Abstract
When City & Community began about eight years ago—and in the third issue—I wrote about how certain concepts seemed to me to be vital to the study of cities. Though they lurked there in the background for many years, they did not themselves become the focus of analytic attention and exploration until the past decade or so. Those two concepts, of course, are place and space. Owing to the writings of figures like Thomas Gieryn, David Hummon, Edward Relph, and Setha Low, among others—it is noteworthy that the parentage of the concepts cuts across social science disciplines—place and space now help to animate a good deal of analytic work on the study of cities and other sites. Indeed, as I sit here, in a coffee bar in Shanghai, I have just come from a luncheon with a couple of Chinese urban sociologists who are excited about the possibilities for introducing these concepts more directly into urban research and thinking in Shanghai and China more broadly.
The first two articles in this issue, one by Ryan Centner and the other by Margarethe Kusenbach, take space and place seriously, and move them in different directions. Centner looks at the dot–com boom in San Francisco, the groups of wealthy people it created, and how such groups tried to use their wealth to reshape the space around them. Centner introduces a new concept, spatial capital, and otherwise relies largely on the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu and Henri Lefebvre to provide a portrait of how spatial capital works, and the interests it serves. He offers, he claims, a critical view of such capital and of the ways it reworks the urban area; his view, he further suggests, is an alternative to the “rose–colored glasses” view of such writers as Robert Putnam and Richard Florida (some of whose work has been featured early on in its origins in this journal). I was particularly intrigued by the practical implications of this work as I have a son who is an investment banker in San Francisco, and I learned precisely how I must advise him to more carefully deploy his own spatial capital in the city. Not that he ever listened to me before, of course. Kusenbach, basing her work on a team ethnographic effort in Hollywood, suggests that the concept of community needs to be further refined and explored. Drawing on the work of Albert Hunter as well as the inspiration of Lyn Lofland, she suggests that there are nested communities from those very close to us in places to those at a far remove from our presence. She provides ethnographic evidence for the operations of such nested communities as well as conceptual distinctions for them.
The third research article here, by Todd Goodsell and Owen Williamson, concerns an online community of “brick huggers,” how the community formed, and the ways it was connected to its offline, place–based existence. Like other research in a similar vein, this project seeks to understand the connections between online and offline presence, but it does so using a special method of assembling and analyzing these online data. It also offers some insight into the ways in which online communities are created as well as the special roles that key communicators play in such communities. As readers of City & Community know, this research follows a long and healthy thread of such work in this journal. Finally, the last article, by John Joe Schlichtman and Jason Patch, proposes a novel method for reconstructing the temporal maps of places. The method is particularly useful for those researchers who employ ethnographic methods and who, in the course of their work, hit soft spots—or what we might call “temporal holes”—in their historical reconstructions. It relies on work both in New York City and in High Point, North Carolina.
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By the time you read this, I will be back in the United States, having once again spent time and learned a lot living and working in Shanghai. At this moment, however, it is vastly different than last year. The Wenchaun Earthquake just hit a week ago. Yesterday, on the first of three days of official mourning, everyday life came to halt precisely at 2:28 p.m. to mark the time one week ago that the first rumbles ran across Sichaun Province. It has been remarkable to live through all of this here. Though we in Shanghai barely felt the ripples—some people in the high–rise towers did experience some sense of swaying and dizziness, thus they were evacuated almost immediately— this is a national tragedy of epic dimensions. As of now, about 35,000 people have been counted as victims, yet almost an equal number still remain unaccounted for. and more than 200,000 people have been injured. The aftershocks continue; 200 workers have been buried by mudslides; and there is a tremendous amount of work yet to do, the most vital of which will be to provide aid and comfort to the children who have become orphans.
In the midst of all of this, I continue to try to do my own research. As you will discover in Volume 8, Number 4 of the journal, the last issue for which I am responsible as Editor, I have been here doing research on what can best be described as the social fabric of Shanghai, seams, stitches, and tears included. Though one is tempted to use this angle or that, or this tool or that, to capture the dynamism of modern Shanghai, if truth be told the city is so vast, and is changing so rapidly that no single angle, no simple device, however, conceptually elegant or attractive, can truthfully capture the full dynamics of the city. and yet I will try. Using the lens of public space as the tool to focus my own research, I will try to reveal the rich and complex nature of the city—a city that only thirty years ago had just emerged from the vast and terrifying upheaval known as the Cultural Revolution. For me, in fact, the Cultural Revolution is the starting point for understanding Shanghai today. But, more on that later.
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Once again, we have several books reviewed in this journal, by Karyn Lacy, Peggy Leavitt, Robert Beauregard, and Miriam Greenberg. I want to thank Hilary Silver and Leonard Nevarez for their continuing contributions to the selection of books and reviewers, for their help in particular over the past couple of years. and to Zachary Neal, my guy Tuesday—or maybe Wednesday, but certainly not Friday—thanks for keeping me on track. Were it not for him, this introduction would never have made it across cyberspace.