Urbanity as a City's Heritage

Abstract

Urbanity has been a key concept to describe western cities since the beginning of the 20th century. But the importance of urbanity is no longer self-evident in global cities since the pivotal moment of 1980/90, when we witnessed the acceleration of flux, the emergence of megacities and the transformation of capitalism. At the same time, urban heritage became of greater interest. Then, as urbanity weakened, it began to be defended by public policies, local commitments and activists in a new way: as collective memories and palimpsest traces. In this article, I consider two examples in the French city of Saint-Etienne to illustrate the heritagization of urbanity: an exhibition about the memory of Algerian miners, and the dramatic demolition of a high-rise building that created a great stir because of its local symbolic significance. These two examples show that urbanity keeps a great place in the imaginary of urban dwellers, including the elites. From a general point of view, we try to preserve the values that we attach to cities, perhaps more than trying to preserve the cities themselves.

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Urbanity became an important concern for urban anthropology during the 1970s, when new accounts of Louis Wirth's works were proposed (Prato and Pardo, 2013). It was instrumental, for example, to conceive the city as a singular institution in opposition to the countryside. The city, the place par excellence of diversity, openness to the world, cultural dissent and subcultures, is also the place of ‘cultural repertoires’ and productions, in which ‘flows of meaning’ from the outside come together in what Hannerz called an ‘inclusive cultural swirl’ (1992: 204). Urbanity contributes to make cities not just densely built, organized, and inhabited spaces, but places that ‘take a specific significance for the resident […] in so far as their social forms give meaning to “who we are”’ (Prato and Pardo, 2013: 97). Urbanity is what makes a city distinct from the countryside, from a suburban residential area, an urban periphery or a bedroom town. Most authors, whether anthropologists, architects, artists or writers, tend to implicitly associate the notion of urbanity with ‘cities proper’¹ and their peculiar characters. Rather than as a built-in quality of the city, urbanity operates as a nexus, a dynamic link of public spaces and urban functions, as a particular atmosphere blending anonymity of passers-by and fondness for some places, a set of complex forms of mobility, of social skills, an art of living, an ethic of the common good in public spaces (Pichon et al. 2014).

Urbanity is thus linked to a concrete and at the same time relational understanding of the city – a process that is neither new nor specific to anthropologists. Three great intellectuals – the sociologist Georg Simmel, the philosopher Walter Benjamin and the critic Siegfried Kracauer – shared similar views at the beginning of the 20^th century. They envisaged the modern city as a place marked by a radical discontinuity of experience, capitalism, myriad signs and commodification (Frisby, 1986). According to Frisby, they focused on the local dimension of experiences, on the immediacy of social relations, on the sensations prompted by the fellow city dwellers we come across in the street as much as by the larger urban spectacle. But it is also about the mental images we form of our past and the way we process those images to seize the materiality of the city – something Maurice Halbwachs, a Parisian contemporary of Benjamin's, called our collective memory. Thus, urbanity also refers to the peculiar urban character of those who live in a city. It tightly ties ways of life, knowledge, skills and attitudes with a particular place from which we draw our memories. And although it has its roots in ancient history, it is more often associated with European and Western modernity.

Nonetheless this notion of urbanity no longer seems to be self-evident. Anthropologists have pointed to its limitations, particularly in understanding non-western cities in which different territories and ways of life coexist, and in which interactions are often circumscribed to individuals from the same villages or communities – in order to maintain a bond with their origins – rather than ranging across the spatial and social contexts of the city (Parry, 2012).² Whether in Europe or elsewhere in the world, the notion of the city is sometimes vanishing into urban spaces that can hardly be delimited. In a growing number of densely built-up areas between cities, urban functions have become hard to identify, and life is no different from that in many other small towns where urbanites come to live. Would we be witnessing the ‘end of cities’ that was announced over three decades ago (Chombart de Lauwe, 1982)? In a short text published in 2005, Sassen questioned the term ‘urbanity’ as too charged with ‘a Western sense of cosmopolitanism of what public space is or should be’ (2005: 1). She proposed replacing it with ‘cityness’ as a tool ‘to detect urbanities that may be constituted in very different ways’ (2005: 2) and to account for those cities where urbanity no longer has a shared meaning for the communities that coexist in them.

Urbanity, however, has not disappeared. It remains a useful concept for understanding western cities as they are defined by the ways in which humans take possession of their spaces, by the social features put in place by residents and visitors, by the outsiders’ practices and representations. Urbanity as a source of social bond permanently hinges on the city's alterations – it is a way of life, a ‘work of urban society on itself’, as Joseph has put it (1984, cited by Forêt 2010: 2). It would be nonetheless problematic to generalize it. Instead, we need to rethink it in light of the transformations that all cities of the world are currently undergoing. Urbanity can designate a set of specific qualities of city dwellers, or a specific link between residents and a set of places that we call a city; it can express the abstract ideal of a city dweller or shape the actual biography of an individual living in cities laden with history. But we could hardly claim that it encompasses the whole range of lifestyles that can be observed in today's urban spaces – spaces that have become increasingly diverse, in which we can barely identify any ‘city centre’ as its core place of expression. Yet the notion of urbanity continues to be fiercely defended by scholars, professionals and local authorities.³ How are we to explain this renewed interest? We are not proposing an epistemology of the concept of urbanity, nor are we outlining an overview of its uses, which remains to be written. Instead, we propose the following hypothesis: urbanity is nowadays as embedded in the heritage- and memory-making of the city as it is in its practices or lifestyles.⁴ To illustrate our point, we will briefly consider the city of Saint-Etienne.⁵

‘Saint-Etienne – an invisible heritage?’⁶

Saint-Étienne is an emblematic city of the first industrial revolution in France, combining coal, metallurgy (at first for arms industry, then for bicycles) and textiles. It remains one of the few French cities with a significant proportion of working-class population, e.g. in mechanics and technical textiles. It was the birthplace of major commercial companies: Casino, the last large company still active in Saint Etienne, and Manufrance,⁷ the first large mail order company in France. Two municipal museums were created around the city's industrial background: the Museum of Art and Industry, established in 1889, and the Mining Museum, which opened in 1991 thanks to an association of former engineers of the coal mines. The ties with its industrial history were also openly asserted by the Cité du Design, a national cultural institution that opened in 2009 at the crossroads of industrial crafts, public space design and industry.

In the 19^th century, Saint-Étienne, whose ‘plumes of smoke rising from the chimneys were transformed into sprays of flame’ (Vachon, 2013: 93), reminded travellers of ‘the Cyclops’ lair’ (ibid.) or, more prosaically, of the English city of Birmingham. Today, like many other cities, it seems to hesitate in establishing its heritage. The city is swayed by institutional and political schemes that tend to confine this history and its imaginary to specially dedicated places, bound to a certain local mythology and likely to be revised according to the needs of the moment, and by a social memory, a commitment to its heritage and a teeming fondness of the traces of its industrial past that exceeds institutional history and heritage sites. It is as if heritages other than those encapsulated in museums, urban landscapes other than known tourist destinations, memories, and stories other than those of official speeches, were proliferating. Let us consider two examples. Former Moroccan and Algerian miners, who were the majority in underground mines from the 1950s onwards, are less and less reluctant to speak to ethnologists. Some of them take their families to the Mining Museum, often for the first time, for the opening of an exhibition or the presentation of a book on their story,⁸ but are reluctant to visit the museum's permanent exhibition. They became aware that they took part in the social and trade-union history of the city (Gauthier, 2013: 166). They remember the cafés in the ‘Arab quarter’, where they used to gather and listen to music, play cards and meet with their compatriots. Today, they affirm the close ties between their native Kabylia and the city of Saint-Étienne, and they defend the memory of that bond. Above all, while their work in the mine and the hardship of family distance are still vivid in their memory, what emerges from the testimonies is their discovery of the city, their participation in the social life of Saint-Étienne and their desire to share their own memories.

The second example is the 2011 demolition of the Plein Ciel tower block in the Montreynaud district, where the city's last large social housing complex was built in the early 1970s. The event was documented by the ethnologist Anna Juan Cantavella and partially reprinted in a booklet published by the city of Saint-Étienne. The decision to blast the building triggered a major public debate in Saint-Étienne. A large majority of the residents (72%) voted in favour of demolishing the building, which was rumoured to be sinking a few millimetres each day. However, memory activists, professors from the school of architecture and other citizens argued against the demolition, seeing the building as a symbol of former urban projects, a unique architectural feature in France (it was topped by a water tower), a mark of the city, a ‘beacon’ telling travellers that they were arriving in Saint-Étienne (Juan Cantavella et al., 2014). Thousands of people witnessed the demolition, stationed in various points of the city, cameras, recorders, smartphones or video cameras in hand.⁹ Various positions were taken. For some, the building had to be preserved as a historical monument; the Minister of Culture was called upon to save it from demolition. For others, it represented the latest instance of a functional approach to urban planning that was held responsible for the ‘ills of the suburbs’. Some were attached to it as to an emblem which, as such, brought their district closer to the rest of the city as a whole; others saw it as the symbol of the social and urban distress of the Priority Urbanization Zone (ZUP). What is notable in all these positions is that they revolved around heritage and collective memory – a Saint-Étienne memory of modern architecture which resulted in a popular publication sold in newsstands.

Those buildings, urban landscapes or urban practices that are valued or whose memory is defended present a unique feature. They embody lifestyles and settings that were largely despised in the past decades, atmospheres and places that bring to the surface disparaged facets of local identity and society. The issue is nonetheless ambiguous: the mobilization against the demolition of the Plein Ciel building was done in the name of its architectural singularity, of its iconic function in the urban landscape, in the name of the ‘workers’ – but mostly by those who did not live in the district.

These forms of memorial transmission and heritage-making, or ‘heritagization’, can be described as ‘weak’.¹⁰ They remain closely linked to the territory of Saint-Étienne and to local forms of communication. Yet, if we consider the likely commodification of almost everything that makes peoples and communities unique, where any symbolic production, individual or collective, can acquire an economic value, then what peculiarly ‘belongs’ to a social group can quickly become a commodity. In Saint-Étienne, however, the memory of immigration exhibited in the museum, or the urban walks organized by the city's Ville d’art et d’histoire service (which now include the Montreynaud district), remain clearly non-commodified; although we have witnessed the arrival of T-shirts praising the ‘gaga’ patois¹¹ and other stereotypes of the city (beausseigne.com). Heritage and collective memory can be sandwiched between two forces. On the one side, there are the processes of cultural homogenization enhanced over the last 30 years by the considerable growth of meanings and the cultural exchanges they triggered (Hannerz, 1992): neither the mining heritage nor contemporary architecture in Saint-Étienne is immune to this trend. On the other side, there are the increasingly powerful claims of cultural difference and localism, portrayed as a defence against globalization and what Harvey called the time–space compression (1990). Thus, cultural heritage and collective memory are in the awkward position of feeding the global market via tourism, folklore and demand for the exotic, while being at the same time tools of resistance against neo-capitalism; they allow for the prevalence of different forms of universality (economic, cultural and legal), while at the same time foster the preservation of forms of exceptionality (Labadi and Long, 2010: 11 f.). In Saint-Étienne, the commodification of heritage has not yet reached this point. The local context is not really appropriate for it, and we have argued elsewhere how working-class memory could serve anti-capitalist claims (Rautenberg, 2012). Elsewhere, as in neighbouring Lyon, the architect Tony Garnier, a pioneer of functionalism, and the famous Canuts, heroes of the labour movement and anarcho-syndicalism, are major resources for the heritage-making of a city included in the list of World Heritage Cities since 1998. Not all cities have the same relationship with their past, even when they look especially committed to heritage-making.

Transformation of cities, complex heritages and memories

When we look closely, we realize that this complex entanglement of heritage and memory, which coincide with the diversity of urban societies, is not recent. It is actually a key feature of modern urbanity. Urban collective memory was already a core concern for Maurice Halbwachs; it enabled him to encompass the material dimension of the city in his sociology, thus avoiding the trap of reifying memory into which recent works have fallen (see Gensburger, 2011). The city is indeed a ‘palimpsest territory’ (Corboz, 2009) mixing public policies and living practices, imagination and appropriation. It piles up layers of human activity, lived stories, spatial planning, conflicts and destructions. It is the space of mobility, movement and cross-fertilization. It is the place par excellence of culture (Hannerz, 1992) and of cultures (referred to as ‘communities’ in the Chicago tradition).

The early 1990s saw a double shift in urban studies and in memory and heritage studies. According to Amin and Graham (1997), a geographer and an urban planner respectively, the emphasis at that time was mostly on diversity. Urban studies were booming, they noted, following the fascination for the urban in western countries. Writers, sociologists, geographers and philosophers were rediscovering cities and emphasizing their uniqueness. They confronted authors who predicted the emergence of a more or less uniform urbanity throughout the world (Amin and Graham, 1997: 412). Rules became more volatile (Thrift, 1994) in a world that became globalized, largely reorganized around spaces of flux leading to the major cities, the megacities (Castells, 1989); yet the diversity of the cities persisted in its vernacular landscapes (Krase, 2012), in our images of them (Robins, 1996), in bitter struggles over the appropriation of local goods and commerce (Zukin, 1995).

In this rich epistemology of the city, urban studies revolved around three main concerns, not unrelated to heritage: the rediscovery of urban centres, the role of cities for economic development and the debates on the importance of ‘creative cities’ (Amin and Graham, 1997: 413). However, Amin and Graham do not believe that these concerns fully account for the variety of cities and their internal diversity. In their view, they reflect the ideology of the time, which emphasized the role of the economy as the main motor of urban growth (Castells, 1989). These approaches may be relevant in explaining how new urban forms relate to financial economics, digital creativity or the media industry; however, it would be a mistake to extend them to all cities and neighbourhoods. The city, in fact, is defined by a co-presence of multiple spaces, multiple temporalities and multiple networks of relationships, linking together places, ideas and knowledge in global networks of economic, social and cultural change (Dematteis, 1988). We should add, with Agier (1999), that cities include slums, townships and suburbs, all those places that he calls ‘banlieues’, banned places that escape the control of authorities in the city centre, where people live in deprivation but also where they use alternative rules to invent everyday life. We must beware of the illusion of unifying the city through consumption (Zukin, 1995), as urban policies often do. The city remains a place of differentiation and hidden discrimination, even if all inhabitants have become consumers. This diversity is the source of the social and cultural dynamics of cities and triggers different forms of temporality and collective memories.

At the same time, heritage and collective memory have become critical political and social issues. In 2002, an inventory was made of 196 memory and heritage initiatives in France that had been taken on by local and national authorities since 1976 as part of the various measures implemented within city policies (Debost, 2005). The issues of memory have mainly concerned immigration, even though pivotal works on working-class memories were carried out by historians and sociologists since the 1970s. A key date was 1996, when Yamina Benguigui released Mémoires d’immigrés, a documentary on Algerian immigration to France based on migrants’ testimonies. The film was shown in local cinemas and social centres and became the subject of numerous debates. It also prompted a wealth of studies on the subject, bringing together ethnographers, social workers and artists. Most of these actions aimed at strengthening local social bonds and exposing the history of migrants, largely unknown at that time. Artists and even ethnographers were asked to become impromptu social workers by getting involved in projects that aimed to ‘revamp social bonds’. Despite this interest in the local, the Jacobinism of French urban policies persisted (Donzelot, 2006). These actions were not intended to enhance a sense of communality, nor to reinforce alternative collective identities. Urban memory had become a ‘new subject of public action’ (Forêt, 2005), a ‘magic word’ that opened a flow of state and local public subsidies, especially since urban minorities were often considered part of the tradition (Raulin, 2009).

After a few years of relative disinterest, the 2010s have seen a significant revival of works on collective memory and heritage in France. This is particularly the case in relation to migrants, following UNESCO's Year of Intercultural Dialogue in 2008. A ‘scientific interest grouping’ (gis) on Heritage Institution and Intercultural Practices (Institutions patrimoniales et pratiques interculturelles), open to the associative and cultural world, was created in 2010 under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture. The main goal of the actions carried out within this framework is to encourage better recognition of migrants’ memory and their social heritage in the public space, to create ‘bridges’ and ‘areas of common interest and identity rather than highlighting differences (…)’ (de Ville, 2013: 62). Jacobinism remains the ideological and political framework of these scientific and cultural policies.

In synthesis, the urban context that has emerged since the 1990s has led scholars to address two main issues – one more focused on heritage, the other on memory. They correspond to the dual movement of globalization and differentiation. On the one hand, some works associate the practices of social appropriation of the past with the gentrification of city centres, with urban renewal, with ‘creative neighbourhoods’; heritage appears here as an asset of urban development. On the other hand, many studies have focused on the social memory of working-class neighbourhoods, often largely populated by immigrants, as the collection of their memories was seen as instrumental to promoting respect for cultural diversity and increasing social balance at the local level. Both approaches attempt to respond to broad processes of urban transformation, including the rising price of estate, the financialization of capitalism and the demographic evolution of cities as a potential cause of social tensions (Harvey, 1990; Thrift, 2005). All these phenomena favour heritage-making to raise land rents and at the same time ‘enhance’ heritage memory by the inhabitants of impoverished neighbourhoods. Today, heritage and memory are regularly included in political agendas and have become instruments of public policy, notwithstanding possible differences at the national level (Rautenberg, 2012).

However, it would be a mistake to relate all heritage and memorial actions to public policies. They often reflect a growing interest in the memory and history of the sites where people live and work, taken up by the agents themselves (Smith et al., 2011). An old hypothesis formulated by the British historian Samuel (1994) would thus be validated. Samuel claimed that cultural and social enhancement of collective memory was the way in which ordinary people produce their history, that these levers would be used by social groups whose heritage is usually denied, so that they can take their place in a common narrative. Therefore, we would not face a mere ‘extension’ of heritage; instead, these responses address deeper political and social issues brought about by the reshaping of democracies and their concern for equality (Rosanvallon, 2011). It has to do with the growing complexity of urban societies, where social groups require participation in the public sphere in different forms. The example of Saint-Étienne shows that, when it comes to heritage and memory, social involvement and public institutions complete rather than withstand each other. We are not in a binary setting opposing a heritage-making imposed from above to processes emerging from the bottom. Instead, we witness alliances, complementarities and fiddling with heritage-making, which can only be understood by taking the local context into account.¹²

Conclusion: urbanity reclaimed

Despite its hazards, the urban character retains its place in our imaginations. Today, it is fiercely defended by politicians, urban planners and social scientists, as well as by non-institutional and even alternative agents in the city. For all of them, urbanity must be more than the sum of its parts. For public authorities, heritage-making, i.e. the preservation of urban landscapes, façades and street layouts through legal or economic means, is meant to prevent ‘traditional’ cities from deterioration and to preserve their ‘identity’. This heritage-making mainly concerns the city centres and sometimes working-class districts with industrial remains; it may be supplemented by a narrative built on the memory of the residents. We are not far from the ‘ethnic theme parks’ and neighbourhoods as described by Krase (2012), with working-class nostalgia replacing ethnicity and conflicts of memory replacing land issues. But urbanity is also seen as a heritage that artists, scholars, activists or simple inhabitants are committed to revive through a show, a ‘meet the author’ event or a public debate. These two attitudes complete rather than withstand each other: their common goal is to safeguard urbanity, be it in the shape of a façade or in daily practices of the inhabitants. Monuments, façades, industrial remains, commemorative plaques, allotments are no longer self-explanatory: they find their meanings in commemorative practices, in narratives, in a whole set of imageries that differ from the heritage-oriented aesthetics of gentrification and touristification. Beyond economy and land, the heritage-making of urbanity takes us back to Georg Simmel's ‘forms of urban life’. We are trying to preserve the values of the city rather than the cities themselves, an urban ‘time of the other’¹³ that is no longer there but whose memory we are committed to maintain.