URBAN SPACE AS REGION OF ENCOUNTER

JOSEPH S. WOOD

"Society is just not that easy of a place"

-- recorded by Studs Terkel¹

In the world of Studs Terkel's anonymous informant, society, easy or not, is a place of some meaning. We all have such worlds within which we act and formulate perceptions. Scholars view such worlds in objective, quantitative terms, like beakers having physical dimensions, which allow for the enumeration of contents. Science expects no less; the prominence of empiricism has limited research to measurable phenomena able to be grasped and to discrete events. Yet most of us, scholars and others, would also recognize that our worlds have a qualitative dimension as well. Within that qualitative dimension lie the encounters that give meaning to place.

How might we improve the qualitative dimension and foster the encounters that make society an easier place? Or, in terms of the question addressed by this volume, how might we realize positive values in an urban setting? This has two questionable premises. We presume that traditional cultures are stable and well articulated in their environment (gemeinshaft, for instance) and that change occurs inevitably to those who move to the city, where traditional values are not sustained. Although I do not intend to build the case, I would argue that the choice to remove, not the removal itself, reflects a shift in values and an alteration in the configuration of social relations. Likewise, slums are created, not as much by those who move to them, as by those who move from them, leaving to the newcomers the rebuilding costs the former inhabitants were unwilling to bear. In both cases, the change is actually embodied in the social context of the decision to move.

We presume as well that city somehow exercises influence over or determines social outcome (gesellschaft, for instance). Said another way, the physical dimensions of our worlds shape our behaviors, our perceptions, and the values incorporated in the qualitative dimension of our lives. The nature of inquiry forces us to such deterministic, cause-and-effect views, thereby obscuring social meaning. Louis Wir th recognized the inherent fallacy fifty years ago in "Urbanism as a Way of Life."² To Wirth urbanization was more than removal from countryside to city, with its attendant adaptations and alterations. It was a cumulative accentuation of the mode of life typical of the city.³ I would add that location may be irrelevant. One does not need to move to the city to become urbanized, nor does one's removal to the city insure urbanization in Wirth's terms. Urbanism may inhabit any number of geographical forms, just as urban has assumed any number of geographical forms. Neither the meaning nor the form is constant across cultures, or in time or space. Indeed, urban form is a configuration or expression of values, no more concrete or unchanging than is society as a configuration or expression of values. Nevertheless, geographical form has become a metaphor for social meaning. Unwittingly in contemporary society and in contemporary scholarship, we assign social meaning in relation to one's location.

Recent structuralist and humanistic thinking in the social sciences has called for fresh assessment of what lies beyond the appearance of the physical dimensions of our world. The city is increasingly seen as reflective of the social relations which support it and equally a constraint on modifying or altering those social relations. The city, in this view, is both mirror and mold,⁴ and several of the essays in this volume deal frankly with this assertion. Blank, building on structuralist arguments, notes that "city" and "urban" are social meanings assigned to a particular spatial form by a historically defined society. As if by example, Paga discusses the standardization effect of central authority on the city's "material aspect." Ostensibly governed by ideological precepts of egalitarianism, in practice, Pag a argues, the city mirrors "an equality of shortages" that in turn molds human response. To reveal meaning in the material aspect, we require qualitative tools of analysis, to which Echavarria proposes a semiotic overview. Alternatively, Hosven argues forcefully that a labyrinthic view, seeing the city from within, will reveal the city to us.

My concern is with further articulating this problem of urban space as metaphor for social meaning, thus complementing the structuralist and humanistic critiques which others have offered. What follows is an exercise in ideas, one that lies dangerously and provocatively astride several disciplinary boundaries. I argue that we create our own geographies as spatial configurations that mirror and mold social configurations. Australian Aboriginals, for instance, conceive of their geography not as a fixed block of land but as a series of "interlocking lines" and "ways through."⁵ I suggest as an alternative spatial metaphor for assessing urbanization and values a set of such "interlocking lines" and "ways through." The alternative is grounded--at least is meant to be grounded--in the spirit, if not the formal logic, of the structuralist and humanisitic critiques expressed here. Its purpose is to try to reveal the qualitative dimensions of urban space that lie beyond appearances. Yet I also question the value of imposing any preconceived configuration of space on another's world.

My argument has two parts. The first of these, that we create our own geography, has a double meaning, and in the context of urbanism and values it has some undesirable implications. We create our own geography in a very material fashion, one that varies from society to society, by such actions as selecting and molding environments to suit our needs. We have found, for better or for worse, that cities serve certain material and meaningful purposes for our livelihoods and our lifestyles. We have built cities for 10,000 years, and we will find in our lifetime half of the world's population living in cities. Indeed, the removal of population from countryside to city is the dominant geographical process of our time.

Cities are not solely geographical forms, however. They are human constructs as well. As corollary to the first part of my argument, we create our own geography not only by our actions, but in our mind's eye. Regretably perhaps, what is on the ground and what is in our mind are often quite different geographies. Regardless, we define what a city is and what it is to be. Geography is the outcome of human imperatives about how people and activities should be allocated in space. We conceptualize relationships between humans and the space within which such relationships take place. We also assign to the relationships such names as society, and to the spaces such names as city. Labeling them as such does not reify them, give them agency over us, or imbue us with values. To argue that the geography of metropolitan Washington causes Washingtonians to behave in certain ways and to hold certain values is fallacious, despite what one might conclude after a drive on the Capital Beltway. Washington is both mirror and mold, reflecting the configuration of our patterns of social interaction. In so doing, it affects our world views, constrains our actions, and evokes our visceral responses to the city. Had other values prevailed, we would have produced a quite different urban landscape. By the combination of design and deed we have created the geographies we deserve.

As geography is as much in our mind's eye as it is on the ground, we build generic geographical models to express the physical dimensions of our worlds. We all do so in order to find our way; for wayfinding. Scholars do so as well for analysis. City is such a model, one that carries quantitative and qualitative meaning quite in contrast to that carried by such other models as village or suburb. Insofar as places embody meanings, so the models of place types, whether for wayfinding or for analysis, become geographical metaphors of those meanings. Schneck's argument in "City and Village" is instructive. He implores us to think of the notion of the eclipse of gemeinschaft for gesellschaft as illustrating more the history of ideas about cities than the history of cities. In that history of ideas, village and gemeinschaft and city and gesellschaft have become metaphorical equivalents. As village embodied community, village has become community. As city embodies urbanism, city has become urbanism. Village space and city space are consequently different and distinctive generic place types of different and distinctive social meanings.

Our contemporary notions of social and spatial configurations of human relationships are exactly that--they are of our contemporary world. Social and spatial configurations are fluid, dynamic entities which reflect not only difference between city and village as place types, but differences in place types across cultures and through time. The second part of the argument, then, is this: To gain perspective on the question at hand, we must step back from our contemporary models and accepted geographical metaphors and associated meanings. We must seek alternative social and spatial configuations of the expression of values, expressions from other times and other cultures, to give us fresh perspective on our own place and time. The lesson we learn, I suggest, is that every society has its own identifiable physical and qualitative dimensionalities. We also learn, I think, that our contemporary metaphors of social meaning fail us in analysis of our contemporary world.

Oaxaca and Olymbus. People elsewhere in the world, away from social and spatial configurations familiar to our contemporary world, create their own indigenous geographies. A study of Oaxacan peasants in Mexico illustrates that spatial configuration is a creation of adaptation to a structural change in economy, and by implication that our contemporary notions of rural and urban have no place in Oaxacan conceptions of social relationships.⁶ The home villages of Oaxacans contain perhaps 300 households. Rotating markets foster local exchange and serve as points of articulation for extra-local exchange with the wider world. The social village of Oaxacans, however, extends over thousands of miles as a multilocal economic exchange system allowing peasants to sell their labor to urban employers. Oaxacans who have migrated from home villages to urban places have extended their social configuration across the intervening space to perpetuate their spatially extended community. They have done so not because they have become urbanized, but because of external constraints on their traditional economic behavior in their home villages that required them to seek employment elsewhere. Their dynamic social geography, a social web sustained by buses ferrying Oaxacans between home villages and urban encounters, is intrinsically neither urban nor rural.

Villagers from Olymbos, Greece, inhabit a similar reconstituted space in which they have symbolically created a new `Olymbos' both in the home village and in new settlements around the world.⁷ The lived territory is discontinuously filled, transcending our notion of an absolute space. Olymbites have reconstituted their geography as a means of adaptation to the changing structure of the economy of which they have become a part. Within this geography, Olymbites encounter others as well, those who in their own fashion reconfigure society and reconstitute space as adaptation to the changing world.

In Oaxaca and Olymbos, neither our contemporary notions of community as locality nor our place-type models, like village or city, mean very much. Our physical dimensionality has little explanatory significance and little relevance to the qualitative and socially meaningful dimensions of others' worlds. Emigrants encountering a larger world carry their own world views as cultural baggage as Gambari has noted. Even as Oaxacans and Olymbites encounter the geography that mirrors and molds modern capitalistic society, they reconstituted their own spatial configurations to mirror their social adaptation.

The New England Village. Closer to the functional and locational origin of the modern capitalistic world, New Englanders created a geography epitomized by a village which has become the singularly significant symbolic community of the American past. The village stands for theocratic, hardscrabble yeomen clustering about simple meetinghouses in which freedom of religion and self-government were fostered and came to flourish. Village and community, the spatial and social configurations, were one. Village was community, and community was village, interchangeable in meaning and correlated in configuration. But the village was not a compact or nucleated settlement. Our contemporary model, built on contemporary conceptions of geographical form, is wrong.⁸

In colonial New England, village was a corporate mechanism for land distribution. The space allocated to the village came to be inhabited by yeomen living with their families on discrete farms dispersed within the village's corporate space. The community, although not clustered compactly in geographic terms, was a social web of frequent, purposeful, and sustained economic, religious, and political encounters. The village road network suggested the spatial configuration that both mirrored and molded these encounters. Indeed, the spatial configuration worked so well as to sustain dispersal of farmsteads without testing the social web.

The nucleated forms that we see today are spatial configurations of nineteenth-century economic intercourse and thus early manifestations of urbanization of the United States. Contemporary villages were built by New Englanders who were becoming fulltime nonfarmers and rapidly restructuring their commercial economy. The relict nature of villages in this century is simply a consequence of Americans' unquenched thirst for reconstituting their geography as they abandoned New England farmsteads and village centers during westward expansion and continued urbanization. Today we seek out these villages as unspoiled retreats from the city. Paradoxically, they symbolize for us a particular historic association of social and spatial configuration that we chose to relinquish when we chose urbanization.

The Galactic Metropolis. When we chose urbanization, we chose a form of social relations, not a place-type. The place-type commonly associated with urbanization, once quite nuclear, is becoming increasingly decentralized, reflecting our changing social configuration. As we reconstitute our geography, we reconstitute the qualitative dimensions of our world as well. This new urban geography, which Lewis⁹ calls galactic metropolis, is both mirror and mold of American society. Metropolis is practically everywhere, a material manifestation of the success of our collective pursuit of material gain.

The social configuration of this modern metropolis, unlike that of the New England village, is not easily read in its spatial configuration. More than ever before, the locus of one's qualitative dimensionality may be spatially unrelated to the locus of one's physical dimensionality. The road network allows swift movement, and electronics have facilitated interaction, but not everyone has equal access to, nor wishes fully to employ, these means of encounter. In the galactic metropolis, the physical dimensions of inhabited space are bursting, while society is polarizing as never before.

In traditional geographic metaphors we associate affluence with suburban, but the affluent live and work in a variety of distinct home and workplace types interchangeably distributed from center city to rural countryside. Qualitative connection to the urban economy distinguishes these home and workplaces from those of the less affluent. Urban--and its subsidiary term suburban--artificially differentiate or distinguish types of affluence, which really are products of the quality of connection. Even the Corn Belt farmer, dispersed upon the family farm like the colonial New England villager, is an integral part of this new configuration, interlinked reciprocally by modem, satellite dish, and Federal Express.

Conversely, we associate poverty (and lack of positive values) with inner city, yet those who experience poverty are qualitatively no more connected to the functioning of the urban economy than those who live in pockets of rural poverty. In recent years the term "underclass" has come to characterize the "truely disadvantaged," who are disconnected from the urban economy.¹⁰ Also disconnected are those involved in the underground economy of drugs; though cash rich, they are not qualitatively connected. Again, urban serves artificially to differentiate or distinguish between types of poverty, but not between qualities of connection to the economy. Others may remain apart voluntarily. The Appalachian construction worker, like the Oaxacan laborer, inhabits a reconstituted social geography in which home is connected by interstate highway and electronic media to urban encounters where the worker can sell his labor and selectively engage urban society without relinquishing the qualitative dimensionality of home.

Blank, drawing on structuralist sources, concludes that we are on the threshold of a new meaning for the city. The city's complex network of relationships at multiple levels can no longer be embodied in a simple framework of physical dimension. Grasping the complexities of this reconstituted geography requires imagination, which Friedmann,¹¹ distinguishing between life space and economic space, offers. Life space and economic space, paraphrasing Friedmann, constitute a "unity of opposites." Life space is the "theater of life"; economic space "corresponds more narrowly to the conditions of livelihood." Life space is bounded, territorial space that also provides sense of place, having both quantitative and qualitative aspects to it. Economic space is abstract, discontinuous, and global, reflecting the broad, encompassing sweep of the capitalist economy. Flows across linkages to nodes, not physical dimension, give substance to economic space. Superimposed over the life space of individuals and communities, however, economic space creates the illusion of independent economies within traditional physical dimensions.

Although designed for different purposes than our model, Friedmann's model provides a useful point of departure for an alternative spatial metaphor. In Dechert's transactional terms, economic space lies on an orthogonal plane distinct from that of life space. Yet life space itself has both physical dimensions of bounded territory and qualitative dimensions of a sense of place that themselves may be orthogonally located with respect to one another. Only if we escape three-dimensional space might we then be able to accommodate all of the dimensions of the spaces we inhabit. Multi-dimensional scaling for assessing relative connection or the hyperspace of computer systems offer the possibility to think of urban space as a configuration of sets of overlapping, discontinuous social configurations, much like the reconstituted geographies of Oaxacans and Olymbites.

The galactic metropolis--or any geographic form--might be conceived, then, as a dynamic region of encounter. The intensity, frequency, and quality of encounters all vary. National Airport represents very different kinds of encounters for pilots, porters, and passengers. The Kennedy Center represents a high intensity, high quality encounter for many Washingtonians, but something quite different for its custodians. Many encounters will be weaker, reflecting weaker connection. Other encounters will be infrequent reflecting greater selectivity. Together these encounters comprise a complex multidimensionality of intersecting orthogonal life spaces, all nested within an encompassing global economy. Traditional geographic models of space offer only a panoramic view. Aboriginal notions of "interlocking lines" and "ways through" suggest a more useful conception of space than bounded land. Focusing on interconnection and encounter, one may attain Hosven's labyrinthic view, giving insight into the logic of the social configuration and related qualitative dimensionality of Oaxacan peasants, New England villagers, or denizens of the galactic metropolis alike. Even Wirth's conception of urbanism as a way of life is enhanced by a geographical model of the encounters of the modern world.

How might we improve the qualitative dimension of one's world and foster the encounters that make society an easier place? Planners have long tried to develop utopian societies by designing utopian geographies; but all planned geographies have failed. Still today, we attempt to make society an easier place by configuring spaces to encompass, and paths to direct, the encounters of the modern world. Yet how many university campuses are criss-crossed by dirt paths linking places of encounter where students have created their own geographies independent of the formal geometries of concrete sidewalks and plazas? Imposing preconceived spatial configurations on others' social configurations, whether as an academic exercise or as cultural hegemony, is counterproductive. As academic exercise it fails us, precluding a labyrinthic view. As cultural hegemony, it may be as well the social glue of which, Schneck argues, cities need no more.

George Mason University

Fairfax, Virginia

1. Recorded in Studs Terkel, The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988).

2. Louis W irth, "Urbanism as a Way of Life," American Journal of Sociology, 44 (1938), 3-24.

3. Don Mar tindale, "Prefatory Remarks: The Theory of the City," in Max Weber, The City, trans. and ed. by Don Martindale and Gertrude Neuwirth (Glencoe: Free, Press, 1958), p. 38.

4. D.W. Me inig, ed., The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscape: Geographical Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

5. Bruce C hatwin The Songlines. Reprinted in part in Landscape, 30 (1988), 11.

6. Douglas Uz zell, "Conceptual Fallacies in the Rural-Urban Dichotomy," Urban Anthropology, 8 (1979), 333-350.

7. Anna Carav eli, Scattered in Foreign Lands: A Greek Village in Baltimore (Baltimore: The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1985).

8. Joseph S. W ood, "Village and Community in Early Colonial New England," Journal of Historical Geography, 8 (1982), 333-356.

9. Peirce F. Lewi s "The Galactic Metropolis," in R.H. Platt and George Macinko, Beyond the Urban Fringe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).

10. William Julius Wil son, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

11. John Friedm ann "Life Space and Economic Space: Contradictions in Regional Development" (Los Angeles: Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of California, Los Angeles, Manuscript, 1981).