The Urban Experience Fischer, Chapter 7, The Individual in the City: States of Mind

• This chapter examines the urban psyche. Do city dwellers suffer psychologically? The thesis that urban crowding causes serious pathology is debunked in this chapter. The argument suggests that the popular rat-cage image of urban life probably is wrong and irrelevant. In disproving this model, the chapter debunks 5 crowding theories. Explain each counter argument to the following: 1) High density creates problems of interference and problems in distributing resources. 2) High density generates stress because human beings have a territorial instinct. 3) The presence of other people in "unnaturally" high numbers and in close quarters produces psychological or physiological over stimulation. 4) High density generates stress because it leads to frequent violations of the "personal space" surrounding each human being. 5) High density generates stress when the socially defined standards for what are appropriate distances between persons are violated.
• What are the general conclusions of Crowding Research? No proof has emerged that density--at least in the normal range of places Americans encounter--has the dire effects claimed by Crowding Theories. Explain.
• How relevant is the entire topic of crowding to an understanding of urban experience? Many researchers and commentators simply assume that by understanding crowding they understand city life. In what ways does Fischer challenge this assumption?
• The idea that urban life creates a pathology [sickness] is central to determinist theory. The text asks whether we can assume that living in cities produces psychological stress or disorder. According to this chapter, the evidence fails, in sum, to support the claim that urban life is psychologically damaging. Explain.
• Alienation [a person's sense of separation from the people around him or her] is thought to result from urbanism. Even U.S. Government reports suggest that contemporary alienation is directly or indirectly tied to the growth of large urban environments.  This chapter examines 3 forms of alienation (powerless, normlessness, and social isolation) to examine whether these claims are substantiated.
• Powerlessness [the sense that one cannot determine the outcome of his/her own life] largely emerges in persons actually lacking social power (people of color, people living in poverty.) Urban life is presumed to cause such feelings. What is that evidence for the following conclusion: The extent to which people believe they ca act successfully to achieve their goals in not reduced by urbanism.
• Normlessness [a sense of detachment from social norms or rules] is also presumed to intensify in urban settings. However, one must ask, Whose norms? Whose rules? There is some evidence that urbanites may me more attached to the norms of their particular subcultures rather than those of the majority. This would support the subcultural rather than determinist model of urban theory. In any case, there is no evidence of a distinctly urban normlessness.
• Social isolation [a sense of loneliness or of rejection by others] is widely assumed to predominate in the city. However, ethnographies of urban life usually describe feelings of social involvement and not of isolation. Some evidence suggests that urbanites are, however, slightly more distrustful of others. But, of whom? Urbanites do not seem to be more distrustful of fellow members of their own subcultural groups, but rather, of strangers.
• What is the data on the happiness or contentedness of urbanites? Explain some possible reasons for this data.
• In general, the urban environment cannot be shown to cause more stress than the nonurban.  This will be critical information as we consider contemporary urban film. In particular, as we study Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, we must analyze Travis Bickle's sense of powerlessness, alienation, and social isolation as larger cultural questions rather than urban questions.

• Smith begins his essay with the example of Tompkins Square Park in New York City. As the site of the first major gentrification struggle, the park has become a symbol of the new urbanism. Reconstruct this example. What dynamics have played out in Tompkins Square Park?
• "Relinquished to the working class, abandoned to the poor and unemployed amid postwar suburban expansion, reconfigured as reservations for racial and ethnic minorities the terrain of the inner city is suddenly valuable again, perversely profitable." Explain each segment of this statement.
• Gentrification represents a geographical, economic, and cultural reversal of postwar urban decline and abandonment. Whole swaths of inner city working-class neighborhoods have been transformed into middle-class and upper-middle-class havens devoted to boutique retailing, elite consumption, and upscale housing. In the neutral language of "neighborhood recycling" and "revitalization," these changes acquire a positive spin.  How is the "improvement" of gentrified neighborhoods to be criticized? What's wrong with this picture?
• The language used to describe and justify gentrification in the media needs scrutiny. Widely scripted as a "struggle to conquer and civilize the urban frontier," gentrification gains a positive spin. What is problematic about the frontier metaphor? How are the codes of Western Hollywood films applied to urban life?
• The social meaning of gentrification is increasingly constructed through the vocabulary of the frontier myth. At first this myth seem innocent. Newspapers extol the courage of "urban homesteaders," the adventurous spirit and rugged individualism of the new settlers, brave pioneers, presumably going where no (white) man has gone before. Examine this terminology and its implications.
• The real estate industry hires "urban scouts" who seek out neighborhoods ripe for reinvestment and to check out whether the natives are friendly. The frontier is idyllic but dangerous, romantic but ruthless. This depiction of the city is so entrenched that marketing crazes regularly reproduce it in New Age boutiques, "cowboy" aesthetics,  colonial and imperial nostalgia-themed shopping (Banana Republic, Safari). Even as Africa is underdeveloped by international capital, it is remarketed in western consumer fantasies. Explain.
• The frontier myth is neither merely decorative nor innocent, but carries considerable ideological weight. "The frontier myth makes the new city explicable in terms of old ideologies. Insofar as gentrification obliterates working-class communities, displaces poor households and converts whole neighborhoods into bourgeois enclaves, the frontier ideology rationalizes social differentiation and exclusion as natural and inevitable". Explain this central statement in Smith's argument.
• Smith claims that two industries defined the new urban frontier of the 1980s: the real-estate industry and the culture industry (art dealers and patrons, gallery owners and artists, designers and critics, writers and performers who "converted urban destruction into ultra chic.") Explain the role of these two industries in promoting gentrification.  How do arts and media practitioners and students need to reconsider the gentrifying effects of "the culture industry?" You may want especially to consider local examples such as SoHo (NYC) and Wicker Park/Bucktown (Chicago).
• The key force in gentrification is the real-estate market. Explain and define the following two primary  terms: disinvestment, the rent gap. Building owners and developers profit from letting their properties run down. Indeed, they gather a double reward for doing so. Having effectively destroyed properties and establishing a rent gap, they create for themselves opportunity for a whole new round of capital reinvestment. Explain.
• Many people believe that "in America no one can make a group leave their homes/neighborhoods." Contrary to this belief, developers can effectively achieve this result through strategic development and the ensuing property tax hikes. These property tax hikes first effect those on fixed income, esp. the elderly long-term residents and renters. The next groups affected tend to be the working poor and working-class residents. Secondly, city governments have the power of eminent domain by which they can seize private property (so long as they compensate the owner for "Fair market value.") Explain how these strategies create gentrification.
• "Gentrification portends class conquest of the new city. Urban pioneers seek to scrub the city clean of its working-class geography and history. Slum tenements become historic brownstones." Gentrification "effaces social history." Explain.
• Some have hoped to encourage gentrification by attempting to illegalize homelessness. Critique this ideology.
• Recreate Smith's argument about media representations of homelessness. If such representations blame the victim, often imagined as mentally ill, alcoholic, or drug addicted, how is the critique of gentrification prevented? How does the dominant portrayal of homeless people cover over critiques of the exclusionary housing market?
• Smith suggests that gentrification will spread outward toward the city-suburban edge where disinvestment is already severe. Explain this prediction.

• Cinema appears to be providing a new language and aesthetic in which the city becomes the central site for social disorder and violence, and black youth in particular become the agents of crime, pathology, and moral decay. Explain.
• The media represents black youth as the source rather than the victims of violence. Explain the statistics which counter this portrayal.
• The city is increasingly portrayed as a space of gruesome violence that threatens to spread outward to the "safe" confines of middle-class America. Critique this dominant representation.
• Treating violent youth as dangerous "urban aliens" is a guaranteed crowd pleaser. Focusing on the devastating effects of (white) racism, rising poverty, and unemployment for a generation of black youth is less popular. Discuss this point.
• The violence in films in never arbitrary or innocent. Thus, the essay attempts to provide alternative understandings of how violence is produced and framed aesthetically. What are the goals of these alternatives?
• Giroux initially presents a distinction between two kinds of violence: 1) the violence of the spectacle, and 2) the representational violence that allows views to identify with the suffering of others, display empathy, and bring ethical commitments to bear. Explain the distinction.
• The essay attempts to "move beyond condemning representational violence in a wholesale fashion" focusing instead on drawing more subtle distinctions between types of violence. Critique must move beyond simply quantifying violence in the visual media. Why?
• Giroux distinguishes three forms of visual violence: ritualistic, symbolic, and hyper-real.
• Define ritualistic violence. Ritualized violence offers viewers voyeuristic identification rather than providing an opportunity for the audience to think through and scrutinize the mechanisms and implications of violence. Explain.
• Passing for "simply entertainment," ritualistic violence draws attention away from representational politics (the politics of images.) Often ritualistic violence portrays the city as a site of degeneracy. One pedagogical (teaching & learning) effect of this is that it contributes to the commonsensical assumption that Hollywood film is strictly about entertainment and need not be judged for its political and pedagogical implications. Offer a critique of this "common sense" view.
• Define symbolic violence. How does symbolic violence offer ways to connect the visceral and the reflective?
• According to Giroux, symbolic violence "finds ways of scrutinizing the mechanisms and implications of violence through different processes of framing, juxtaposing, repeating, and quoting images within a context that invites meaningful commentary." Explain this statement in detail. What are processes of framing? of juxtaposing? of repeating? and of quoting images?
• Giroux offers C. Eastwood's Unforgiven as an example of symbolic violence. How does the film "raise ethical questions concerning how violence has been mythologized and decontextualized so as to reinvent a nostalgic and utterly false version of the American past?" In particular, how does the film explode the myth of the West? This, too, will become an important consideration as we examine the relationship between John Ford's The Searchers and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.
• Define hyper-real violence. How can violence be "more real than real?" This form of ultraviolence is marked by technological overstimulation, gritty dialogue, dramatic storytelling, parody, and an appeal to gutsy realism. According to Giroux, hyper-real cinema, most often presenting itself as "realistic" and "hip," combines moral indifference with cultural slumming. Explain.
• The new hyper-real films go beyond emptying representations of violence of ethical content; they also "legitimate rather than contest," by virtue of their documentary-style appeal to "what is," the spreading acts of symbolic and real violence rooted in and shaped by a larger racist culture. Explain this notion.  What does it mean for film to legitimate rather than contest the violence of the larger culture?
• While violence appears to cross over borders of class, race, and social space, the representation of violence in the popular media is largely depicted in racial terms. Explain.
• Keep these distinctions in mind as we approach Taxi Driver, which at the time of its release was shocking for its extreme violence. In fact, the picture was threatened with an "X" rating for its violent images. Do we merely dismiss this artistic triumph? How can we consider thoughtfully the violent representations of Taxi Driver?

• Taxi Driver is based on several sources: Dostoevsky's existential novel Notes from Underground and John Ford's Western film The Searchers. The first source is an anti-heroic novel which focuses on the pathology of the narrative voice. The latter is an aesthetic landmark which undoes the certainties of the early Hollywood western film.
• The clip suggests that Ford's later film, The Searchers, plays with the same setting and leading man (John Wayne) of earlier Westerns, but delivers instead a disturbing portrayal of the Western hero as psychotic and obsessive. John Wayne's Ethan Edwards is driven by psycho-sexual obsession, revenge fantasies, and racial hatred. He is, as anti-hero, the most frightening character on screen. Ford presents this character through profoundly artistic cinematic details.  Observe the clip and analyze these details.  Note especially the ground-breaking "door frame" which closes the scene. How does the doorway serve to mark off Ethan Edwards from family and community? Why? What is the moral import of Ford's gesture?
• The leading man & milieu of Ford's The Searchers seem to have more in common with the protagonists and setting of film noir than the typical Hollywood Western.  Explain.  Describe the social context of these traits, as indicated in our earlier film noir readings and through Scorsese's commentary.
• Scorsese's commentary likens film, esp. genre film such as the Western, to jazz. How does he make this connection? What does he mean by improvisation?
• Taxi Driver reinvents The Searchers as an urban Western. Try to make sense of the notion of "urban western." How is New York City imagined as frontier (see Smith reading)? Review the main characters and plot of The Searchers so as to make possible a more thorough reading of Taxi Driver.  Attend especially to the main plot line, Ethan, Sport, "the niece" and the "Indian." The connection will be traced in our next unit's reading by Stern.