Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (review)

Cities in Modernity is a wide-ranging and impressive synthesis concerned with the new kinds of urban spaces created by the processes of modernization, how they came to be, and the interactions among those spaces and a newly modernizing society. Richard Dennis, a geographer at University College London, demonstrates that, in the ways it was organized, perceived, and used, space itself had agency in the modernizing process. The book’s focus is a bit narrower than the title suggests; it concentrates on the emerging Anglo-American urban middle class and the spaces most important to its self-creation and identification. There are chapters addressing residential suburbs, apartments, offices, and department stores, as well as new uses and functions of streets. The analysis is confined primarily to London, Toronto, and New York. Each chapter draws examples from all three cities, although the tilt is toward London.

Central to Dennis’s purpose is the integration of cultural, economic, and technological understandings of urbanization. He draws heavily from representations in art and fiction as they reveal how men and women understood and used those spaces. Novelists located characters in specific, identifiable places, indicating that both author and reader understood their social meaning. A second major point Dennis makes is that the three cities shared “common experiences of modernity” (p. 25) which overrode lesser differences in national history. In this regard he is drawing an explicit distinction from Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1982).

There are three additional themes. First is how new spaces took on particular gender identifications and the role they played in providing middleclass women with new opportunities. A second theme is the increasing specialization of function within the modern city; concomitant to this was the impulse to create order and to map, measure, and survey the built environment. Third is the blurring of the line between public and private. Some spaces such as streets became more private, while private spaces such as department stores took on public functions.

The book is brimming with insights and connections drawn across time and space, and between the built environment and its representation in the arts. For example, the department store and the residential suburb were both crucial to shaping middle-class self-identity. They both reflected the order, efficiency, and specialization of modern space and how space was gendered in multiple ways. Large department stores, with steel framing and electric lighting, created a sense of spectacle that catered to upper-middleclass women and ennobled the act of consuming. The stores were also workplaces for thousands of female sales clerks and for the garment makers kept out of sight in the upper stories. But even sales clerks and the typists from nearby office buildings could browse the displays and imagine themselves in the finery on the mannequins.

The residential suburb enabled the emerging white-collar, family-oriented middle class to claim its own space. Connecting the modern environment with the “scientific” survey and the window that fiction provides, Dennis includes a fascinating map of the London suburb of Camberwell which overlays the social categories of Charles Booth’s late-1800s survey with the characters in George Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee (1895). Despite differences in financing, building, and ownership patterns in the three countries, there was a remarkable similarity in the outcomes: socially and physically homogeneous neighborhoods that emphasized domestic privacy while providing appropriate settings for displays of consumption that were essential to modern middle-class identity. Suburbs, like other modern urban spaces, embodied contradictions. Suburbanites saw their neighborhoods as a refuge from the modern city.

A final chapter examines the network of technologies that underlay the modern city: sanitation, communication, and transportation connected economic change and cultural representations. In discussing the New York elevated lines, for example, Dennis draws on William Dean Howells, John Dos Passos, and John Sloan to highlight his point that “the El” could democratize and also facilitate residential...