cityscapes - Andrew Sandoval-Strausz

If we want to think about the relationship between imperialism and cityscapes, we immediately run into two major issues: first, the characteristics of European and American empires and their place in global histories; second, the epistemology of the study of urbanism. Since Dr. Bender and Dr. Adas have thought and written so authoritatively about the former, my comments will focus on the latter from the standpoint of a historian of the urban landscape.

We might begin with the epistemological status of the built environment. NeoAmericanist has inquired why “so few historians studying urban America” have “asked questions or incorporated themes related to American imperial ambitions.” While I do not dispute the basic contention here, it is important to recognize that there are two contrasts being drawn. The explicit one is geographic: the scholars cited as having done exceptional work on colonial urbanism—Gwendolyn Wright, Lawrence Vale, Zeynep Çelik, and Nezar AlSayyad—have written primarily about European imperialism. But there is another, unspoken contrast here: these scholars all work in schools of architecture and were trained as architects or architectural historians rather than as “historian historians,” as those of us with history degrees are affectionately called in architecture circles.

Why is this important? Because architecture scholars routinely do something that most historians do not: they see buildings and landscapes as intrinsically worthy of study and inherently valuable as historical evidence. As Robert Fishman pointed out at Harvard University’s 2005 “Reconceptualizing the History of the Built Environment in North America” conference, for many years urban historians all but ignored the visual aspects of cities. They only “learned to see” well after they had established most of the field’s foundational epistemological commitments, among which was a focus on textual and quantitative sources rather than visual ones. It is only relatively recently that “historian historians” have joined architectural historians in interpreting cityscapes themselves as historical artifacts, however incompletely: we remain primarily textual in our orientation despite the fact that while words are easily used to mislead, it is hard to be hypocritical with lumber or stone. (Or, put more succinctly, “Talk is cheap; buildings are expensive.”)1

Under these conditions of scholarly production, it stands to reason that architectural historians working on Europe have taken the lead in studying urbanism and empire. There is simply so much extant, extensive, and conspicuous French, British, and Spanish colonial architecture that scholars who think first and foremost about the built environment have a great deal to work with. These and other European powers spent decades and in some cases centuries constructing entire urban landscapes in their overseas possessions in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Not only that, but many of these landscapes were designed by renowned architects and scrupulously documented by colonial authorities. This has made it even easier for an architectural profession long devoted to admiring individual genius to be interested in their work overseas and to find the kind of records needed to complement their reading of surviving structures. The resultant scholarship, particularly that on French and British imperial urbanism, has been enormously impressive and important, and has been followed by a new generation of more devotedly postcolonial research in the form of books like Indigenous Modernities and Making Lahore Modern, which challenge some of the basic assumptions of previous studies.2

By contrast, the landscapes of United States imperialism typically have not followed the pattern of European empires. We need give no quarter to disingenuous claims of American colonial exceptionalism to recognize that they have looked rather different—and in a way that made them easier for both architectural historians and historian historians to overlook. Other than U.S. imperialism on its “home” continent (on which more shortly), the American empire has produced fewer, smaller, and less permanent landscapes: while the U.S. sectors in Manila or the Panama Canal Zone are certainly major artifacts that have accommodated tens of thousands of people, they are simply not of the same order of magnitude as the colonial sections of Casablanca or Bombay. In addition, the American colonial built environment was (and is) much more intensively commercial than its European counterparts. If governors’ palaces and segregated dwellings for colonial officials typified French and British colonies, the artifacts of the U.S. empire were better characterized by the countless hotels and resorts that bound Caribbean and Pacific possessions into an expanding touristic imperium, or by South American company towns like Fordlandia or the managerial enclaves of the United Fruit Company. The reason this is an epistemological issue is that until very recently, architectural history tended to ignore commercial buildings and instead focus on the traditional triumvirate of domestic, religious, and governmental structures. Thus, even those scholars most likely to notice American imperial landscapes would have been inclined to downplay them as unimportant or ephemeral, especially as compared with the architectural pageantry of European colonial urbanism.3

Despite these architectural and intellectual obstacles, historians have indeed published some extremely insightful books on American imperial urbanism. These works are not always as elaborately theorized as their European counterparts, but they certainly fit the NeoAmericanist criteria for this roundtable. Robert Rydell’s All the World’s a Fair (1987) interprets world’s fairs and expositions as domestic architectural expressions of the American imperial mindset in the early decades of overseas expansionism. He shows, for example, how Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 divided the official “White City,” the Beaux-Arts-inspired expression of American nationhood and power, from the unofficial and commercialized “Midway,” with foreign exhibitions situated according to their ranking in the racial hierarchy of the day. Annabel Wharton’s Building the Cold War (2001) clearly demonstrates how the U.S. government subsidized the construction of Hilton hotels in geopolitically important cities like Cairo, Athens, and Jerusalem. The ostentatious modernism of these hotels, particularly conspicuous in the shorter, older, and less geometric urban landscapes of North Africa and Asia Minor, was intended to symbolize the cosmopolitanism and military-technological prowess of the United States. Meanwhile, the hotel interiors, which featured the very finest accommodations, amenities, food, drink, and décor, used consumer goods to help persuade the urban elites of unaligned nations to place themselves in the economic orbit of the capitalist superpower. Most recently, Coll Thrush’s Native Seattle (2007) has documented the indigenous origins of this northwestern metropolis. He shows how native settlements and economies in what they called “the crossing-over place” were overlaid and then displaced by white migrants as they built Seattle. Over the decades, whites expelled, ignored, or exoticized Indians, who nonetheless eventually managed to reassert their own identities in the city around the turn of the new millennium. Ultimately, Thrush’s work reminds us that the entire U.S. urban system has for centuries been an imperial project in which newer built environments have tended to erase both the surviving landscapes and the historical memory of the continent’s first inhabitants.4

Redirecting our gaze to future scholarship, there are any number of ways in which an explicitly imperial interpretation of U.S. urban history could augment the existing strengths of the field. The sub-discipline of tourism studies has become very active, and given the well-established relationship between tourism and empire—not to mention the economic importance of pleasure travel to urban economies and the increasing global integration of the travel industry—there is much to be said about landscapes of tourism. I also expect to see more work on American company towns abroad; it is becoming apparent that these were more common than previously supposed, and such scholarship would enjoy a methodological boost from existing histories of domestic company towns. We might also hope for historical studies of the built environment of American military power; with the long history of U.S. naval bases and the twentieth-century proliferation of army and air force installations around the globe, this should tell us a great deal about the everyday life of attempted global hegemony.5

That said, I’d like to use the remainder of my contribution to focus on one particular area of American urban history that I think very much needs to be reinterpreted in the context of U.S. empire-building. The history of postwar urbanization and suburbanization is among the strongest in the entire field of American history. From the foundational texts of the 1980s by Kenneth T. Jackson and Arnold Hirsch to the superb monographs of the past fifteen years by Thomas Sugrue, Richard Longstreth, Becky Nicolaides, Robert Self, Alison Isenberg, Eric Avila, Kevin Kruse, Matthew Lassiter, and others, we enjoy a rich understanding of the urban crisis and the suburban surge, including details of deindustrialization, property-rights activism, tax policy, trade-group lobbying, historic preservation, retail sales strategies, and national political realignment.6

But the metropolitan America that these historians have so successfully explored is not the one we see around us. The existing urban-suburban historiography was born and developed in an era of urban crisis when many observers were wondering whether big cities had become obsolete. This period was bounded by the catastrophic Watts Riots of 1965 and the even more destructive Los Angeles Riots of 1992; it was emblematized by the municipal near-bankruptcies of the 1970s and the crack cocaine and crime epidemic of 1985-1991. It stood to reason that scholars who were surrounded by symptoms of an urban crisis would seek to explain its historical roots. Since then, however, the nation’s cities have changed dramatically, and in the estimation of most urbanists, they have made a comeback, with many cities gaining population in ways not seen in decades.

It is impossible to understand the roots of this new phase in American metropolitan history without considering immigration and empire. The most important demographic fact in the survival of scores of U.S. cities is the arrival in the past fifty years of tens of millions of newcomers from Latin America and Asia. As Mike Davis pointed out ten years ago in Magical Urbanism, Latinos and Asian Americans have become the most urbanized populations in the United States. The urban-suburban historiography must therefore move toward a new paradigm that is both multiracial and transnational. The existing literature still treats the metropolitan geography of the United States as a question of black and white and of purely domestic population moves, and to be fair, this racial dyad was indeed the heart of the story at least up until the 1980s; indeed one need only read Thomas Sugrue’s Sweet Land of Liberty (2008) to see that this paradigm can still drive extraordinary historical thinking and writing about American urbanism and suburbanism. But future metropolitan histories will have to explain transnational factors that have operated between the United States, Latin America, and Asia.7

The dynamics of empire and the shape of the built environment would play important roles in this proposed new history. The story of American involvement in other nations’ internal affairs are essential to explaining the sources of immigration to the United States. Providing a more up-to-date synthesis of postwar metropolitan history is important because in its absence, much of the available writing on urbanism leans rather too heavily on terms like “globalization” and “neoliberalism.” As Michael Peter Smith has pointed out, these discourses are teleological and tend to minimize the agency of immigrants. And because they are economistic approaches that emphasize an abstracted demand for labor in urban metropoles and a ready supply of workers in the developing world, they cannot explain the reality of migrant flows that are extremely uneven: some lands very distant from the U.S. send large numbers of migrants, while others that are very close and in similar economic circumstances send few. In writing about the importance of immigrants to sustaining American cities, it is essential to emphasize that immigrant flows tend to follow old imperial linkages. If we want to explain how and why tens of millions of Latin Americans and Asians moved to U.S. cities in the same period that saw tens of millions of whites leaving them, we will have to revisit the history of U.S. political, economic, and military involvement in places like Mexico, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Korea, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, El Salvador, and Guatemala.8

The built environment will be even more central to a new metropolitan history. In large part this is because the very definitions of urban and suburban—and the very different distributions of people, homes, businesses, money, labor, and inequality that they entail—are at base about landscape. But it is also because much of what I wrote in that last paragraph seems so obvious, suggesting a need to defamiliarize the postwar city in order to restore agency and contingency to its history. By the early twenty-first century, the close association of people of color with big cities has become so intuitive that the word “urban” has become a stand-in for “black and Hispanic, and sometimes Asian” (as in “urban youth,” “urban schools,” and the movie genre called “urban”); meanwhile, “small-town” is an accepted euphemism for “white” (as in so many of Sarah Palin’s coded appeals to her noticeably homogeneous political base). But this was never automatic or inevitable; it needs to be explained, in particular by problematizing the ethnoracial character of urban America. For example, the largest populations of Latinos initially came to this country or were brought here from Mexico and Puerto Rico to perform agricultural labor in rural areas. Yet most soon relocated to cities, establishing new colonias and attendant urban economies—this at a time when other populations and job opportunities were leaving for the suburbs. This new postwar urban history will thus have to explain how so many migrant workers and deracinated political refugees managed to survive and in many cases thrive in areas that federal policy, state legislatures, and mainstream capitalism were in the process of abandoning. It will have to proceed “from the bottom up” by exploring how immigrants occupied physical locations and shaped residential, economic, and social space; the next urban history must be a history of the landscapes of housing, small-scale retail, quotidian public sociability, and place identity.9

While this proposed history is very time- and place-specific, it also raises a few methodological and epistemological issues that might usefully be applied to the study of empire and urbanism more generally. To begin with, it certainly takes its direction from vernacular architecture and cultural landscape studies in proposing certain changes of focus: away from grand buildings like colonial headquarters and consular residences and toward the unremarkable but numerous buildings that make up most of the cityscape; and away from elite-centered processes like design and planning and toward everyday use and reuse by the actual inhabitants of buildings and neighborhoods. It also suggests that the vector of empire has been reversed. In terms of the built environment, imperialism means more than wealthy and powerful nations constructing ouptposts, bases, or entire cities abroad that function as instruments of political, economic, and military domination. It also means formerly or currently colonized populations migrating by the millions into imperial centers and transforming the patterns and characteristics of urban life there. In many cases, this will signal the transformation of the Other into the Neighbor and the corresponding importation of new forms of urbanism from Latin America, Asia, and Africa into the colonial metropoles of Europe and North America.10

• 1. Robert Fishman, “Site Reading: How Urban History Learned to See,” abstracted at the conference website: http://warrencenter.fas.harvard.edu/builtenv/fishman.html; A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, Hotel: An American History (New Haven, 2007), 6.
• 2. On the traditional intellectual habits of architectural historians, see Thomas Hubka, “Just Folks Designing: Vernacular Designers and the Generation of Form,” Journal of Architectural Education 32 (1979), 27-29; Dell Upton, “Architectural History or Landscape History?,” Journal of Architectural Education 44 (1991), 195-199. On French and British colonial urbanism, see Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago, 1991); Zeynep Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule (Berkeley, 1997); Norma Evenson, The Indian Metropolis: A View Towards the West (New Haven, I989); Thomas R. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain's Raj (Berkeley, I989); Mariam Dossal, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities: The Planning of Bombay City, 1855-1875 (Oxford, I991). Recent reinterpretations of colonial urbanism include Jyoti Hosagrahar, Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism (New York, 2006); Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny (New York, 2006); Steven Nelson, From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa (Chicago, 2007); William J. Glover, Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City (Minneapolis, 2007); Zeynep Çelik, Empire, Architecture, and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters, 1830-1914 (Seattle, 2008).
• 3. Richard Longstreth, “Foreword” to Bernice L. Thomas, America’s 5 & 10 Cent Stores: The Kress Legacy (New York, 1997), viii; Richard Longstreth, “Architecture and the City,” in American Urbanism: A Historiographical Review, ed. Howard Gillette, Jr. and Zane L. Miller (Westport, Conn., 1987), 165; A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, “Spaces of Commerce: A Historiographic Introduction to Certain Architectures of Capitalism,” Winterthur Portfolio, forthcoming.
• 4. Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago, 1985); Annabel Jane Wharton, Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture (Chicago, 2001); Coll Thrush, Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (Seattle, 2007).
• 5. On tourism, see, for example, Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, 1976); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York, 1992); Dennis Judd and Susan Fainstein, eds., The Tourist City (New Haven, 1999); Hal Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence, Kansas, 1998); Catherine Cocks, Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850–1915 (Berkeley, 2001); Richard Gassan, The Birth of American Tourism: New York, the Hudson Valley, and American Culture, 1790-1830 (Amherst, Mass., 2008). On company towns abroad, see Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (New York, 2009); James Martin, “Work and Leisure in the United Fruit Company’s Caribbean, 1899-1960” (Doctoral dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2008). On company towns in the United States, John Garner, The Company Town: Architecture and Society in the Early Industrial Age (New York, 1992);  Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (Chicago, 1996); Margaret Crawford, Building the Workingmans Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns (New York, 1996).
• 6. Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (New York, 1983); Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York, 1985); Thomas Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, 1996); Richard Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920-1950 (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); Becky M. Nicolaides My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago, 2002); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2003); Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (New York, 2003); Alexander von Hoffmann, House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of America's Urban Neighborhoods (New York, 2003); Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley, 2004); Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It  (Chicago, 2005); Howard Gillette, Jr., Camden After the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a Post-Industrial City (Philadelphia, 2006); Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, 2007); Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, 2007).
• 7. Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. Big City (London and New York, 2000); Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York, 2008). For a key move beyond the black-white binary, see Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton University Press, 2008).
• 8. Michael Peter Smith, Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization (Oxford, 2001). On the relative size and origins of immigrant populations, see Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait (Berkeley, 2006), Ch. 3. For key texts on Latino urbanism, see Victor M. Valle and Rodolfo Torres, Latino Metropolis (Minneapolis, 2000); Daniel D. Arreola, ed., Hispanic Spaces, Latino Places: Community and Cultural Diversity in Contemporary America (Austin, Texas, 2004); David R. Diaz, Barrio Urbanism: Chicanos, Planning, and American Cities (New York, 2005).
• 9. For a revealing look at the motivations of Puerto Rican agricultural workers who moved to Philadelphia, see Carmen Teresa Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies (Philadelphia, 2001), Ch. 3. See also Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York after 1950 (Princeton, 2008).
• 10. For an introduction to vernacular architecture and cultural landscape studies, see J. B. Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, 1986); Michael P. Conzen, ed., The Making of the American Landscape (New York, 1990); Paul Groth and Todd Bressi, eds., Understanding Ordinary Landscapes (New Haven, 1997); J. B. Jackson, Landscape in Sight: Looking at America, ed. Helen Horowitz (New Haven, 2000); Chris Wilson and Paul Groth, eds., Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J. B. Jackson (Berkeley, 2003), or any volume of Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture or its successor journal, Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum.