Listening to the Provinces: A Painter's Letters Home

2 4 Y L I S T E N I N G T O T H E P R O V I N C E S A P A I N T E R ’ S L E T T E R S H O M E S H I F R A S H A R L I N On 7 November 1919, about a week after his arrival in Vitebsk, some three hundred miles west of Moscow, the artist and writer Kazimir Malevich wrote to a Moscow friend that his room gave ‘‘the illusion of being in Moscow.’’ What created that illusion? He didn’t say. But he did not need to say why the illusion merited mention. Vitebsk belonged to that elusive category the provincial city; it was not small enough to be a village and not large enough to be a great city, but it was a city nonetheless – yet also not quite a city in the eyes of someone, like Malevich, coming from Moscow. If, as the Elizabethan historian John Stow claimed, ‘‘Good behavior is yet called urbanitas because it is rather found in cities than elsewhere,’’ provincial liability erased urban advantage. Provincials are never urbane. Provincial cities nevertheless deserve to be the center of our attention for two reasons: they are all cities and no city. Any city can be provincial. In comparison to Paris, Moscow is provincial. In comparison to a shtetl, Vitebsk is not. More important, provincial cities are everywhere: their number keeps increasing as large cities lose population to even larger cities. Contrary to popular expectations, globalization in the twenty- 2 5 R first century has not contributed to a more decentralized and equitable world but rather to further centralization of resources and population, as Saskia Sassen, a leading scholar of globalization , has shown. Globalization requires ever-greater concentrations of expertise and resources in order to manage vast networks, thus contributing to the disproportionate growth of cities that enjoy the advantages of wealth and a large, skilled population. The internet is not the first technological innovation that has disappointed hopes that small cities will now gain advantages that make them the equal of large cities. Earlier such hopes centered on the railroad, and it too unexpectedly contributed to the decline of small cities by allowing their inhabitants to leave for the big cities more easily. The recurring hope that improved access to resources brought about by a new technology would make the world smaller, more united, and more just testifies to the depth of this longing rather than its imminent realization. Many once great cities have dwindled in size and importance. The fortunate ones find ways to turn their past greatness into a tourist industry. The less fortunate put up plaques to commemorate their past for the occasional visitor. For instance, Milan, Ohio, which now has a population of approximately thirteen hundred, was once ‘‘the second-largest grain exporting port in the entire world, second only to Odessa, Russia,’’ a fact that explains its now incongruously spectacular mansions and huge town square. Some cities’ aspiration to greatness exists in slogans alone. Tacoma, Washington, was too close to Seattle ever to become the ‘‘City of Destiny’’ that its hopeful citizens envisioned in 1890. Small and medium-sized dots, signifying these provincial cities, can be found scattered all over maps but are rarely included in the thinking about cities done by urban studies professors and city planners. Pioneers in urban studies set the precedent for this lack of specificity. In his 1937 talk ‘‘What Is a City?’’ Lewis Mumford defined the city as a center of drama and ballets, a place that exists outside time and place. The three hundred years and thousands of miles that separate the Elizabethan London whose urbanitas is praised in Mumford’s opening quotation from John Stow does not appear to lessen its relevance for the contemporary urban ideal he proceeds to describe. Louis Wirth, another pioneer in urban sociology , likewise neglected to specify details about the urban environ- 2 6 S H A R L I N Y ment except that its varied crowds would foster a particular type of urban personality. Readers of his...