The best books on the modern history of cities

Among so many brilliant authors on city life – if I could have chosen 10 books, I would have surely also have given you books by critics like Walter Benjamin and Marshall Berman, and writers like James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Charles Baudelaire. One of the pleasures in reading Vanessa Schwartz’s book is that she knows and draws on so much of this older work to think about the astonishing spectacle of late 19th-century Paris. Here is life on its boulevards; sensational stories of the city as presented in mass-circulation newspapers; the morgue (!) as a place for both science and entertainment; the wax museum, the panorama, and the cinema. A sensationalized version of everyday life is what most fascinates the author, and us as readers, making us think about what is “real” and what is important to understand, public and private life, commercialism, modern ways of seeing and judging, and ourselves as moderns.

This is Victorian London, a city of dynamic growth, extreme class divisions, obsessions with public sexual danger and pathology, growing anxiety in the face of so much that is unknown and uncertain, and moralizing campaigns for reform. Not least, and the book ends with this story, this is the city of Jack the Ripper. Sometimes Walkowitz is densely analytical, for she is skillful as both storyteller and theorist. In both genres, the experience of modernity is central, as are questions about the body and the self, ethnicity, class, and morality. The city that emerges, in all its dread and delight, is a story that inspires us to think about other cities, other streets, other scandals, and other modernities, including our own.

When my students read this book they find Fritzsche’s idea of “the word city” incredibly compelling and useful for thinking about our knowledge and interpretations of the past but also for experiencing our own lives in cities. As in the books by Walkowitz and Schwartz, we wander with Fritzsche through the city as a tangible place and the city as a text, and how these shaped one other. We experience the ways newspapers saw and made the city: its voices, rhythms, fantasies, and dramas. With beautiful writing—Fritzsche is one of the most elegant and insightful of historical writers and I recommend all of his books—we explore turn-of-the-century Berlin, at street-level and eye-level, in search of stories that reveal much about living in modern times.

The “urban culture” mentioned in the subtitle of this book will remind us of themes in other books about the modern city: the urban experience as one of flux and diversity, uncertainty and possibility, community and alienation, class and gender, sex and violence. Chauncey focuses on urban geography and spaces, especially boundaries, interstices, and enclaves. Most astonishing, and an important discovery, are the many spaces of “ambivalent toleration” for sexual and gender difference in pre-1930s New York. This meant spaces like the Bowery, Greenwich Village, Broadway, and Harlem, but also working-class, immigrant, ethnic, and racial subcultures where dominant normativities could more easily be ignored and challenged.

New York City was a “gay world before binarism”—before the time when gay and straight were stable identities rather than fluctuating practices, before modern flux and thus possibility were crushed by definitional and moral absolutism. This is a story, brilliantly uncovered and told, that reveals much about suppressed or forgotten histories of modern America and of cities.

This is an extraordinary book: stories, in the voices of those who experienced it, about living in public housing projects in Chicago before these homes were demolished starting in the 1990s. Of course, there are memories of crime, gangs, drugs, violence, police brutality, sickness, and death: sometimes understood as the product of urban life, capitalism, and racism, but also as the product of individual mistakes and failures. But mostly these witnesses tell of community, of self-respect and determination, of learning to survive and even resist.

Students in my urban history class in a prison education program in Illinois reminded me that “urban” in their world—which was often precisely the world of High-Rise Stories—meant not the city as a whole, but the inner city, the world of the street, of the marginalized, of people of color. This is a compelling window into that story, told by people who lived it: without seeing and understanding this “urban” side of urban history, we understand only a part of what cities are about and have always been about.