Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
U.S. Michel Chevalier, a French observer akin to Tocqueville, observed of the
American that “He always has something to do, he is always in a terrible
hurry. He is
fit for all sorts of work except those which require a careful
slowness” (quoted in Schivelbusch 1977:112).
Similarly, the 1920s Chicago School of sociology, geography, and urban
analysis, ensconced within that prototypical example of modern American
urbanism, theorized the time-space compression of urbanization in elegant
and insightful terms that re
fi
ected the poignant realities of everyday life for
millions of immigrants, both those from abroad and rural residents thrown
into the maelstrom of urbanity. Theorists such as Robert Park drew on the
urban sociology of Frederick Toennies and notions such as
Gemeinschaft
and
Gesellschaft
to examine the phenomenology of urbanization in light of
the massive rural-to-urban migration then characteristic of most U.S. and
European cities (Park et al. 1925/1984). In this reading, urbanization repre-
sented the annihilation of mythologized rural communities in which everyone
knew everyone else. In contrast to small towns in which everyone ostensibly
was intimately connected to everyone else, and presented the same sense of
self under all contexts, urbanization was held to decompose these traditional
bonds and erode the foundations of mutual trust. Cities, it was held, were not
conducive to the formation of a sense of community. Louis Wirth (1938), in
particular, advocated a desolate but compelling view of city life as structured
around three major axes, size, density, and heterogeneity. Size or total popula-
tion, he held, created a climate that was inherently predatory, utilitarian,
uncaring, and commodi
fl
ed: strangers were rare in small towns, but the norm
in large cities. Density, he argued, led people to be close physically but not
emotionally; indeed, alienation was the norm. Finally, social and cultural
heterogeneity, manifested in the diverse lifestyles found in large cities, gener-
ated few of the common values necessary to the success of healthy com-
munities. The result was allegedly the widespread presence of crime and other
social pathologies ranging from suicide to psychoses, a conclusion that mir-
rored similar Freudian concerns about the stability of the bourgeois subject
in an era of convulsive change.
In cities, consumption too became an expression of late modern time-space
compression. Department stores, for example, played a role in fostering the
new bourgeois panoramic vision: having moved to new high-rise buildings,
they were models of technological modernity, with elevators, escalators, elec-
tric lighting, and central heating. These new, highly commodi
fi
ed environ-
ments stripped goods of their once-sensuous qualities and engendering a new
way of relating to objects (Benjamin 1969). Department stores thus celebrated
the bourgeois spectacle of the commodity much as the railroad opened up
new vistas on the countryside (Schivelbusch 1977). The rise of mass advertis-
ing made the far-away appear familiar and the familiar appear exotic, com-
modifying the cultural distances between “here” and “there.” The growth of
the credit system in the early twentieth century is another example of time-
space compression, for it accelerated the ability of the middle and working
fi
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