Abstract
The publication of a Sociological Review Monograph on urban issues and processes is timely, both sociologically and politically. With the global recession of 2008 placing cities near the top of policy-making agendas, urban environments came to represent an ideal medium through which to explore the conjunction of ‘public issues’ and ‘private troubles’ that had exercised the discipline since its inception (Mills, 2000 [1959]).
There are several reasons for this. Economic crisis has prompted a growing concern about the capacity of cities to retain, attract and command new sources of capital. Just as important for sociologists, however, is that the organization and lived experience of urban life appears to be associated increasingly with renewed waves of social unrest and protest. Such conflict has been generated in significant part by systems of governmentality in which the proliferation of ‘gated communities’ and repressively policed ‘red zones’ of exclusion, characterized by an enforcement of law requiring a suspension of democratic rights for some (Agamben, 2005), exist uneasily alongside the exacerbation of inequalities and rising levels of poverty.
This focus on the city is not, of course, entirely new: sociology has long recognized the importance of urban centres to those social, economic and cultural issues that lie at the heart of its disciplinary purview. Contemporary studies may be yielding new insights into the modern functioning of major cities as command and control hubs in the global economy (Sassen, 2001), the deleterious effects of city life on social capital (Putnam, 2000), racial separation and urban abandonment in the US (Wacquant, 2007), moral issues associated with cultivating sympathy for ‘those who are other’ in metropolitan contexts (Sennett, 1994: 18, 376), and a wide range of other issues. Nevertheless, these analyses continued to resonate with the significance placed on city life by the founding figures and early developers of the discipline.
Engels's (2009 [1845]) explorations of urban industrial life in the 1840s, for example, provided an early and still influential study of the physically damaging and spiritually dehumanizing conditions of life for working people living in urban enclaves characterized by overcrowding and lacking basic amenities. Weber (1966 [1921]) explored the differences between contrasting types of cities, and distinctive ways of city living, and located urban forms as integral to wider social, political and religious developments. Simmel (1971 [1903]) had earlier identified the metropolis as both liberating individuals from traditional ties, but as also threatening to dominate life through its existence as the ecological matrix of the money economy wherein qualitative values were reduced to quantitative measures. Influenced profoundly by the sociology of Simmel, the most influential department in the history of sociology, the Chicago School, sponsored a series of studies focused upon the city as an ‘urban laboratory’. These covered a huge range of issues, with Park and Burgess (1967 [1925]) highlighting the importance of the city as a spatial structure and ecological organism, and identifying the significance of urban milieu for the potential creation of intelligent, self-directing publics.
The mention of Simmel is of particular relevance to our contemporary general concern with the city, and for the specific concerns of this volume on Urban Rhythms. Simmel's (1971 [1903]) essay, ‘The metropolis and mental life’ represented a watershed in terms of the manner in which sociology analysed the inter- and intra-actions between the affectual character of the materiality of cities, the development of monetary exchange and calculation, and the acceleration of modern forms of embodiment. At the centre of his analysis, moreover, is a concern with how metropolitan stimuli, individuals and media of exchange contribute to a ‘rhythm of events’ that encompass ‘conflicting life embracing currents’ (Simmel, 1971 [1903]: 326, 339). Developing through their entanglements with each other, Simmel argued that the built environment threatened sensory overload on those accustomed to the slower rhythms of rural existence, prompting in them an emotional armouring against, and a subsequent reserve to, the stimuli with which they were faced. This resulted in a rational, calculative orientation to the ‘complications and extensiveness’ of metropolitan life; an orientation that not only displayed an affinity with, but also stimulated further the extension of monetary transactions and the treatment of people, as well as the built environment, as means towards ends (Simmel, 1971 [1903]: 328).
There is still much to be said for Wirth's (1967 [1925]: 218) judgement that Simmel's analysis of the city has been the single most important sociological article on the subject. Emerging from a very different tradition of analysis, however, it is Lefebvre's (1990, 2004) writings on embodiment, cities and the production of space that have arguably done most to extend Simmel's concern with rhythm. Recognizing the coexistence and co-production of social and biological rhythms, Lefebvre (2004: 21) explores the multiple possibilities of existence that characterize city life, insists on the ‘lived temporality’ of any valid social analysis that seeks to capture these conditions, and provides a major source of inspiration for the articles that constitute this collection on Urban Rhythms.
Lefebvre is a controversial figure within urban studies, with some questioning the continued theoretical utility of his writings, but Smith's and Hetherington's introduction demonstrates how his work can be used to connect long-standing problems within sociology (such as the problem of order) to new studies concerned with how the multiplicity of rhythms produced within and outside of urban areas can exert a profound effect on how cities are viewed, experienced and organized. The individual contributors to this volume develop these insights further in a series of valuable and interdisciplinary papers that insist on the generative, rather than simply reproductive, capacity of rhythm in urban life. These range from investigations that engage in a sensory elaboration and analysis of rhythms, and that explore ‘red zones’ and the nature of political exceptionality, to analyses of the affective, reflexive and relational character of contemporary mobility experiences, of the co-constitution of space and place through symbolic classifications and communal living, and of the multiple ways in which modern cities are layered, patterned and processed by influences from East and West, modernity and postmodernity.
The Sociological Review Monograph series publishes special supplements of the journal in collections of original refereed papers and could not continue without the goodwill, advice and guidance of members of the board of The Sociological Review, and of those anonymous referees who assess and report on each of the papers submitted for consideration for these collections. I would like to thank all of those involved in this process, especially Dave Clarke, for his very considerable input into the collection, Phil Hubbard, Rolland Munro, Carolyn Baggaley, and also the editors of Urban Rhythms for having produced a stimulating and timely volume.