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City Living
City Living
How Urban Dwellers and Urban Spaces
Make One Another
QU I L L R K U K L A
1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190855369.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For and with Eli and Berlin
Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody,
only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Figures
Color Images
Text Photos
I could not have written this book without enormous help from all sorts of
people and places. My largest debt is to the cities that most closely informed
my research and taught me their ways, especially Berlin, Johannesburg,
Soweto, New York, and Washington, DC. These cities invited me in and
allowed me to explore and learn from them. Without them, and other cities
that I have explored and inhabited, there would be nothing but abstractions
in this book.
My son, Eli Kukla, contributed so much to this project that it could not
have existed without him. He served as my research assistant for all of my
fieldwork. Because of his extraordinary facility with languages, his official
job was to help with communication in German and Arabic (and, as it turned
out, Zulu, which he picked up quickly), as well as to translate documents,
help with archival research, and identify languages used in different sites.
But in fact, his role became much more extensive. He helped me choose and
interpret research sites and accompanied me on nearly all of my research
outings. Perhaps most important, he discussed each part of our experience
with me endlessly and helped me interpret what we saw. He read drafts of
multiple sections and gave me helpful comments. In short, he participated
in almost every stage of the research and writing process, in ways that far
exceeded his official assistantship responsibilities. He has put literally hun-
dreds of hours into this project. Although all the text here is my own, he con-
tributed so much by way of both labor and ideas to this book that he almost
counts as a coauthor.
My next debt is to Marianna Pavlovskaya. When I began working in ear-
nest on this book, drawing only on my background as a philosopher and
my enormous and passionate love of cities, I quickly came to realize that
I needed a grounded empirical understanding of how cities developed and
worked in order to complete the book responsibly. I decided to go back to
school and get a master’s degree in urban geography from CUNY-Hunter
College. Marianna Pavlovskaya took me on as an advisee and mentored my
master’s thesis, “Repurposed Spaces in Berlin and Johannesburg,” which
formed the basis for Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of this book. I could have not had
xvi Acknowledgments
a better adviser; she is a brilliant geographer who was willing to both share
her wisdom with me and take me seriously as an odd colleague-student hy-
brid. I thank her for taking on such a quirky project and advisee; for being so
supportive and insightful in her advice; for letting me work independently
when I wanted to; and most of all, for doing more than anyone else to help
me make the paradigm shift from thinking like a philosopher to thinking
like a geographer, or at least a philosopher-geographer. Her intellectual ex-
ample and mentorship have been invaluable. Indeed, my time at Hunter was
a midcareer gift. The intellectual training, stimulation, and inspiration I re-
ceived there were pivotal for getting me through this project. I am grateful
as well to my other professors in the program, particularly Inez Miyares and
Rosalie Ray, whose seminars also had a hand in shaping this book, and to
Jillian Schwedler, who served as the second reader on my thesis and whose
work on repurposed space inspired my own.
My third debt goes to my wise and forbearing editor at Oxford University
Press, Lucy Randall, who both supported and believed in this unusual inter-
disciplinary project and showed unlimited patience with my ever-extending
timeline, which kept stretching to incorporate new degrees, new fieldwork,
and several changes in direction in my writing.
I am incredibly grateful to multiple exceptionally educated, knowl-
edgeable, and committed tour guides, archivists, and other residents with
special geographic knowledge in Washington, DC, Berlin, Johannesburg,
and Soweto, who got excited about my project and ended up helping me
with my research in ways that went far beyond their job descriptions.
With their help, I found and accessed spaces I never would have other-
wise known about, made invaluable connections, and got a deep and rich
feel for the cities. These were people who love and understand their cities,
and were willing and able to share that love and understanding; their gen-
erosity and knowledgeability were remarkable. My colleague and friend
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò allowed me to interview him in depth about the racial
micropolitics of a playing field in Columbia Heights, Washington, DC.
Maria Klechevskaya of Berlin ended up redirecting my approach to finding
research sites. Julia Dilger, the archivist at the Neukölln Museum in Berlin,
spent an entire day helping me find treasures in her collection. Natalia
Albizu let me interview her in depth about life in Neukölln. I am especially
honored and grateful that the residents of Köpi 137 decided to allow me
to do research and take photographs in their home, despite their commit-
ment to privacy. In particular, I thank Köpi spokespeople Frank and Gabby
Acknowledgments xvii
City Living. Quill R Kukla, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190855369.003.0001
2 Introduction
1. Take a walk by yourself in an isolated area, setting your own pace, let-
ting the landscape and your own goals dictate how fast you move and
by what path, letting your gaze and attention be drawn entirely by the
landscape.
2. Take a walk with a friend, which involves calibrating your pace to
theirs. You may each need to slow down or speed up to keep your paces
matched. You will negotiate together, usually implicitly, what’s worth
stopping and looking at, how fast to go, and which path to take.3
3. Take a walk among strangers in a crowded city. You again need to cal-
ibrate your pace, but now the goal is the opposite; walking exactly at
pace with a stranger is creepy, so you will slow down or speed up as
needed to stay out of sync with others. You will also be negotiating ap-
propriate personal space and eye contact. You may need to implicitly
work out how to take turns, for instance if you are passing someone in
a narrow passage. You may be casually friendly toward those you pass,
particularly if your attention has been caught by the same thing, for in-
stance if you both pause to look at a piece of street art or notice together
that a bus is delayed. But there are definite limits to how extended and
friendly such an interaction will be, and you need to negotiate and re-
spect these limits together.
4. Take a walk through your own familiar neighborhood. Here you are not
walking with others, but you are walking among people who may be fa-
miliar to you, and you will all have a shared sense of the shape and pace
of the space. You might have more extended interactions as you go; for
example, you might stop for a couple of minutes in front of a new res-
taurant that just opened to discuss it with a neighbor, or you may stop a
neighbor to ask to pet their dog. The assumed shared background here
is greater than it is in the walk amidst a crowd of strangers, but it would
still be odd for you to match your pace with that of a neighbor also out
for a walk or for you to ask them to slow down so you can keep up.
5. Take a walk in a foreign city that is new to you. You aren’t sure of
directions, or local customs, or norms for communicating and
interacting. Now you won’t have that same expertly embodied set
of skills available to you. You will probably have to consciously con-
trol and adjust your pace, perhaps dodging unexpected obstacles or
vehicles. (Whenever I talk about this, I am reminded of the time that
I was almost run down by a giant tricycle being ridden by about seven
pre-teenagers, pulling a wheelbarrow spilling over with bleating goats,
6 Introduction
***
I cannot launch into this book without pausing here in the introduction to
reflect on the unprecedented moment in history at which I am finishing
writing. Right now, in the spring of 2020, most of the world is in some degree
of lockdown because of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Most businesses
are shut; only essential workers are working outside of the home; people are
under orders to stay at home as much as possible, not to gather in groups, and
to wear a mask and maintain at least six feet of distance between themselves
and anyone who is not a member of their household. Around the world, with
the exception of a few outlier states and countries, our streets are empty, and
people move as far away from one another as possible, avoiding physical in-
teraction. Over the course of about a week in March 2020, our movement
through cities and our micronegotiations and interactions changed com-
pletely; they have become minimal, fearful, tentative, and a constant matter
of conscious reflection.4
In other words, movement in cities has become, at least for the moment,
the opposite of what I spend this book arguing characterizes typical urban
life and movement. The COVID-19 crisis has changed just about everything
that I have written about here. I developed a picture of cities as defined by
proximity among strangers, and shifting and fluid bodily norms for personal
distance and interaction. I explored how city dwellers develop an inculcated
Introduction 7
and unreflective sense of risk and safety that helps them move competently
through space but also recreates biases. All of this has been upended. We are
all exceptionally reflective as we move through space now, and the distances
between us are uniform and rigidly calculated. All other people on our
streets show up as immediate threats. Our embodied interactions have been
reduced to almost nothing. Our sense of risk and safety has been thrown into
chaos; everything seems risky and we have little to no settled or expert ability
to determine how risky a situation is, not least because threats are mostly
invisible.
I spend a great deal of time in this book talking about spatial agency and
its importance for the flourishing of city dwellers. Spatial agency is our ability
to autonomously occupy, move through, and use space, as well as our ability
to mark and transform it in accordance with our needs and desires. I explore
what enables and undermines spatial agency, and I try to demonstrate its im-
portance to city dwellers. But all at once, our spatial agency has been radically
diminished. Our mobility has been dramatically reduced, both at the local
level and in terms of long-distance travel. In the places we are still allowed
to go to, how we move through and use space is tightly controlled and sur-
veilled. In Chapters 5 and 6, I discuss the fallout from the severe restrictions
on spatial agency faced by residents in divided Berlin and apartheid South
Africa. We are facing similar, and in some ways even more draconian, spa-
tial restrictions and surveillance now, although it is at least in large part for
the good cause of public health.5 So many people right now are joking about
throwing themselves into home improvements; but I think there’s a deeper
fact at issue here about homes being the only place we can currently exer-
cise spatial agency (if anywhere, since many people don’t have safe homes, or
any privacy or power within them, or the resources to work on them). This
home-directed spatial agency is fundamentally anti-urban, and if this book
is right, it is a serious hit to the conditions for our flourishing as city dwellers.
Right now, in May 2020, it is too soon to tell whether this is just an aber-
rant phase that will go down in history as an odd time, or whether every-
thing about how we use city space and move through and dwell in cities has
changed forever and has rendered this book itself an exercise in historical
documentation of what used to be. Either way, and as demoralizing as it is to
have all the phenomena I have been painstakingly studying as characteristic
of our way of life suddenly ripped away, I do think that one of my core theses
has been proved true by this crisis: I argue that our agency and experiences
are planted in space and rooted in motion; our sense of territory and place
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that period the same succession may begin again with great
exactness.
22 Ideler, Hist. Unters. p. 208.
The near coincidence of the solar and lunar periods in this cycle of
19 years, was undoubtedly a considerable discovery at the time
when it was first accomplished. It is not easy to trace the way in
which such a discovery was made at that time; for we do not even
know the manner in which men then recorded the agreement or
difference between the calendar day and the celestial phenomenon
which ought to correspond to it. It is most probable that the length of
the month was obtained with some exactness by the observation of
eclipses, at considerable intervals of time from each other; for
eclipses are very noticeable phenomena, and must have been very
soon observed to occur only at new and full moon. 23
23 Thucyd. vii. 50. Ἡ σελήνη ἐκλείπει· ἐτύγχανε γὰρ
π α ν σ έ λ η ν ο ς οὖσα. iv. 52, Τοῦ ἡλίου ἐκλιπές τι ἐγένετο π ε ρ ὶ
ν ο υ μ η ν ί α ν. ii. 28. Νουμηνίᾳ κατὰ σ ε λ ή ν η ν (ὥσπερ καὶ
μόνον δοκεῖ εἶναι γίγνεσθαι δυνατὸν) ὁ ἡλίος ἐξέλιπε μετὰ
μεσημβρίαν καὶ πάλιν ἀν ἐπληρώθη, γενόμενος μηνοειδὴς καὶ
ἀστέρων τινῶν ἐκφανέντων.
While men were becoming familiar with the fixed stars, the
planets must have attracted their notice. Venus, from her brightness,
and 127 from her accompanying the sun at no great distance, and
thus appearing as the morning and evening star, was very
conspicuous. Pythagoras is said to have maintained that the evening
and morning star are the same body, which certainly must have been
one of the earliest discoveries on this subject; and indeed we can
hardly conceive men noticing the stars for a year or two without
coming to this conclusion.
Jupiter and Mars, sometimes still brighter than Venus, were also
very noticeable. Saturn and Mercury were less so, but in fine
climates they and their motion would soon be detected by persons
observant of the heavens. To reduce to any rule the movements of
these luminaries must have taken time and thought; probably before
this was done, certainly very early, these heavenly bodies were
brought more peculiarly under those views which we have noticed as
leading to astrology.
At a time beyond the reach of certain history, the planets, along
with the sun and moon, had been arranged in a certain recognized
order by the Egyptians or some other ancient nation. Probably this
arrangement had been made according to the slowness of their
motions among the stars; for though the motion of each is very
variable, the gradation of their velocities is, on the whole, very
manifest; and the different rate of travelling of the different planets,
and probably other circumstances of difference, led, in the ready
fancy of early times, to the attribution of a peculiar character to each
luminary. Thus Saturn was held to be of a cold and gelid nature;
Jupiter, who, from his more rapid motion, was supposed to be lower
in place, was temperate; Mars, fiery, and the like. 34
34Achilles Tatius (Uranol. pp. 135, 136), gives the Grecian and
Egyptian names of the planets.
Egyptian. Greek.
Saturn Νεμεσέως Κρόνου ἀστὴρ φαίνων
Jupiter Ὀσίριδος Δῖος φαέθων
Mars Ἡρακλεοῦς Ἀρέος πυρόεις
Venus Ἀφροδίτης ἑώσφορος
Mercury Ἀπόλλωνος Ἑρμοῦ στίλβων
The notion which led to the usual designations of the days of the
week is not easily unravelled. The days each correspond to one of
the heavenly bodies, which were, in the earliest systems of the
world, conceived to be the following, enumerating them in the order
of their remoteness from the earth: 36 Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun,
Venus, Mercury, the Moon. At a later period, the received systems
placed the seven luminaries in the seven spheres. The knowledge
which was implied in this view, and the time when it was obtained,
we must consider hereafter. The order in which the names are
assigned to the days of the week (beginning with Saturday) is,
Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus; and
various accounts are given of the manner in which one of these
orders is obtained from the other; all the methods proceeding upon
certain arbitrary arithmetical processes, connected in some way with
astrological views. It is perhaps not worth our while here to examine
further the steps of this process; it would be difficult to determine
with certainty why the former order of the planets was adopted, and
how and why the latter was deduced from it. But there is something
very remarkable in the universality of the notions, apparently so
fantastic, which have produced this result; and we may probably
consider the Week, with Laplace, 37 as “the most ancient monument
of astronomical knowledge.” This period has gone on without
interruption or irregularity from the earliest recorded times to our own
days, traversing the extent of ages and the revolutions of empires;
the names of the ancient deities which were associated with the
stars have been replaced by those of the objects of the worship of
our Teutonic ancestors, according to their views of the
correspondence of the two mythologies; and the Quakers, in
rejecting these names of days, have cast aside the most ancient
existing relic of astrological as well as idolatrous superstition.
36 Philol. Mus. No. 1.
It is not easy to say with whom this notion originated. Some parts
of it are obvious. The appearance of the sky naturally suggests the
idea of a concave Sphere, with the stars fixed on its surface. Their
motions during any one night, it would be readily seen, might be
represented by supposing this Sphere to turn round a Pole or Axis;
for there is a conspicuous star in the heavens which apparently
stands still (the Pole-star); all the others travel round this in circles,
and keep the same positions with respect to each other. This
stationary star is every night the same, and in the same place; the
other stars also have the same relative position; but their general
position at the same time of night varies gradually from night to night,
so as to go through its cycle of appearances once a year. All this
would obviously agree with the supposition that the sky is a concave
sphere or dome, that the stars have fixed places on this sphere, and
that it revolves perpetually and uniformly about the Pole or fixed
point.
But this supposition does not at all explain the way in which the
appearances of different nights succeed each other. This, however,
may be explained, it appears, by supposing the sun also to move
among the stars on the surface of the concave sphere. The sun by
his brightness makes the stars invisible which are on his side of the
heavens: this we can easily believe; for the moon, when bright, also
puts out all but the largest stars; and we see the stars appearing in
the evening, each in its place, according to their degree of splendor,
as fast as the declining light of day allows them to become visible.
And as the sun brings day, and his absence night, if he move
through the circuit of the stars in a year, we shall have, in the course
of that time, every part of the starry sphere in succession presented
to us as our nocturnal sky.
This notion, that the sun moves round among the stars in a year,
is the basis of astronomy, and a considerable part of the science is
only the development and particularization of this general
conception. It is not easy to ascertain either the exact method by
which the path of the sun among the stars was determined, or the
author and date of the discovery. That there is some difficulty in
tracing the course of the sun among the stars will be clearly seen,
when it is considered that no 130 star can ever be seen at the same
time with the sun. If the whole circuit of the sky be divided into twelve
parts or signs, it is estimated by Autolycus, the oldest writer on these
subjects whose works remain to us, 38 that the stars which occupy
one of these parts are absorbed by the solar rays, so that they
cannot be seen. Hence the stars which are seen nearest to the place
of the setting and the rising sun in the evening and in the morning,
are distant from him by the half of a sign: the evening stars being to
the west, and the morning stars to the east of him. If the observer
had previously obtained a knowledge of the places of all the principal
stars, he might in this way determine the position of the sun each
night, and thus trace his path in a year.
38 Delamb. A. A. p. xiii.
In this, or some such way, the sun’s path was determined by the
early astronomers of Egypt. Thales, who is mentioned as the father
of Greek astronomy, probably learnt among the Egyptians the results
of such speculations, and introduced them into his own country. His
knowledge, indeed, must have been a great deal more advanced
than that which we are now describing, if it be true, as is asserted,
that he predicted an eclipse. But his having done so is not very
consistent with what we are told of the steps which his successors
had still to make.
The Circle of the Signs, in which the sun moves among the stars,
is obliquely situated with regard to the circles in which the stars
move about the poles. Pliny 39 states that Anaximander, 40 a scholar
of Thales, was the first person who pointed out this obliquity, and
thus, as he says, “opened the gate of nature.” Certainly, the person
who first had a clear view of the nature of the sun’s path in the
celestial sphere, made that step which led to all the rest; but it is
difficult to conceive that the Egyptians and Chaldeans had not
already advanced so far.
39 Lib. ii. c. (viii.)
40 Plutarch, De Plac. Phil. lib. ii. cap. xii. says Pythagoras was the
author of this discovery.
The diurnal motion of the celestial sphere, and the motion of the
moon in the circle of the signs, gave rise to a mathematical science,
the Doctrine of the Sphere, which was one of the earliest branches
of applied mathematics. A number of technical conceptions and
terms were soon introduced. The Sphere of the heavens was
conceived to be complete, though we see but a part of it; it was
supposed to turn about the visible pole and another pole opposite to
this, and these poles were connected by an imaginary Axis. The
circle which divided the sphere exactly midway between these poles
was called the Equator (ἰσημέρινος). 131 The two circles parallel to
this which bounded the sun’s path among the stars were called
Tropics (τροπικαί), because the sun turns back again towards the
equator when he reaches them. The stars which never set are
bounded by a circle called the Arctic Circle (ἄρκτικος, from ἄρκτος,
the Bear, the constellation to which some of the principal stars within
that circle belong.) A circle about the opposite pole is called
Antarctic, and the stars which are within it can never rise to us. 41
The sun’s path or circle of the signs is called the Zodiac, or circle of
animals; the points where this circle meets the equator are the
Equinoctial Points, the days and nights being equal when the sun is
in them; the Solstitial Points are those where the sun’s path touches
the tropics; his motion to the south or to the north ceases when he is
there, and he appears in that respect to stand still. The Colures
(κόλουροι, mutilated) are circles which pass through the poles and
through the equinoctial and solstitial points; they have their name
because they are only visible in part, a portion of them being below
the horizon.
41 The Arctic and Antarctic Circles of modern astronomers are
different from these.
We may here remark the first instance of that which we shall find
abundantly illustrated in every part of the history of science; that man
is prone to become a deductive reasoner;—that as soon as he
obtains principles which can be traced to details by logical
consequence, he sets about forming a body of science, by making a
system of such reasonings. Geometry has always been a favorite
mode of exercising this propensity: and that science, along with
Trigonometry, Plane and Spherical, to which the early problems of
astronomy gave rise, have, up to the present day, been a constant
field for the exercise of mathematical ingenuity; a few simple
astronomical truths being assumed as the basis of the reasoning.
Sect. 11.—Eclipses.
Eclipses of the sun and moon were from the earliest tunes
regarded with a peculiar interest. The notions of superhuman
influences and relations, which, as we have seen, were associated
with the luminaries of the sky, made men look with alarm at any
sudden and striking change in those objects; and as the constant
and steady course of the celestial revolutions was contemplated with
a feeling of admiration and awe, any marked interruption and
deviation in this course, was regarded with surprise and terror. This
appears to be the case with all nations at an early stage of their
civilization.