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

On the very first page of his book, historical geographer Richard Dennis warns the reader that his book emulates the “crowding and frenetic energy” of the late nineteenth-century city: “So my text is deliberately full to overflowing with examples, incidents and asides, as writer and reader pick their way along crowded city streets or wait (im)patiently at the bus stop while a succession of vehicles on other routes pass by.”(p. xiii) This statement seems to me the best possible review of this ambitious, sprawling, and sometimes quite astonishing work which considers both new ways of representing the city and the new urban features of the middle-class city: reorganized streets, residential suburbs, apartments, offices, department stores, and technological networks. Dennis focuses on features that he thinks make modern cities similar in form and content and underlines this argument by trying in all cases to find illustrative material from London, New York, and Toronto—and occasionally, when the secondary literature is too tempting to ignore, from other North American cities.

Like the modern city, and perhaps the concept of modernity, the book contains “contradictory impulses…paradoxes of order and diversity”. (p. 349) The sources of order are Dennis’ overarching themes. He sees in all the modernizing cities the same desire by ambitious city builders and urban reformers to make the city more efficient through the functional ordering of space, a desire that helped generate the regulations and accompanying data collection that have proved so useful to later social, business, and urban historians in the form of social surveys, census data, assessment records, city directories, and maps. Interestingly, he suggests in early chapters of the book that the same panoptic vision can also be found in Anglo-American artistic and literary productions of the period and encourages by example historians to make better use of such representations of the city. Dennis also emphasizes the common technological and financial innovations that made it possible to reconfigure streets and create department stores and skyscrapers in these three cities. Finally, in considering the ways in which these new spaces were experienced, Dennis often concentrates on middle-class women, looking for ways that new urban forms could be sources of both regulation and liberation. In short, Dennis is quite consistently attentive to how the new middle-class spaces of the city were imagined, how they were built, and how they were actually used.

Against this order, Dennis also embraces diversity. This book somehow manages to contain within its pages discussions of the El of New York, female flâneurs in London, and the names and owners of apartment blocks in Toronto. Within the space of several pages, Dennis veers from the novels of William Dean Howells to the tenants’ registers of the Peabody Trust, from the details of mortgage financing to The Diary of a Nobody. At times, the analysis leans quite heavily on the work of other scholars working in the fields of business and social history and cultural and architectural studies. At other times, the argument clearly is a product of Dennis’ own careful, quantitative analyses of Toronto and London. The details are often fascinating, even if some of the analyses that are drawn from other scholars do lead the chapters down alleyways and away from the central argument. The chapters do, as Dennis warned, become quite crowded. What saves the book is the uncanny ability of Dennis to bring each chapter to a strong conclusion, to return the focus to his main themes, to underline the order in the diversity.

Some aspects of this crowded book work less well than others. The focus on the common experience of very different cities leads a historical geographer to downplay the contexts of chronology and place. Comparisons of mid-Victorian London to the Toronto of the 1920s and 1930s can be...