (cf. Dan Silver and Terry Clark, Scenescapes and 10 other books on scenes internationally, http://scenescapes.weebly.com).
We thus make several contributions. Many suggest that core elements of past sociological theory are obsolete. Instead, by adding new culturally-based scenes, we provide a new way to synthesize centuries of urbanization (and other) theories based on historical changes of what is urban. Second, we illustrate how to identify more subtle and specific dimensions of urbanization than most work using more narrow demographic concepts and data. We capture these changes by considering a broader range of cultural dimensions that update the historical classics like class and ethnicity to join with others like LGBQ groups, environmentalists, and diversity. New forms of data and types of analysis join units like the nation with combinations of other levels, like cities and zip codes. Finally, the scenic approach links global urbanization and migration with more diverse combinations and overlaps among old and new dimensions and dynamics across nations and neighborhoods to permit richer interpretation and link to other themes in sociological work. The classics of sociology need continual updating as the world changes, but often this means more reframing and contextualizing than simply discarding. We sketch this general point here with urbanization theory, but the Handbook and other recent work pursue these themes more generally.
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