Abstract
In Seeing Cities Change, Jerome Krase introduces his visual urban analysis by comparing his approach to being a tourist, likening it to “using our eyes to decipher the clues…that surround us” (p. 1). The word “clue” stands out, for the rest of the book takes us on a detective adventure to decode and contextualize the visible particles hidden in plain sight in cities from New York to Rome.
From Benjamin to Lefebvre, Gottdiener to Zukin, Krase weaves a thread across generations of urbanists interested in observing cities as constellations of symbols, representations, and distinctions. “Seeing” constitutes both a method for deciphering these distinctions as well as a key part of the everyday experience of urbanism. The visual lens, Krase suggests, is a mode of representing the “vernacular landscape” through a complex relationship between structure and culture (p. 14). It is a semiotic perspective; it focuses on the spatialization of materiality, performance, narrative representation, and everyday uses and interpretations. By making these connections, observers can read urban localism as ordered systems of meaning and learn to dissect the processes of arranging, rearranging, and contesting any given moment of visible public life.
To develop his visual approach, Krase draws on a great deal of primary and secondary sources, from newspapers and poems to decades of personal photographs and observations. In a chapter called “Seeing Diversity in New York City,” Krase draws out New York’s everyday distinctions through the eyes of tabloid journalists, poets, historians, architectural critics, sociologists, and others. Taken together, they unveil a portrait of the “casual” and “informal” character of diversity bubbling up from the streets. Institutions such as mosques, synagogues, and ethnic restaurants coordinate local identities and are part of the taken-for-granted cultural fabric; but so are small-scale rituals of “Orthodox balconies” representing the Jewish holiday of Sukkot and the subtle performances of propping up sandwich boards outside generic markets advertising “Chimis Dominicanos,” that is, “Dominican-style sandwiches” (p. 60).
The material of the city—its buildings, facades, foods, businesses, commercial signs, articles of clothing, and the many other codes on display—are props, as important to the street theater as the actors themselves. The material influences the experiences of professional observers and fleeting pedestrians alike. For the sociologists in the crowd, Krase is repeatedly if not explicitly suggesting how to find research projects right in front of our eyes. His visual approach documents available clues as well as the research and storytelling skills needed to contextualize the places in which we live. Thus, the visible cues can reveal the stagnation and stability of places, as well as open up ways of seeing cracks in the urban fabric that need to be more closely scrutinized to understand where we have been and how we got there. To this end, Krase argues that we can see the visibility of change in the layered symbolic systems rubbing up against each other. These symbolic worlds represent processes of grouping and re-grouping places. Urban neighborhoods, he notes, can become “Italianized” through colors and cannoli, or as is more often the case in contemporary New York’s various Little Italies, become “less so, in response to immigrant settlements and local commercial practices” (p. 83).
The visible encroachment of groups is in part a demographic story. And Krase, an emeritus professor at Brooklyn College, often assigns his students a neighborhood of the city to study. He tells them to understand its demographic composition, the potential of groupings that are there, but then like Robert Park did in Chicago, he pushes them into the streets to see what it all means. There, they identify the tensions and discrepancies stemming from global flows of peoples and objects, leading to changing ethnic distinctions and consumer cultures.
Because actors and materials put together cities as meaningful codes, ethnic distinctions become “objects of curiosity” with “touristic currency” (p. 86). Ethnic neighborhoods constitute the tension between incorporating and distinguishing, the relationships between zones of consumption and demographic competition. Little Italies don’t exist in Italy, Krase informs us, because there is no juxtaposition of visible characteristics to invent that cultural experience for outsiders. Whereas Chinatowns and Little Italies are historically ethnic enclaves and spaces of urban incorporation, they also emerged as key tourist designations. They solidify ethnic places as “ethnic theme parks” (p. 99).
In a fascinating series of chapters, Krase makes cross-continent comparisons to understand the visibility of changes like gentrification and immigration. He identifies the vernacular landscape of gentrification in Greenpoint, a Polish neighborhood in northwest Brooklyn, and in Kracow, from where many of Brooklyn’s Polish once emigrated. Having ethnic similarities and shared historic “looks” (p. 208), Krase finds a cross-continent trend due to configurations of new and old and local and global that similarly refashions the feel of places thousands of miles apart. He also compares and contrasts the distinctions between “Little Italy” and “Big Italy,” specifically looking at New York and Rome. As New York’s Little Italies lose their Italian demographic compositions to new waves of immigrant groups, Rome has simultaneously given rise to new neighborhoods known as Little Africa, Little India, and Chinatown, as well as a range of other ethnic zones (p. 174). New York’s Little Italies remain viable as ethnic theme parks, while Rome’s ethnic distinctions are rarely viewed through that similar tourist lens.
Seeing Cities Change is a unique book, not only an analytic framework into the cultural and spatial distinctions within cities, but also an incredibly useful companion for novice students learning what it means to see as sociologists and investigate the worlds and cultures around them. It would be an excellent text for classes on the sociology of cities, especially those that require students to explore their neighborhoods to understand them. Krase chronicles his visits to cities around the world like a tourist while also contextualizing them like a tour guide. To this end, he emphasizes the importance of “seeing” the surface of places, but in so doing he paradoxically forces us to look beneath the surface to understand how these visibilities work as sources of distinct urban experience.