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  • The Concrete JungleA History of Global Urbanism
  • Diana Martinez (bio)

The concrete jungle,” a still-popular conception of the urban, describes a tangle of organic growth where curling sinews of a green and tropical vitalism are replaced by a mire of unrelieved greys. Though the figure of the concrete jungle has been largely displaced by a lighter, more flexible, and more crystalline urbanism of glass-curtain walls and mediated surfaces of light-emitting diodes, on one hand, and by an urbanism of blue tarps and improvised shelters of settled “transients” on the other, it bears remembering that the modern, industrial city (and here I am discussing a historical artifact) is an object or set of relations that first appeared as a figure cast in concrete.

This essay focuses on concrete as a material, but it also considers the relationship between two different, though related, usages of the word concrete, the first of which was as a logicians’ term—a term developed in opposition to the word abstract to denote that which is actual, solid, and material. As a term, then, concrete stands in not only for materiality itself but also, eventually, for a particular kind of description of “reality.” The second usage of the word, referring to a specific building material (made up of a mixture of cement, water, sand, and aggregate), only came into use in the mid-nineteenth century, a convention emerging coincident with the industrial production of Portland cement—a material that American producers and promoters argued would enable the construction of a durable American greatness. This greatness, however, would not be limited to what was once proposed as the United States’s “destined” continental form but would instead suggest and enable American colonial expansion overseas.

It is no coincidence that an American “Concrete Age,” as announced by the title of an early twentieth-century trade publication,1 was also the moment that the United States became a global empire. A practice of classifying “ages” according to material (i.e., the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages), was formalized in the early to mid-nineteenth century with the expansion and professionalization of archaeology and the scientific classification of rapidly growing museum collections in Europe and the United States. In view of a past now so systematically defined in terms of their materiality (and the agencies that those materialities afforded), Americans began to see themselves in the grandiose terms of an epochal and civilizational history, not only using but identifying with the increasingly ubiquitous material, equating its durability and strength with visions of a global American plenitude.

The efficiencies of industrial production posed their own threat by generating what Adam Smith and David Ricardo described as a general glut.2 This unmanageable excess resulted in a market volatility that motivated a transformation of the US federal government from what was at first its intentionally limited role of protecting individual liberties to a far more expansive role in which it would manage the overall performance of the national economy. The new functions of the federal government included the coordination of industrial output at a national level and an expansion of markets for American goods. Both of these new tasks were taken on as a means of managing the effects of overproduction. Colonialism was just one of a series of strategies proposed as a means of generating demand. As such, colonization was presented to the United States not only in ideological terms (colonialism’s [End Page 73] so-called civilizing mission) but as a strategy to achieve “concrete” goals (important for the maintenance of the United States’s material conditions).

Thus an era usually described in terms of its progressivism might be better understood as a period in which political goals valorized verifiable “fact.” These “concrete” values were articulated in a language of specific measures and quantifiable growth and served as both the basis and justification for the acquisition of the United States’s first overseas colonies, a development that happened in tandem with the explosive growth and development of American cities at the turn of the century.

These new American “possessions”—namely, the Philippines, Cuba, Guam, and Puerto Rico—were, on account of their remoteness and noncontiguousness with...

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