Amazon Blog Post

It seems noteworthy that a substantial portion of the Amazon dialogue – from both supporters and detractors of Amazon – has centered around notions of community in how this decision has played out.

Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted that Amazon was given the opportunity to “be a good neighbor” and rejected “working with the community” (1). Congresswoman Alexandria Oscasio-Cortez tweeted that a group of “dedicated, everyday New Yorkers [and] their neighbors” were able to stop the deal with Amazon (2). New York City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer stated in a press conference that Amazon does not share New York values (3). Queens Senator Michael Gianaris stated that Amazon pulling out only demonstrates their unwillingness to work with the local community (4).

In contrast, governor Andrew Cuomo issued a statement blaming the New York State Senate, saying that they placed their “own narrow political interests above their community” (5) noting that polls demonstrated overwhelming support of Amazon coming to LIC. A local businessowner in LIC is quoted saying “the community does not agree with [Amazon leaving] at all,” and a CEO of a job-training program in LIC felt that Amazon would have provided inspiration, especially for residents of Queensbridge Houses, a LIC public-housing project (3).

In the official statement released by Amazon, they noted that polls show 70% of New Yorkers supported their plan to come to LIC, and placed blame on state and local politicians who are preventing them from “building the type of relationships […] required to go forward,” and concluded by thanking Governor Cuomo, Mayor de Blasio and “many other community leaders and residents” for their support (6).

With the examples presented in this short blog, I think it becomes clear that the notion of community is bilaterally used as a tool for exemplifying the moral high-ground of their stance. How is community defined? Whose interests are represented within this vague notion of community and who are its constituents? What is the efficacy of democracy (through elected officials) in representing the desires of a community? In the end, much of the debate really centered around the rights of a community, but it doesn’t seem like everyone was on the same page for what that actually meant.

(1) https://twitter.com/NYCMayor/status/1096110674613358593

(2) https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1096117499492478977

(3) https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-long-island-city-mixed-feelings-that-amazon-wont-move-in-11550190263

(4) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/nyregion/amazon-hq2-queens.html

(5) https://thehill.com/policy/technology/430078-cuomo-blasts-state-dems-over-amazon-pulling-out-of-hq2-plan

(6) https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/update-on-plans-for-new-york-city-headquarters

-Christopher Ryan

As I read the articles for this week, I found myself reflecting on how these readings connect to my dissertation topic related to the ecological homogenization of cities. Beginning with Engels (1845), I noticed that as he described different locations, there seemed to be certain commonalities in terms of what the poor residents of these urban slums would experience. As he quotes the Artisan, “like all over rivers in the service of manufacture, flows into the city at one end clear and transparent, and flows at the other end thick, black, and foul, smelling of all possible refuse.” His accounts frequently include mentions of polluted water and air, and while these descriptions are increasingly historical as cities move away from being centers of industrialization and eco-legal protections are adopted, they serve as a shared communal urban-ecological history, with ripple effects to the present.

As Brenner (2013) notes, the conversation of climate change and the fate of the planet is intrinsically linked to the city with changes to the “atmosphere, biotic habitats, land-use surfaces, and oceanic conditions” (p. 86), and that the city extends well beyond its core, including commuters, tourists, teleworkers, and the media. The impacts of urban ecological homogenization extend farther from the center and become more encompassing. Lefebvre (1973) argues that natural space is gone and only represents the materials necessary for production and he finds this truth to be even more strongly so than in Marx’s time. From the perspective of Marxist political ecology, capitalism is the force that drives this ecological homogenization (perhaps with the lawn industry as a key example).

Even so, while creating such narratives, it is important to not view homogeneity when there exists diversity. Sandoval-Strausz (2014) notes the differences in Anglo and Hispanic lawn performativity. Drawing from distinct Euro-historical origins to cultural practice, Sandoval-Strausz describes how Latino families use their front lawn as a space of socialization and fence it off from the street. In contrast, Anglo families lack these fences, but instead socialize inside the house and the backyard. The capitalist forces that drive lawn culture would manifest quite differently depending on the cultural backgrounds of the families. Rather than conceptualizing a linear narrative of lawn culture being diffused to residents, instead it may be more useful to think about how these notions spread in round-about ways, being amended by culture, returned to origin for re-packaging, or being sent elsewhere in turn. Landscaping knowledge is not diffused simply in a unidirectional manner (Jacobs, 2012; Sandoval-Strausz, 2014).

-Christopher Ryan

I read three of the reading materials, which push me to think about some basic questiones? What is city? Why it is important to research? How to do the research with the balance of special case and common theories?

Scott and Storper try to build a general theory of the urbanization process from the perspective of trade, production, which uses agglomeration as a mechanism leading to sharing public goods, matching people and jobs, learning from the flowing of information. But different cities are different because of their specific situation of locations, land use and human interactions. The combine the special cases and common dimensions together push me more to think about how to do the case study. Firstly, I should respect the unique of each city, thinking about the specific local condition of policy, cultures and level of economic. But I also need to think about how to link the empirical special case to a broad theoretical thinking on several common topic of urban studies.

Zukin and Martinotti use their own careers to inflect the situation of urban sociology in America, wish that urban researcher can contribute to progressive change in 21century. As a student in architecture but not sociology, what I concerned is how to understand the changing of environment from the sociology perspecitive, which not only care about the clients, aesthetics and economic development but the justice and freedom of human beings.

This week’s reading made me wonder what kinds of questions are the right ones to be asking in the field of urban sociology. Even the most basic line of inquiry– what is a city? can be unpacked to reveal layers of problematic reasoning and complicated understandings of the question. I find it intriguing yet unsurprising that the more recent articles (Zurkin, Martinotti, Scott and Storper) focus on a theoretical and economically framed understanding of the multiplicity and enormity of such a task. Scott and Storper insist on surpassing the specificity of cities to establish a superstructure framework for understanding the mechanisms by which similar environments are created (namely, the segregation of neighborhoods,) and I found similar resonances in the Zurkin and Martinotti articles, and a strong sense of sociopolitical urgency in the DuBois abstract.

Who has the right to occupy space, and how do social power structures organize and dictate these rights? This is one question that I found occurring repeatedly, often subtly, in these readings. The discussion of the urban land nexus in Scott and Storpor’s article provides a useful entryway to this questions, as they discuss it in terms of a economically-determined urban mosaic. We see one example in the government-sponsored and white-only suburbs mentioned in the DuBois article. Zukin’s denunciation of “loft-living” (where workers are ousted from their spaces to make room for wealthy apartment-renters) also raises a similar question, and, in a roundabout way, so does Burgess’ interpretation of Chicago’s rings of habitation. Space in cities, where there is an a priori density of population, is highly politicized, but in many of these articles, is treated as equally psychological and moral as it is political (DuBois p5, Burgess p41, Park p35.) How do communities in a position of superstructure power manipulate questions of morality to justify these segregations and ousting of immigrants, different races, and otherwise marginalized groups? The Park and the Burgess essays articulate a moralizing stance on poverty and the poor distanced from understandings of economics and much more concerned with problematic investigations into immigrant mores and moral underpinnings. How do we formulate the right question to effectively answer this problem of the privilege of space?

Park describes a class of experts at companies like Bell Telephone investigating the future advances and opportunities. It struck me how much things seem to stay the same and how a company like Amazon has used their HQ2 campaign to glean information about cities across America, likely to improved their profitability in the future (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/amazon-hq2-long-island-city-virginia.html)

Zukin’s Loft Living, and Richard Florida’s work on creative classes,also foretold the situation New York City finds itself in now. I think we must remind ourselves, or at least ask ourselves, why Amazon wants to expand into New York City in the first place. The 25,000 workers Amazon has promised New York either already live here or want to live here. They are the loft living, creative class.

Park and Burgess’ pieces, in their assumption of city’s allegiance to concentric rings, now seems rather normative. It is a little too easy to be critical of their work in hindsight, especially with their pejorative language surrounding issues of race and gender. Now into the 21st century, as New York City and other cities continue down a post-Fordist path, it is interesting to see how something like Amazon HQ2 fits into a service economy. The tech workers a company like Amazon needs to attract seem to want to live in a vibrant sandbox of amenities and services. So now industry chases the worker back to the city and the tail begins to wag the dog.

-Adam Sachs

Three of this first week’s readings provide a historical grounding of urban theory. The earliest example is DuBois, from 1899, providing a first look at urban research in his study on African Americans in Philadelphia. We see him grapple with the pain of imprecision in social science research.

Then, there is theorizing and analysis from Robert Park in 1915 and Ernest Burgess in 1925. Park, writing on the cusp of World War I, is full of excitement over the questions that can be asked through the study of cities.  He has an almost romantic view of what can be learned about humans through cities, claiming that the urban environment is the “natural of the civilized man” (especially Jews???). Park wrote of the city both as a construction and reflection of its people and also as a self-contained object of study. From this writing, a core question about cities emerges: who effects who? How does a city reflect is people, and how do people change based on their city? This is particularly pronounced in economic terms as he approaches the new pool of vocations available to people through division of labor, which highlights these questions of exchange of cause and effect regarding how one’s corner of the economy may yield other civic and political identities and beliefs.

In the intervening years between Park and Burgess, I could see some of the effects of the success of the prohibition movement and the moral crusading of the early women’s movements. Their language seems to represent a shift in the prevalence in the politics of fear about morality and how it is maintained in an urban environment with high crime and delinquency. What Park calls “the disintegrating influences of city life” are given more color as an “underworld of vice and crime…the most intense degree of adventure and danger, excitement and thrill.” But he builds on Park’s work primarily by going deeper into the meanings that are constructed around particular areas of cities and the processes of expansion. Instead of seeing the city as a concrete unit of study, he describes “processes of disorganization and organization.” He begins to see the unfolding of some of Park’s ideas, recognizing the potential divisive social effects of division of labor. Particularly interesting to read in the current political context is how he grapples with migration. The combination of foreign immigration and the Great Migration yield what cities may experience as outside intervention, disturbances, “the excess of the actual over the natural increase of population.” This construction – that migration is not part of the natural increase of population – is still felt in today’s politics.

I am curious about how two terms in particular evolved over the course of the 20^th century, that either changed meanings or fell out of fashion. One is “sentiment” – something Park associates with people’s relationship to neighborhoods, but is also used as a counter to the rational life that is supposed to exist in cities. The second is mobility, which they both explain in great detail, but perhaps due to the difference in how I conceive of it, remains a bit opaque to me, though is clearly central to the early development of urban theory.  

Urban sociology ultimately aims to study the city and the components which make up its complex social reality. Such an endeavor cannot be taken without first identifying the boundaries to a city – what is urban life in contrast to non-urban life? In my opinion, such a question requires an anthropological and historical approach in addition to sociology. No question of substance can be addressed in an academically linear fashion, anyway. In terms of how the readings approach this question, I do feel that some of the discussions seem too recent and discount the complexity and diversity of urban life back to the onset of agriculture. If cities present too much flux for a concrete definition, perhaps broadening the scale to include all examples of urban life could illuminate commonalities to understanding how cities form.

 Park (1915) describes “ancient cit[ies]” as a fortress useful in wartime defense, whereas modern cities are centered around commerce and are ultimately derived from the marketplace itself. Free markets are what ended serfdom and provided freedom to the inhabitants of an area. Burgess (1925) describes the late transition from rural to urban in American cities in contrast to European ones, and in doing so emphasizes a cultural blindness to the indigenous civilizations that inhabited the continent prior to Europeans and what their permutations of urban life entailed (and in addition, how certain American cities have pre-colonial roots at their foundations).

When all definitions of urban entail modern and Western visions (“the skyscraper, the subway, the department store, the daily newspaper, and social work”) (Burgess, 1925, p. 37), the investigation of urban life becomes diluted and myopic. Zukin (2011) posits the question of the difference between being a journalist, anthropologist, ethnography, and making scientific knowledge and enacting social justice, though I’m not entirely sure what distinction is being made. Martinotti (2011) notes that urban sociology includes a spatial (and as such historical) component (p. 2), but what to what depth does this historical component delve? This historical depth is touched upon when Martinotti later notes that ancient cities also had profound technology (“walls, pyramids, aqueducts, [and] roads” (p.10)). Scott and Storper (2015) mention the over-emphasis on cities of the global North and argue that historically cities are the result of the redistribution of agricultural surplus yielding “political administration, ceremonial and religious pursuits, [and] craft production” (p. 10). At its core, such a definition could adequately define a modern city, as well.

It does seem that as discussions of urban life become more recent, they also stretch to include urban models from the past in order to fully understand the onset of urban living and the impacts that it has on populations.

-Christopher Ryan

Starting with the Scott/Storper article and then progressing through the following readings in the order of the syllabus had a tremendous effect on my interpretation of this week’s readings. Scott and Storper are essentially arguing for an economic determinism that defines the urban: a dense agglomeration of production, exchange, and consumption enacted in a set of conditions both material and social (land use, location, and human interaction). Cities exist by the grace of economic activity. Humans are not auxiliary to such phenomena, but they are subject to it – the social is embedded in the economic. This is certainly true of exurban societies, and the “land use nexus” can be found in rural areas too. Creating a benchmark to differentiate urban and non-urban, however, is risky. As Martinotti reminds us, cities mean change. Density and population are relative terms when defining a city. How can we differentiate?

Park and Burgess echo (or initiate?) the economic determinism that generates a city. The division of labor that was deepened and institutionalized by capitalist development yielded enough surplus to accommodate new vocations, currency, a system of utility that is not defined by social mores, and above all, dense networks of people and exchange – cities. Although these sociologists may insist on the urban as a set of “attitudes and sentiments,” or the “city as a state of mind,” such conditions remain framed by the economic circumstances that enabled them to emerge. Social and political phenomena are not independent of economic phenomena: they are reactions to, plans for, and symptoms of, the economy. DuBois reminds us that the “slum is a symptom, not a fact.” He clearly understood that slums have been socially produced through an economic vocabulary.

Zukin is emphatic on the issue of space as an expression of such social relationships. She also emphasizes that “the city is an expression of economic processes.” These conditions allow for and perhaps exacerbate economic and social injustices, but thanks to their defining characteristics (density, agglomeration, mobility) they are also prime sites for resistance and change.

Each reading attempts a definition of “urban” to focus inquiry and theory more precisely. But each  struggles to differentiate “urban problems” from “people problems.” At the same time, they all agree (some more explicitly than others) that economics drive the developments that shape urban experiences. Economics are not necessarily capitalist in nature, either: large urban settlements like Venice or Rome in the early modern or ancient eras could not strictly be defined as capitalist, or even proto-capitalist societies. But they were still sites of innovation, knowledge exchange, reaction, growth, politics, reform, expansion, and diversity. I suppose I might fall in line with Scott and Storper (and, thus perhaps Zukin) by understanding the urban begins with understanding the economic processes that belie it.