In Charles Tilly’s essay “What Good Is Urban History?

,” he explores how urban history lets us

locate global social processes within small social life. While building on Lewis Mumford’s
argument he mentions how Mumford showed that there is a close connection between internal
lives of cities and the particular configurations of power and production within which they lay.
While reading the essay I was reminded of the opening of "All that is Solid Melts into Air" by
Marshall Berman where he demonstrates how the political and urban design of contemporary
cities are isomorphic. Marshall uses the ex-nihilo creation of Brasilia, the capital city of Brazil, by
President Juscelino Kubitschek as an example.1 Brasilia was built to resemble a jet and looks
dynamic but is a dismal city to live in as there are hardly any public spaces. Marshall writes,
“There is a deliberate absence of public space in which people can meet and talk, or simply look
at each other and hang around. The great tradition of Latin urbanism, in which city life is
organised around a plaza mayor, is explicitly rejected.”

A map of Brasilia, which was planned by the disciples of the left wing architect Le Corbusier in the 1950s to resemble a jet.2

The physical transformation of a city also sometimes lead to social transformation. The close
connection between the internal lives and the configuration of social also creates to borrow a
phrase from Richard Sennet’s “The Hidden Injuries of Class,” a “class consciousness.” In the
modern cities the same road which drove poor out of sight now brings them back directly into
everyone's line of vision. Frequent encounters lead to the internalisation of “class
consciousness” and can lead us to understanding what Charles Tilly tries to argue that “
purposive action leads to durable and systemic social structures.”

1
Berman, Marshall, 1940-2013. All That Is Solid Melts into Air : the Experience of Modernity. New York
:Simon and Schuster, 1981.
2
https://www.udg.org.uk/publications/articles/brasilia-master-plan