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Comments on urban agency: relational space and intentionality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2016

ROBERT LEWIS
ROBERT LEWIS*
Affiliation:
Department of Geography, University of Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1, Canada
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Extract

For urban historians and urban historical geographers, the relevance and meaning of the city as a driver of human history is central to what we do, both theoretically and empirically. For some, the question of how to define what a city does is a pressing one. For many of us, though, the question is rarely raised; it resides in that murky place behind our writing and thinking, and has little direct or conscious play over how we go about doing our daily work. Historical geographers, with their greater emphasis on theory and spatial relations, are more likely than historians, trained as they are to think through narrative, empirical evidence and temporality, to explore the city's role in explaining social change. Despite this difference, the fact remains that only a handful of urban historical scholars of whatever stripe are actively interested in thinking through the scope and significance of urban agency. The fact that few openly grapple with the question of urban agency, of course, does not mean that we do not work with some understanding of the city's ontological status. All of us do, for better or worse.

Type
Special Section on urban agency
Information
Urban History , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , February 2017 , pp. 137 - 144
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

1 I would like to thank Simon Gunn and Bert de Munck for inviting me to present on the urban Agency panel at the EAUH, Lisbon in September 2014, Michèle Dagenais and the other panelists for the scintillating discussion and Nick Lombardo for some cogent comments on an early draft.

2 For a friendly critique of how relational thinking has been used in geography, see Jones, M., ‘Phase space: geography, relational thinking and beyond’, Progress in Human Geography, 33 (2009), 487–506 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, 1991; orig. edn 1974); Foucault, M., ‘Of other spaces’, Diacritics, 16 (1986), 22–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Garb, M., ‘The great Chicago waiters’ strike: producing urban space, organizing labor, challenging racial divides in 1890s Chicago’, Journal of Urban History, 40 (2014), 1079–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In a similar vein, Ruth Percy uses space to analyse the uneven impact of female garment strikes in London and Chicago. See ‘Picket lines and parades: labour and urban space in early twentieth-century London and Chicago’, Urban History, 41 (2014), 456–77.

5 Latour, B., Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar.

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7 Keil, R., ‘Progress report: urban political ecology’, Urban Geography, 24 (2003), 279 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Swyngedouw, E. and Heynen, N., ‘Urban political ecology, justice and the politics of scale’, Antipode, 35 (2003), 898–918 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gandy, M., ‘The Paris sewers and the rationalization of the urban space’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24 (1999), 23–44 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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9 Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias, 4.

10 Some of the key texts are Freund, D., Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hise, G., Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore, 1997)Google Scholar; Harris, R., Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto's American Tragedy 1900 to 1950 (Baltimore, 1996)Google Scholar; Lewis, R., Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis (Chicago, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nicolaides, B., My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago, 2002)Google Scholar; Wiese, A., Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Simon, R., ‘City-building process: housing and services in new Milwaukee neighborhoods, 1880–1910’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 68 (1978), 5–64 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Massey, D., ‘Politics and space/time’, New Left Review, 1/96 (1992), 80 Google Scholar.

13 Marx, K., ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Carver, T. (ed.), Marx: Later Political Writings (Cambridge, 1996), 31–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar