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

Cities in Modernity begins with three bridges – the Brooklyn Bridge, London’s Tower Bridge, and the Bloor Street Viaduct in Toronto. For Richard Dennis, the design and construction of the bridges, as well as their subsequent uses, exemplify the ‘hopes and fears of modernity, its opportunities and threats’ (19). The creation of the bridges required dynamic local governments, innovative designs, novel technologies, and the mobilization of capital and labour. The bridges thus reflected the vitality that transformed New York, London, and Toronto (his three principal sites of study) during the period that he examines, eventually allowing people to move in new ways across reconfigured and expanded cities. At the same time the sordid and sometimes grizzly details of bridge construction, as well as the propensity of modern urbanites to ‘throw themselves over the parapet’ (20), demonstrate the equivocal, uneven, and incomplete nature of this transformation. Dennis pursues these interwoven themes across a dizzying array of topics – artistic and literary representations of cities; surveying, mapping, and planning; uses of city streets and public spaces; suburbanization; urban business patterns; and consumer practices – attentive in each case to the complicated reordering of urban spaces and lives during the latter part of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries.

At the same time, Dennis hopes that his book will bridge a scholarship driven apart by divisions between ‘cultural and economic interpretations of urbanization . . . qualitative and quantitative modes of analysis, [and] abstract theory and . . . empirical studies’ (3). Dennis accomplishes this aim in part by anchoring the book in a remarkably broad reading of the secondary literature; this foundation, while weighted toward cultural histories and literary sources, indeed encompasses a wide variety of interpretive perspectives. At the same time, he proposes a ‘bridging’ approach to evidence, emphasizing, on one hand, the empirical content of literary and artistic work, and, on the other, the socially constructed, subjective dimensions of statistical and other social scientific sources. Both paintings and censuses, Dennis suggests, inform historians about the interpretive perspectives of their creators as well as the empirical realities that surrounded them (79, 112).

The book largely fulfills its author’s hopes that, like a ‘panoramic painting, each incident has gained significance from its position among its neighbours’ (348). Indeed, the combination of material generates something new. Canadian historians may find that Toronto sometimes fades from prominence in the story; they may also find that parts of the Toronto material cover familiar territory (particularly, for this reader, the extensive use of Richard Harris’s work to detail suburbanization in Toronto), but the placement of Toronto in Dennis’s wide frame should interest and provoke Canadian historians.

Dennis anticipates the two principal criticisms that I would make of the book; however, he does not entirely answer them. Most of the book seems to equivocate on the importance of place. The role of landed and traditional elites, differences of demography and size, discrepant levels of home ownership, and the timing of development in each locale, to name a few examples, seem to suggest different stories unfolding in each of the three the case studies. But Dennis offers few overarching analytic distinctions among the three cities. A brief ‘Postlude’ speaks directly to those who might criticize this absence. ‘Contrary to the current enthusiasm for different modernities,’ Dennis observes, ‘it seems to me that the cities on which I have focused had more in common with one another than they had different from one another’ (349). Coming on the last page of the book, the statement feels more asserted than proven. By placing this claim at the end of his story, Dennis avoids a more detailed and satisfying exploration of how degrees of commonality and difference should be assessed, especially in synthetic, rather than primary, analysis.

At various points in the narrative, Dennis also acknowledges critics who might question who, precisely, is represented in this book. What do we learn, for example, in the mapping of the Pooters’ social...