The Sociable City

News from the metropolis is invariably bad: from Jacob Riis's tenement photojournalism to the slums in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) to the blight of the Valley of Ashes in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and onward to the gang violence of Irving Shulman's The Amboy Dukes (1947), Walter Hill's 1979 film adaptation of Sol Yurick's The Warriors (1965) and, most recently, to the Hobbesian housing politics of David Simon's Hbo miniseries Show Me a Hero (2015), the urban jungle festers with powerless despondency. Nor do reclamation narratives bring much joy: urban renewal inspires either the gentrification satire of L. J. Davis's A Meaningful Life (1971) or the nostalgia for lost bohemianism in Garth Risk Hallberg's City on Fire (2015). Jamin Creed Rowin challenges the pessimism of such urbanist discourse by exploring an underappreciated progressive movement. At heart in this tradition is a rejection of Adam Smith's insistence on sympathy as the fundamental bond of “fellow-feeling” for a concept more transient and less tethered to intimacy: “the idea of sociability,” which eschews the familial model of communal interdependency for casual, passing relationships that are no less emotionally satisfying (p. 7). The spaces for these interactions are “public streets, small commercial establishments, [and] community gathering places” rather than “housing projects, large commercial developments, public works, and highways” that dictate the private sphere as the preferred space of interaction (p. 11

Aesthetics · Art · Criminology · Gentrification · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · History · Law · Political Economy and Marxism