The Cultures of Cities

338 Pages·1995·36.054 MB·English

by  Sharon Zukin

THE CULTURES OF CITIES
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE CULTURES OF CITIES:
"The Cultures of Cities gives a tremendous boost to urban
cultural analysis. Full of fresh details and original ideas, it
should significantly influence the whole discourse on cities
and culture."- Harvey Molotch, co-author of Urban Fortunes
"Sharon Zukin has written a penetrating and nuanced portrait
of the displacement of planning by marketing in our cities, of
the ways in which they extend and increasingly depend on the
spurious automations of culture that have become America's
most important product. What makes her book especially rare,
though, are her recordings of the ways these cultural superpo
sitions reverberate in the life of the street, the negotiations
and compromises forced on the real lives of people harried by
this symbolic economy and its seemingly inexorable cooptation
of the spaces of public life."-Michael Sorkin, architect, editor
of Variations on a Theme Park
Copyright© Sharon Zukin, 1995
The right of Sharon Zukin to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 1995
Reprinted 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000
Blackwell Publishers Inc
3 50 Main Street, Malden, Massachusetts 02148, USA
Blackwell Publishers Ltd
108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 IJF, UK
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Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition
that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or
otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Zukin, Sharon
The cultures of cities I Sharon Zukin
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 1-55786-436-5 (acid-free paper)
ISBN 1-55786-437-3 (pbk:acid-free paper)
1. Cities and towns. 2. City and town life. 3. Urban sociology. I. Title.
HT109.Z85 1995 95-7534
307. 76-dc20 CIP
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Commissioning Editor: Simon R. Prosser
Production Manager: Jan Leahy
Typeset by AM Marketing
Printed and bound in Great Britain
by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
This book is printed on acid-free paper
THE CULTURES OF CITIES
Sharon Zukin
l3
BLACKWELL
Publishers
FOR ELISABETH RACHEL ZUKIN ROSEN
CONTENTS
Preface
Vll
1 Whose Culture? Whose City? 1
The Symbolic Economy • Culture as an Economic
Base • Culture as a Means of Framing Space
• Public Space • Security, Ethnicity, and Culture
2 Learning From Disney World 49
Real Theme Parks • A Shared Public Culture •
The Spatial Reality of Virtual Reality • Disney
World as a Service Industry • Disney's Symbolic
Economy
3 A Museum In The Berkshires
with Philip Kasinitz 79
Trouble in the Berkshires • Global Art Worlds •
The Conceptual Museum • Cultural Politics •
Museums and Metropolitan Culture
4 High Culture And Wild Commerce
In New York City 109
Measuring the Arts Economy • High Culture as
Space and Symbol • Landmarks • Museums
• Times Square • Jobs and Money • A Culture
Capital?
v
vi The Cultures of Cities
5 Artists And Immigrants In New York City
Restaurants
with Louis Amdur, Janet Baus, Philana Cho,
Dalton Conley, Stephen Duncombe, Herman
Joseph, Daniel Kessler, Jennifer Parker, and
Huaishi Song 153
Restaurants as a Cultural Site • Immigrants and
Global Trends • New York Restaurants •
Restaurant Employees • The Social Division of
Labor • The Ethnic Division of Labor •
Restaurant Owners • Symbolic Economy and
World Economy
6 While The City Shops 187
A Child's Cartography • Ghetto Shopping
Centers • Downtown Brooklyn • 125th Street
• Indoor Flea Markets • Remembering Walter
Benjamin
7 The Mystique Of Public Culture 259
The Meanings of Culture • Cultural Strategies •
Seeing Visions • A Word About Theory
References 295
Index 313
PREFACE
This book has both a personal history and an intellectual
history. It is the first book I have written since my daughter
was born four years ago. Unlike me, Elisabeth is a native New
Yorker. Everything about the city is self-evident to her. So I
have tried to explain to her all the little truths that took me
so long to figure out - why cities are great as well as fearsome
-as well as a lot of smaller, related mysteries. Why do I prefer
buses to subways? Why do we never sit in the last car of the
subway train? Why do art museums build sculpture gardens
but do not let you touch the statues? Like all parents' stories,
mine are full of contradictions. Sometimes there are even
glaring contradictions between what I teach or write, as an
observer of cities, and what I do as a mother.
For instance, the very week I discussed with graduate
students Donna Haraway's article on "Teddy Bear Patriar
chy," in which Haraway scathingly deconstructs the arrogant
worldview embodied in the stuffed-animal dioramas and origi
nal wildlife program of the founders of the American Museum
of Natural History, I took Elisabeth to the zoo. The fact that
its name has been changed to the wildlife conservation center
and its visual presentations brought up to date with ecological
concerns did not make me feel more at ease with the contradic
tions between my various roles. In part, I have tried to write
my way through them. So the book has some of the defects of
vii
viii The Cultures of Cities
parental stories that want to explain too much and manage
to explain too little.
Some of the contradictions, however, arise in the changed
meanings of culture in cities today. In the last few years,
culture has become a much more explicit part of urban politics
and policies. Multiculturalism has become a code word for
social inclusion or exclusion, depending on your point of view,
and has sparked long-running battles over what is taught
in the public schools and which books are bought by public
libraries. The atmosphere of tolerance that city people histori
cally claim has been charged with the lightning rods of social
and cultural "diversity." Accepting diversity implies sharing
public space - the streets, buses, parks, and schools - with
people who visibly, and quite possibly vehemently, live lives
you do not approve of. Cultural institutions, such as art muse
ums, which were assumed to enhance a city's reputation for
civility, have been challenged as "elitist" and are in the process
of being "democratized" or redefined. At the same time, the
wealth of these institutions is praised by public officials for
strengthening a city's competitive position in relation to other
cities. When we look at a painting by Van Gogh and see tourist
dollars, when we think of social class differences in terms of
"cultures," when we design a downtown shopping center as
Disney World - we are walking through the contradictions of
the cultures of cities.
The Cultures of Cities also grows out of my fascination
with the material side of cultural production and cultural
representations. When I wrote Loft Living a number of years
ago, I tried to make clear the seductive influence of the arts
on urban redevelopment. Using artists' studios or lofts to stim
ulate housing markets and raise property values was an unan
ticipated effect of encouraging artistic careers - yet in its
connections with an ever-expanding tide of cultural consump
tion in the city's art galleries, restaurants, and gourmet food
stores, it was a first step toward gentrification. The response
to Loft Living by urbanists and artists alike encouraged me
to emphasize the symbolic importance of the arts in urban
political economy. With a continued displacement of manufac
turing and development of the financial and nonprofit sectors
of the economy, cultural production seemed to be more and
more what cities were about.
Preface IX
By the time I wrote Landscapes ofP ower: From Detroit to
Disney World, North American cities had shifted even farther
from traditional manufacturing of material things toward
more abstract kinds of products: stocks and bonds, real estate,
and the experiences of cultural tourism. Redevelopment in
both cities and suburbs was based on control of visual images
of social homogeneity, from the rolling hills of corporate sub
urbs to the gentrified restaurants of nouvelle cuisine. What
I saw all around me moved me to make the radical argument
that the way consumption was organized - in spaces, in jobs,
in television shows and literary images - had become at least
as important in people's lives as the organization of produc
tion. Cultural capital was as "real" as investment capital in
its effects on society.
Using the concept "landscape" enabled me to focus atten
tion on social communities, from factory towns to postmodern
cities, as both material and symbolic constructions. As I con
tinued to think about cities, I began to think of their economies
as based increasingly on symbolic production. The growth of
restaurants, museums, and culture industries pointed toward
a symbolic economy whose material effects - on jobs, ethnic
and social divisions, and cultural images - could scarcely be
imagined.
Before I conceived of The Cultures of Cities as a book, I
gave a series of lectures that implicitly developed the theme
of a symbolic economy. In 1991, in a paper I wrote for a
conference at the University of Bremen, the symbolic economy
took on the shape of the New York art market in the 1980s
and early 1990s - its inflated expansion and underbelly of
social fears. In 1992, I spo'ke at Syracuse University about
the plan to develop a Massachusetts Museum of Contempo
rary Art in North Adams, a town suffering from deindustrial
ization and high unemployment. Around the same time, I gave
another lecture, at a conference at the State University of
New York at Binghamton, on how public spaces-from empty
storefronts to neighborhood shopping streets - are changed
by conditions of economic decline. I also continued to write
and think about Disney World as an emblem of the service
economy and a flagship of a certain kind of urban growth
orderly, well-mannered, placing individual desire under cor-