Photography and the Image of the City

This chapter examines the visual form of urban photography during the technology’s foundational stages of the mid-nineteenth century. Of special interest in this chapter is the photographic form of the daguerreotype. Because of its technical limitations and cumbersome requirements for prolonged exposure, the daguerreotype was never a literal window onto the city. The photographic process itself posed the practical and philosophical paradox of whether a city that could not and would not stand still might be interpreted by a mode of representation that required its objects of observation to be stationary. This new technology could offer up images of exquisite detail. It could also produce (unlike the alternative later technology of the stereoscope) pictures in which the pulsating life of the metropolis was more or less absent. Chapter 4 addresses this representational paradox, while presenting a selective visual survey of some of the early city views from New York and Paris that photography afforded the nineteenth-century reader.

The Revolutionary Formalism of France

This chapter addresses how the divergent city experience of the Paris métropole accumulated contrary meanings (overtly political in the minds of some, artfully performative in the minds of others) for interested onlookers during the tumultuous middle decades of the nineteenth century. The signature rhythms of the city’s divided politics in this period constituted a form unto themselves. For some observers of Paris, the distinguishing characteristic of these forms is that they were being placed under great strain by the domestic factions coalescing in France around a number of longstanding social grievances there, which together found expression in the country’s capital city. Another group of observers might have recognized the revolutionary potential of such grievances, but they were preoccupied instead by the captivating drama that was politics in Paris. These readers monitored the city’s politics less to understand its core issues than to enjoy what was effectively a form of street theatre for a viewing public. In the Paris of 1848, readers met with an urban “text” the content of which was sometimes indistinguishable from the enormity of its historical forms.

Reading the Urban Form of Fire

This chapter considers the big-city blaze as an “object” of interpretation. Given the disturbing frequency of fires that occurred there, New York in the nineteenth century became the home of a unique variety of city reader: the fire watcher. Readers of what were known in this earlier era as “conflagrations” faced a dilemma of formal proportions: whether to interpret the form of fire as a direct material threat to city peoples and property, or else as a captivating pyrotechnic display capable of delighting the senses. Compounding this formal conundrum was the question of how a reader responded to the working-class men who typically volunteered to fight these fires. It was not seldom the case that fire readers who belonged to the middle- and upper classes of society came to regard the improvised physicality and boisterous rowdyism of the amateur fireman as a threat nearly equal to that posed by the city fire.

Strong Reading, or the Literary Conversion of the Urban

This chapter examines the phenomenon of “Strong reading,” named after the nineteenth-century New York lawyer, bibliophile, and diarist George Templeton Strong. As evidenced by Strong’s own historical example, the Strong reader placed such great faith in his traditional standards of literary discrimination that he proceeded to read all of urban life as if it were a work of literature. The unstated aim of this manner of city reading was to remake the more troubling aspects of urban life into a more familiar form of “text.” In turn, the Strong reader might have managed to convert the modern city into a safer kind of aesthetic spectacle, but he often purchased his interpretive reassurance at the expense of a less mediated relation to urban life.

Afterword

Urban Formalism has examined what it historically meant to “read” the mid-nineteenth-century city, in the broadest sense of that term. I’ve placed forms at the heart of this study in the belief that the work of urban interpretation ultimately requires us to attend to the representative patterns of the city’s cultural formations. These days, such formations are increasingly recognized as “forms.” This study accordingly sits at the semantic intersection of some of the historical city’s most readable (which is not to say most easily apprehensible) formal “texts.” Among these last I have included the literary city, the material city, the political city, and the visual city. My argument, throughout, has been that the often-contradictory ways by which our predecessors interpreted the forms of the modern city at once made the metropolis more and less readable.

Introduction

This book rests upon a pair of related propositions that have far-reaching consequences for the work of urban studies. The first is that the history of the modern city is a history of urban forms. The second is that the interpretive turn to formalism represents a wholly new approach to thinking about urbanism and historicism. In other words, this book argues that to conceive of the city “formally” is not only to revise our understanding of the city’s actual existence. It is to argue for an alternative way of apprehending the conditions through which knowledge of the city is even possible. Forms alter our sense of what the historical city was. Forms change how we perceive the very practice of urban perception, whether we’re talking about the perceptual habits of historical observers from the past or anyone who is mindful, today, of how forms function in the present century. In the final analysis, the twin claims on which this book depends suggest a different kind of urban being even as they propose a novel approach to city “reading.” In forms, we’ll never know the city the same way again.