THE AMERICAN CITY
a sourcebook of urban imagery
First published 1968 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright 1968 by Anselm L. Strauss
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2006048003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The American city : a sourcebook of urban imagery / Anselm L. Strauss, editor.
p. cm.
Originally published: Chicago : Aldine Pub. Co., 1968.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-202-30927-9
1. Cities and townsUnited States.. I. Strauss, Anselm L.
HT123.A44 2007
307.760973dc22 2006048003
ISBN: 978-0-202-30927-9 (pbk)
TO my publisher and my wife who,
like Mr. and Mrs. Shandy and their Tristram,
accidentally gave birth to this offspring.
CONTENTS
, Anselm L. Strauss
, Anselm L. Strauss
, Rudyard Kipling
, Julian Ralph
, John L. Peyton
, William H. Dixon
, Sarah Royce
, Horatio Alger, Jr.
, Frederick J. Turner
, J. W. Scott
, S. Waterhouse
, Thomas J. Summers
, John Taylor
, A. D. Mayo
, Charles Edwards
, E. H. Chapin
, Walter Burr
, Josiah Strong
, John Habberton
, H. W. Gibson
, Robert Hunter
, W. I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki
, C. Wright Mills
, E. H. Chapin
, Horace Greeley
, A. D. Mayo
, Anna S. Richardson
, J. M. Welding
, Marie L. Hankins
, George S. Hillard
, Charles Loring Brace
, Charles Loring Brace
, Joseph Lee
, William P. Shriver
, Jane Addams
, Bernard Weinraub
, Franklin Giddings
, Simon N. Patten
, Hylan Lewis
, Frederic C. Howe
, Richard T. Ely
, Anna J. Cooper
, A. Julius Friedberg
, Alfred H. Lewis
, Milton Kotler
, William MacAdoo
, Egon Bittner
, Carl Werthman
, Robert Blauner
, Junius Browne
E. C. Moore
, Walter Firey
, Harvey Zorbaugh
, Harvey Zorbaugh
, Floyd Dotson
, Christen T. Jonassen
, Albert J. Reiss, Jr.
, Frederick Edge
, Charles H. Cooley
, Robert and Helen Lynd
, Thorstein Veblen
, C. Wright Mills
, Louis Wirth
, Morris Janowitz
, Fred Davis
, Meyer Berger
, Alfred E. Smith
, Clara Waldo
, Meridith Nicholson
, William Allen White
, Anonymous
, Everett Chamberlin
, H. A. Bridgeman
, Frederick Allen
, Andrew M. Greeley
, Lucius Beebe
, Yoshie Egawa
, Ruth Pape
, Titus K. Smith
Robert H. Talbert
, Frederick Olmsted
, Frederick S. Lamb
, Leslie Miller, Dr. MacAlister, and S. S. Fels
, Ryerson Ritchie
, John Ihlder
, Donald H. Bouma
, Walter Firey
, Herbert J. Gans
, Harold Goldblatt
, Anselm L. Strauss
, Anselm L. Strauss
The readings that comprise this collection barely hint at the immense wealth of commentary produced by Americans about their cities and about urbanization in general. From early days, many Americans have been taken aback at discovering just how urban their nation seemed destined to be. Cities are here to stay is a constant refrain both of people who love cities and people who hate them but have to do their best to live with them. Like the course of a fast automobile racing along a dusty road, our urbanization has been accompanied by a great cloud of commentary, composed of dire and hopeful prediction, denunciation, celebration, prescription, advocacy, planning, philosophizing, sociologizingand from time to time including also what we would now consider genuine social research. All these ingredients of urban commentary present perspectives on the meanings of urbanization.
Some of the perspectives are now archaic, the products of specific times, places, and groups of people. Couched in the language of the day, they cannot but impress us with their provinciality. The more recent commentary may seem more reasonableor at least more understandablebut only because the authorsexperiences with cities are like our own experiences.
Behind these historical differences, however, there persists a remarkable stability of urban images. Indeed, this collection of writings will tend to strike readers as continually transcending time. Olmsted writing about parks in the 1870s, early city planners bemoaning the apathy or greed of citizens, and turn-of-the-century businessmen boasting about their particular cities all seem quite up to date. Just a few words here or a few references there, and their utterances would be applicable to our own cities or our own civic problems.
Most generally, however, the newer perspectives on cities are complex composites of images drawn from older perspectives combined with recently emerged imagery. The emergent derives from recent developmentswhether physical, like the latest in urban architcture, or geographic, like the huge sprawl of the strip city, or political, like the shifting balance of downstate-upstate politics. The emergent imagery also derives from the appearance of new groups, political, religious, and social, on the American scene. In interpreting their experiences with matters seemingly connected to cities, these groups draw upon old stocks of urban imagery, thus creating composite new urban perspectives. Their perspectives are linked with the actions of individuals and groups, and even with institutional planning and functioning.
No single volume can cover all these perspectives, and certainly not all their subtle variants. What I have aimed at in this collection is a sampling of both older and more recent stances toward our cities, the sampling organized mainly around fairly persistent themes. In the first two selections, drawn from my own writings, I have set out what I conceive to be these themes. Readers may add to them as they wisha game that has delights of its own.
