Abstract
How do we create valid comparisons among cities in different national contexts when the relationships that define them differ? What are we to make of the different outcomes of similar social forces in the development of cities? I would argue that one of the key factors that validate comparisons among cities is to focus on the right unit of analysis, namely, the city plus its links to the national context in which it is embedded. I shall illustrate this point through a comparison of the development of public parks in New York City (NYC) and in Buenos Aires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when both cities were important industrial centers. While appeasing industrial labor played a major role in the design of public parks in NYC, development of parks in Buenos Aires focused on attracting landowning elites and their wealth to fuel the industrialization of Buenos Aires. Thus, apparently similar cities undergoing relatively similar socioeconomic transformations evolved differently because of the different historical roles these cities played nationally.
I shall also illustrate the relevance of considering the links that connect cities to the larger national society even when looking at those urban transformations typically associated with globalization. A case in point is the proliferation of gated communities on the periphery of cities all over the world. This has been taken as an example of the spread of American culture and its spatial patterns through globalization (Webster et al. 2002). Yet, when we relate the timing and geographical patterns of gated communities’ development with the historical uses of suburban lands in different nations, we can clearly understand why these become so popular in countries with different urban traditions from the United States. For example, the reconfiguration of Argentina's economic policy was a critical factor in explaining the spread of gated communities in the poorest suburban municipalities of Buenos Aires. Poor local governments relied on them as a mechanism to profit from land that lacked any kind of infrastructure, especially in the 1990s when the state stopped funding public works. Thus, an international urban design and real estate phenomenon, such as gated communities, was reproduced in particular places because it responded to local needs, which are often unique to that geography and nationally distinctive urban history.
However, the links between cities and the nation–state are often neglected in recent studies of urban change. This is not to say that globalization is not one of the most relevant phenomena to understanding urbanization today. In the early nineties, urban scholars studied globalization through the analysis of “world cities,” which became the lens through which one could disclose the workings of globalization itself (Fainstein, Gordon, and Harloe 1992; Marcuse 1993; Friedman 1986; Sassen 1991; Castells 1989; Hall 1998). Since then, theories of globalization have evolved, allowing the study of urban networks even when the scholars challenge the conventional global–to–national–to–urban hierarchy (Taylor 2004; Davis 2005). But over time, the list of world cities in academic studies became longer and more eclectic. More often than not, globalization is not the main theme of these papers. Rather, they focus on the size, growth, social characteristics, and internal dynamics of cities of the world, rather than ties among‘world cities’ (Kasarda and Dogan 1988; Koonings and Kruijt 2010; Beall and Fox 2009; Gugler 2004; Bell and Jayne 2005). Jennifer Robinson has asked: “How are theoretical approaches changed by considering different cities and different contexts, by adopting a more cosmopolitan approach?” (Robinson 2002). I believe the answer is to conceptualize how cities differ, grow, and define themselves with reference to their national contexts.
Western academic interest in Eastern or Southern cities reflects growing curiosity about the diversity of societies, material development, and cultural productions that take place in alternative urban settings. It demonstrates that the discipline of urban sociology is capable of abstracting relevant lessons in spite of divergent national trajectories and dissimilar geographical conditions. But more significantly, this surge of interest in foreign cities since the early 1990s reveals a rescaling of urban studies from the global to the urban scale (Brenner 2003). Further, as the gap between wealthy and poor widens within most countries of the world, nationality is no longer a reliable indicator of individual wealth (Firebaugh 1999). And as communications technology increasingly offers us individually customized content, the social cohesiveness that emerged from physical proximity, shared consumption, public education, and other national sources is gradually eroding (Webber 1963; Sennett 1977; Calhoun 1992; Mitchell 1995; Castells 1996). The growing diversity of social realities within national boundaries seems to call for analyzing the transformation of society at both smaller or grander scales (Brenner 2004). Seen from this perspective, the growing penchant in academia for international urban studies is one of the many secondary products of less cohesive national societies. To put it differently, the more the certainty that the boundaries of the nation match those of the community fades, the more relevant other units of social analysis have become.
Yet, cities are at the forefront of contemporary comparative sociology not only because of the increasing diversity of income, values, and ideologies within national boundaries, but also because there is a commonality of problems among cities. In part, this is the consequence of globalization itself, as all cities, regardless of their size and centrality, are increasingly subjected to similar challenges to their local structure. These common challenges include: the social dislocation that massive human migration creates (Rhus 2009); the difficulty of providing adequate urban infrastructure for rapidly growing populations (Moser, 1995); the volatility of transnational investment capital (Sassen, 2007); the difficulties of generating institutional alignments between cities and states; and the need to impart justice and foster community ties in societies with diverse cultures (Scott, 2001).
Above and beyond facing similar challenges, cities—as opposed to nations or rural areas—have a complexity and a distinctive internal logic in the way that they transform themselves which justifies them as an object of study. They become a unity or system in the sense that Robert Park (1915, pp. 577–578) defined the city … the place and the people, with all the machinery, sentiments, customs, and administrative devices that go with it, public opinion and street railways, the individual man and the tools that he uses, as something more than a mere collective entity. We may think of it as a mechanism – a psychological mechanism – in and through which private interests find corporate expression.
Insofar as the consequences of globalization and the specificity of urban systems warrant studying cities per se, the lessons learned in one urban setting become a point of reference for other urban settings too. How does urban theory facilitate and encourage this transference of knowledge? How can we acknowledge the influence of state and global circuits on cities, and at the same time adopt cities as our object of study? How can we take into account the role that national trajectories and geographies play on urban development? We need a theory of cities that operates at the same scales and levels of autonomy as our observations about them.
Designing Public Space in Industrializing Cities: Nyc and Buenos Aires in the 1900S
One useful way to trace how national contexts are embedded in urban dynamics is comparing cities of similar rank in the regional hierarchy and undergoing similar economic and social changes at similar times, but belonging to different nation–states. For example, in the early nineteenth century, after nation–states in the Americas consolidated their independence from European powers, they still looked back to Europe for normative models for developing their cities. Haussmann's plan to improve the control and conditions of the Parisian urban populace at the expense of the medieval urban fabric resonated well with the city–builders in the New World, who needed to accommodate an unprecedented flow of immigrants and industrial establishments. At the time, American urbanists did not cherish the architecture of the colonies. It is no surprise, then, that the layout of many public parks in the Americas mimicked the plans of French ones.
However, there was also national divergence in the public parks. This is most noticeable in the comparison of park design in New York City and Buenos Aires, which importantly highlights national differences between the United States and Argentina. In the nineteenth century, both cities were important industrial and commercial hubs experiencing explosive population growth due to an intense and rapid flow of immigrants. In both cities, local governments were actively managing this growth, providing tap water by the 1890s, subways by the 1900s, and regulating building footprints and maximum heights by the 1920s. However, there were significant differences between those cities’ main parks. The design of New York City's Central Park, in line with Olmsted's inclusive vision, “comes from the people, and to them, in all phases of society it must necessarily be devoted” (NYT, 1857). Conversely, the Park in Buenos Aires was to be “for the larger land owners, of aristocratic pretensions and sumptuous fitting” (Clemenceau 1911). What explains this divergence in the planning of urban parks in two democratic societies?
Inter–city competition and the mobility and threat of the industrial working class in New York City provided some of the motivations for the creation of Frederick Law Olmsted's Central Park (Rosenzweig and Blackmar 1992). The design of a “democratic park” was a way to improve the livability of the city for all, as well as a means for making New York City competitive vis–à–vis other industrial centers like Philadelphia (Meyer 2003). The many growth nodes and the fairly developed transport network of the Unites States meant that residents could be highly mobile and could choose where they lived (Tiebout 1956). Conversely, the poor development of transportation networks and the high primacy of the urban systems of many Latin American countries made rural to urban migration more important, but impeded city–to–city migration (Dorfman, 1983). For instance, given the uneven geographical development of Argentina and its railway infrastructure, no other city in the country could compete with Buenos Aires for economic primacy, so there was no risk of losing residents to other cities. The threat of losing population to another city in the same urban system is one of the important national forces driving urban planning decisions.
In spite of the remarkable industrial growth that Buenos Aires experienced in the early twentieth century, industrialization was a minor influence on Argentina's social and political organization until World War II (Halperin Donghi 1994; Di Tella and Dornbusch 1986). This was because agricultural production was still the dominant economic activity in terms of international trade and total gross domestic product (Diaz Alejandro 1970). Even in the city of Buenos Aires, which has accounted for the largest share of industrial production, industrial workers, and number of establishments in Argentina since the 1930s (INDEC 2001), city leaders catered to the tastes of landowning elites rather than to the growing mass of industrial workers (Hodge 1996). Thus, the government designed and sponsored public parks programs, such as exclusive horse races and charity meetings, for most affluent residents. This is not to say that urban leaders did not care about the living conditions of all residents. At the time, the city of Buenos Aires was building a system of sewers and water pipes, as well as creating a network of public hospitals and schools. Rather, it reveals the understanding that the city could not sustain its growth without the support of landowners’ wealth (Davis 2004). In this way, the elite who controlled agriculture, the main export product of the nation, and not intercity competition drove urban development of the City of Buenos Aires (Libertun de Duren 2011). The different uses of public space in New York City and Buenos Aires in the 1900s, a time when both were experiencing massive immigration and growing industrial development, hint at the role each city played in a larger system. Scholars need to look at the national context to explain urban design decisions at the level of the city.
Globalization and Locality: Gated Communities in the 2000S
Even today, when urbanization models are closely associated with global consumption (Zukin 1995), national trajectories are one important variable in explaining current patterns and dynamics of urban development. Even if on the ground cities seem to look more and more similar thanks to the global spread of land uses and styles, such as shopping malls, gated communities, and international architectural designs (Sklair 2011), the mechanisms that explain the production of these “urban goods” are highly specific to each locality and its distinctive national context.
Consider the proliferation of gated communities in the peripheries of Latin American cities. The urban design and architectural iconography of these developments are remarkably similar to those in gated communities in the United States (Blakely and Snyder 1995). Additionally, anthropological studies of residents’ rationales for living in such developments tend to highlight similar concerns in North and South America (Caldeira 2001; Low 2003). But the similarities end once we take our comparison to the regional scale. The sprawling North American suburb is the consequence of an extended transportation and infrastructure network and widely available housing credit, which enabled middle income families to move to these areas (Mumford 1938; Fishman 1987; Webber 1963). Conversely, highways, infrastructure, and housing credit tended to be scarce in Latin American countries, so the suburbs become the location of the most impoverished residents. Traditionally, Latin American suburban land that lacked public urban infrastructure was the home for those who could not afford to live in the city (Scobie 1975; Schnore 1963; Portes 1989). Urban sprawl defines the footprint of gated communities in the United States (Burchell 1998). In contrast, in Latin America, many gated communities are adding density to urban peripheries.
These peripheries increase their share of gated developments mostly through two mechanisms. First, neighborhoods choose to gate themselves as a response to their perception of rising insecurity on the streets. Second, due to deindustrialization of the periphery, suburban municipalities rezone their lands from industrial to residential to encourage real estate housing developers to invest in these areas. As gated communities are developed in Latin American suburbs with historically low land values, poor neighborhoods are situated next to new affluent gated ones (Libertun de Duren 2006). As a consequence, spatial socioeconomic contrasts between the central city and the periphery began to fade, at the same time as inequalities become sharper within each suburban locality. This social geography is unique to contemporary Latin American cities. Both national trajectories and globalization are relevant to its formation.
Conclusion
Until recently, sociological theory tended to take the nation–state as the most significant geographical unit of analysis. Given the vertical control that national governments imposed on local markets, this approach was justified. Conversely, as private capital has become more global, the porousness of national borders warrants refocusing urban studies on the network, as Castells (1996) argued, rather than on the nation. Globalization theories were not framed at the scale of the city, but nevertheless used it as a lens to detect how global networks operate. Today, as the world hierarchy and internal cohesion of the nation state come under question, we need to reconfigure our approach to describing social transformations. The urban scale has become even more relevant for understanding social change. On the one hand, the city remains a relevant and valid unit of analysis. On the other hand, the urban scale still needs to be connected to the nation state in which it is inserted, just as much it needs to incorporate the implications of a globalized world.
To show that cities in the Global South do or do not comply with a theory of urban growth based upon cities of the Global North is a valuable endeavor, but one that is not conducive to building a new theory of urban transformation. A new theory would provide a methodology for including the links that cities have with their nations and transnational networks. Unless we do so, we are likely to find that foreign cities are interesting case studies only because we began with the wrong hypothesis. That is one constructed on the assumption that urban systems that look similar and are subjected to similar pressures should behave similarly, regardless of the national contexts in which they are embedded. This calls for in–depth comparative studies that take into account the long shadow of national–urban linkages in our networked society and thereby renders visible the specificity of history and geography in urban development.