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Empirically speaking, contemporary urban North America is a space that makes up a rather small percentage of the respective national territories, though it is the home of more than 80% of the population. This disjuncture of territorial expansion and demographic density is inversely mirrored, but also replicated in literature, media, and the arts, where the city takes up an astounding amount of narrative and visual space, while the rural and the anti-urban function as tightly woven and emotionally powerful asides. In the public imagination—in the United States, in Canada and abroad—contingencies and contradictions apparently rule the representation of urban spaces and urban lifestyles. Cities that look and feel like Los Angeles, Toronto, Tijuana or other major North American cities seem ubiquitous and yet exceptional. Found in the classics of the Hollywood noir and continually reframed in global screen culture as well as in urban theory, these cities are represented in scenarios of urbanization and urban transformation that are glorious and fearful at the same time. Current urban research discusses the democratizing and liberating possibilities of creative, sustainable, smart, connected, and/or equitable city cultures, but it also expresses a noteworthy sense of urgency (Florida; Townsend; Fainstein). Debates about North American urban futures resonate with Liam Kennedy’s cultural diagnosis of a contemporary “crisis of urbanity” which threatens to disrupt older ideals of urban life that allowed for democratic collectivities to be built from “the erotic and aesthetic variety of street life, the close encounters with strangers, the freedoms of access and movements in public spaces” (Kennedy 3).
Our seminar will trace such notions of a crisis of North American urbanity at three historical moments that were particularly critical to the development of political and cultural trends in North America: the turn to the nineteenth century with its formation of the USA as a young nation (material studied will include texts by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin), the turn to the twentieth century that brought global recognition to an industrialized North America (material studied will include texts by Frederick Jackson Turner, the Chicago school of urban sociology, the Southern Agrarians, Jacob Riis) and the turn to the twenty-first century (material studied will focus on texts from and about Chicago, Toronto and Detroit) that saw the depletion and shrinkage of formerly industrialized, urbanized Northeast; a turn that arguably revitalized the power of earlier anti-urban imaginaries that dwelled on recurring histories of exploration, settler colonialism, agrarianism, and plantation culture. A reader with the material under consideration will be made available prior to the beginning of the term.
Scholarship to Get Started:
Chakrabarty, Vishaan. A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America. New York: Metropolis Books, 2013.
Conn, Steven. Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014.
Ehrenhalt, Alan. The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.
Fainstein, Susan S. The Just City. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010.
Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited. New York: Basic Books, 2011.
Howarth, William. “The Value of Rural Life in American Culture.” Rural Development Perspectives 12.1. Web. 12 Jan. 2014. <http://ers.usda.gov/Publications/RDP/rdp1096/RDP1096B.pdf>
Ickstadt, Heinz. “The City in English Canadian and US-American Literature.” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Kanadastudien 11 (1991): 163-73.
Judd, Dennis R. and Dick Simpson, eds. The City, Revisited. Urban Theory from Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Minneapolis and London: U of Minneapolis P, 2011.
Kennedy, Liam. Race and Urban Space in Contemporary Urban Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000.
Lapointe, François. Cities as Crucibles: Reflections on Canada’s Urban Future. Ottawa: Invenire Books, 2011.Lehan, Richard. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998.
Orvell, Miles, and Klaus Benesch, eds. Rethinking the American City: an International Dialogue. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
Soja, Edward. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000.
Townsend, Anthony M. Smart Cities, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. New York: Norton, 2013.
Wade, Richard. The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790-1830. 1959. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996. |
