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141 The urban juggernaut of the early twentieth century created new challenges for cities as they tried to deal with the dramatic changes in everyday life. Former castle towns, battered by Meiji reforms that had undercut the towns’ source of feudal privilege, recovered and began to grow at a swift pace.1 The population churn generated by an increasingly mobile labor force destabilized urban communities, as newcomers to the city constituted an increasing share of the local demographic. The city became a melting pot, dissolving the social memory of the community that rested on the geographic stability of successive generations of residents. In the meantime, the establishment of modern industry undermined the economic foundations of city life and gave rise to new occupational structures and economic geographies. As the communications revolution expanded the territorial jurisdiction of the city, and as the building boom of the teens and twenties remade its built environment, the predictability and familiarity of the cityscape seemed to disappear. Such changes created a crisis of socialization for municipal governments. Their toolbox of policies for managing social tensions had little effect in the new environment, because existing mechanisms to moderate social behavior and guide individuals to conform to norms of public order could no longer function as they once had. As increasingly clamorous social groups competed for public space and political representation, for access to resources and city services, new questions arose: Whose city was it going to be? How could these antagonistic forces be reconfigured into a workable social unit? One response to these questions emerged in the context of regional culture movements , where visions of local community provided new grounds upon which to build a sense of belonging. As they cast about for material from which to F O U R The Past in the Present 142 • M O D E R N T I M E S A N D T H E C I T Y I D E A fashion a cohesive identity, municipal leaders stretched the meaning of the city, installing the belief that the rising urban centers of the twentieth century represented natural communities that drew on a shared cultural heritage. In pursuit of a sense of community, urban elites turned to a search for customs that conveyed what was special about their locality. This involved excavating the past to discover the foundations of the modern city and the roots of its identity. It required educating the local population about their history and traditions. In the process, urbanites reinvented the idea of the city, making the urban community into a vessel of regional culture and a core component of their selfhood. Urban residents imagined their cities as selfenclosed lifeworlds with corporate identities, as organic communities with political centers. They wrote urban biographies that told the stories of these collective subjects, the history of a community’s birth and development to the present age. Much the way we think of nations, we tend to think of cities as natural communities vested with primordial sovereignty. But the concept of the city as organic community and sovereign subject actually took shape in the interwar period, a product of regional culture movements in the service of urban development.2 Though it constituted a fraction of the urban demographic, the middle class commanded an oversized role this process. Teachers and librarians, city officials and journalists, businessmen and politicians, headed a host of regional movements that remade their urban communities and reinvented the city idea over the course of the 1920s and 1930s. Through chambers of commerce, the city planning movement, and regional arts movements, the middle class monopolized the creation of the modern urban form—which was both envisioned and constructed through the institutions they dominated . Middle-class urbanites invested their hopes and ambitions in the development of their communities in a number of ways. They lobbied the national government for city planning designation and the establishment of new schools. They created baseball teams and sports tournaments. They promoted their products, celebrated their artists, and cheered their sports stars, especially when these symbols of the vibrancy of local culture made the jump to the national and international stage. As urban residents identified themselves with the success of their communities, urban development came to signify not simply constructing infrastructure and factories, but the cultivation of a distinctive brand and local tradition—something that could identify their city and set it apart from the rest. Staking their [18.191.171.235] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 10:10...

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