More Thinking About Cities

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been revising, in my head, the last chapter that I wrote for my little book on the archaeology of the American experience. This is not best practice on a number of grounds especially since it’s making it harder for me to make progress on my next chapter and causing me to second guess every other chapter in the book. 

At the same time, it’s been great to have the luxury to mull over topics, read a bit more expansively (in an entirely undisciplined way), and think about some new work on the archaeology of contemporary cities. For example, this past week, I read Christopher Matthews and Bradley D. Phillippi’s new edited volume Archaeologies of Violence and Privilege (New Mexico 2020). It included two chapters that directly related to my work (and a wealth of useful observations and arguments throughout). 

Chris Matthew’s chapter on the impact of the excavation of Interstate 280 through the city of Orange, New Jersey contributed to what Matthews termed a “carceral” landscape. The construction of the Interstate through the middle of city destroyed key community resources, separated neighborhoods, created a wasteland flanking the highway. The highway also facilitated the emergence of predominantly white suburbs and the establishment of a network of byways between places that allowed black and white residents to pass through each other’s communities without interacting. The social, political, and economic processes that led to a racially divided landscape likewise led to the concentration of police activities in a black community which bore the brunt of the social and economic displacement created by the new interstate. This new carceral landscape both embodied and reified racists attitudes toward the increasingly isolated black community whose struggles become problems to control with force and violence rather than conditions to ameliorate.

Paul R. Mullins, Kyle Huskins, and Susan B. Hyatt contribute an article to the same volume that explores the intersection of environmental history and race in Indianapolis. The article begins with a proposed urban beech along the White River in the city that was largely derided because of the river’s reputation for pollution. Mullins and colleagues traces that perception to the use of the White River in the late19th and 20th centuries for swimming by the city’s African American community. The course of the river through working class neighborhoods and its use as the dumping ground for industrial pollution contributed to its reputation as dirty and unclear. The construction of local swimming pools throughout the city in the 20th century provided the white community with more sanitary conditions for swimming, but excluded the black community who were banned by rule and custom from white pools. While there was one pool set aside for the use of the black community, many blacks continued to swim in canals despite the danger of pollutants and fast flowing water. 

Contemporary attitudes toward the White River preserve the history of city’s racist past long after the city integrated officially segregated swimming pools and sought to clean up the region’s waterways. 

Finally, a talk at Dumbarton Oaks (which I could not attend) brought to my attention the work of A. K. Sandoval-Strausz on the role that Latinos have played in late-20th and 21st century urbanism. I have not finished his book,Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City (2019), but read with great interest his 2014 JAH article, “Latino Landscapes: Postwar Cities and the Transnational Origins of a New Urban America“

Using the Oak Cliff, Texas as a case study, Sandoval-Strausz argues that the influx of Latino immigrants into this economically depressed community revitalized its abandoned and ruined buildings, businesses, and economy. Low costs attracted these immigrants to declining urban areas, but the character of Central American urbanism shaped the kind of communities that they constructed in these places. The imported to American cities their familiarity with small, family-run businesses, walkable neighborhoods, and outdoor socializing and filled the void left behind by Americans move to suburbs, corporate chains, and architecture that privileges the privacy of the back yard to the public facing front yard and porch.

Latino immigrants effectively construct a transnational city in the ruins of American urbanism. It finds parallels to recent work that seeks to find “the possibilities of life in capitalist ruins” and the role that Central American immigrants play in providing labor and community in regions like Pennsylvania coal country that have struggled to transition to post-industrial or light-industrial economies. Moreover, this work complicates notions of decline and ruins in US cities by revealing how these are not terminal conditions but part of more complex cycles in the life of global cities.