I’ve studied historiography, the study of how people have studied history throughout time. The reading from Theoretical Perspectives on the City interested me for this reason. I started viewing cities I know through their theories. San Francisco, as a commuter city with some very nice residential areas within the city limits, looks like the concentric circle and wedge models from urban ecology. New York City has elements of both the gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. Within this complex of cold urbanism are nestled smaller, more personal communities where members are ethnically and religiously similar. And then LA just makes no sense, which makes it perfect for the postmodern paradigm. As I mapped cities through these paradigms, I recognised my – and these paradigms’ – biases. Urban ecologists and I like to see the order in structures. Marxists and others who view history as a struggle between parties would be drawn to political economy to explain city dynamics. And postmodernists view the world through a subjective and fractured lens; the chaos of an urban landscape is appealing. Their natures influence their interpretations. Though no one theory can fully explain it, through all three we can get a clearer picture on what makes a city.

Questions: How would you interpret cities you know and have visited? With which school of thought do you most identify? Why do you think that is?

While reading through “Theoretical Perspectives on The City,” I was struck by Tonnies’ view that the gradual but inevitable shift from small rural communities to larger, metropolitan environments posed a significant hazard to society. Tonnies stated that these larger, more urban settings were less conducive to cooperation and would eventually destroy themselves. While this is a potential issue of larger urban cities, I believe there is a larger issue than Tonnies overlooked, which was well covered by Ernest W. Burgess. Burgess predicted a pattern in the growth of cities in which the center of any given urban setting would be dominated by entertainment and business, which would fan out into residential areas of varying wealth. Burgess made another observation – the central business area of any given city will slowly expand outward, gobbling up poorer residential areas in what is effectively a process of widespread gentrification. This is a pattern which can be easily seen in many modern cities, and is the one which poses the greatest threat. As gentrification continues outward, the communities which are displaced will be left with nowhere to go. This process will continue further and further until eventually there is no space left for the poorer communities and society will enter a state of decay, as Tonnies predicted.

Congratulations to Kyle and Allegra for being the first to post reading responses for this week!  But everyone, from now on, please stick to the 150-200 word stipulation. It is not a suggested word count, and 200 is not the minimum, it is the maximum. Distilling your thoughts in to a limited number of words is a valuable skill that you will be forced to develop in this course. And this way we can all – hopefully – have time to read each other’s responses. Thank you!

What is the place of subjectivity in sociological study? More or less, I found myself newly informed by the Gregory reading (especially in regards to the statement made on the stereotypical views of impoverished groups as being disorganized and helpless), however I also found myself intensely distrustful of some of the historical accounts—not because I don’t think any of these issues didn’t happen, far from it, but because of the admittance of the author on the tilt he was putting on it. Objectivity is impossible, I get that—the golden objective standard for journalism is fast becoming a funny thing people used to strive for, and the “impartial observer” is little more than a myth—but the acknowledgement of recolored history made me more skeptical than I feel I should have been for any point of the author’s to get through. “While doing my fieldwork,” Gregory writes, “it quickly became apparent that activists continually recollected and reworded Corona’s history to provide meaning and context, as well as narrative authority, to interpretations of contemporary social conditions.” (14) Then, later, “If my writing of this history has been skewed by the ways in which activists selectively reuse the past, it has also been shaped by my own, equally particular, theoretical and political commitments.” (15) The problem I find with these quotes is more or less the problem that’s apparent in Govan’s action of “[dismissing] decades of people and events with an impatient wave of his hand,” and the further problem of the proliferation of the stereotype of the welfare queen (which seems to be more or less the same action but with the blinders covering up different angles)—the complexity goes unrealized and, as such, the account becomes biased in a way that’s too blatant for the role of the study of how people work. As in the Kleniewski readings, there’s an attempt to simplify trends which leads to an impossibility to find what’s seemingly true: “Thus, the ecologists’ search for a model to describe ‘The City’ was frustrated by the complexity of actual cities.” (27) The problem here doesn’t seem so much to be one of some baseless redirection but of an exchange of sympathy—away from accounts that might might complicate the sympathy and a redrawing of lines to make sympathy easier. This seems to me to be a failure of empathy. But the problem then becomes: if objectivity is impossible, and the acknowledgement of directed subjectivity seems untrustworthy, how can empathy be projected more boldly into every account, and how can complexity be more truly realized? How do you balance the need for truth to systems with the need for your point about the systems to get across?

—Kyle