Gerrylynn K. Roberts, ed. The American Cities and Technology Reader: Wilderness to Wired City. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. ix + 309 pp. $59.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-415-20086-8; $200.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-415-20085-1.

Reviewed by Zachary M. Schrag (Department of History, Columbia University)
Published on H-Urban (April, 2000)

Cities as Artifacts

"Cities are artifacts," writes Witold Rybczinski. "The telephone system is huge but largely invisible, and only part of the Great Wall or the Panama Canal can be seen at a time ... but a city can be experienced all of a piece."[1] Moreover, cities are composed of countless smaller artifacts, from vast aqueducts serving millions of people to tiny pagers clipped onto many an urban belt. In an effort to better understand cities by understanding artifacts, the Journal of Urban History has devoted three special issues to the theme of the city and technology, and Temple University Press has published several important studies as its series on Technology and Urban Growth.[2] Now, The American Cities and Technology Reader: Wilderness to Wired City attempts to package some of this and other similar material for undergraduates. It offers instructors a way to inject an urban history course with extra attention to the physical stuff of cities, or, though it is less likely, a way to add urban themes to a course on the history of technology. While the arrangement of the material in the reader is confusing and the scope narrow, the quality of the individual selections may make it a reasonable introduction to an important body of urban scholarship.

Though part of a larger series of three textbooks (on pre-industrial, European, and American cities' relationship with technology) and two other anthologies, the reader is designed to function on its own. Editor Gerrylynn K. Roberts of Britain's Open University has chosen thirty-one selections, most of them abridged articles from journals or collections, others abridgments of book chapters. Some of the selections are more compellingly argued than others, but all are well-written, thoroughly researched essays on important subjects. The contributors include some of the most prominent urban scholars on the subjects they know best: John Reps on colonial town planning, Kenneth Jackson on suburbanization, Clay McShane on pavement, Joel Tarr on sewers, and Manuel Castells and Peter Hall on information-age cities. The quality of the individual pieces is unquestionable, but as a teaching tool, the reader is less than the sum of its parts.

Unlike comparable anthologies on urban history or the history of technology, the reader includes no historiographical essay, nor is it broken down into chronological or thematic sections.[3] Perhaps the accompanying textbook, which was not submitted for review, explains how these particular works were chosen and arranged, but there is no such explanation in the reader itself. In a two-page introduction, Roberts writes that the goals of the series, and this reader, are "to show ... how towns and cities have been shaped by applications of a range of technologies [and] how such technological applications have been influenced by, for example, politics, economics, culture and the natural environment"(1). This statement requires some qualification.

First, the range of technologies discussed in the book is generally limited to construction techniques, city planning, and infrastructure (transportation, communications, power, water supply, and waste disposal). Except for one essay on the growth of high-tech manufacturing in twentieth-century Massachusetts, there is nothing on the industrial technology--from the steel mills of Pittsburgh to the shipyards of Portland--that attracted people to cities in the first place. There is nothing on the domestic technology--laundry, food preparation, cleaning--that made cities livable, or the health technology that kept their residents alive. You will not read about the military technology that knocked some cities down and saved others from destruction. Or about the technologies of entertainment, newsgathering, police, firefighting, commerce, and education, though these are so much a part of the qualitative distinction between city and countryside. Restricting the reader primarily to infrastructure is a reasonable choice, one made by the Journal of Urban History special issues and the Temple series as well. But it is worth remembering that from steam laundries to riot guns, there are many more city-specific technologies out there.

Second, despite Roberts's stated interest in the role of "politics, economics, culture and the natural environment," the articles here overwhelmingly emphasize public policy as the key to understanding technical change. In this vein, Carol Willis shows that skyscraper shapes responded as much to lot size and zoning laws as to architects' fancy, Paul Barrett argues that airplane size depended on the willingness of city governments to build larger runways, and Kenneth Corey explains that "the role of the state is fundamental to Singapore's development" in the era of information technology (272). (For the record, Singapore is not an American city and Roberts's excuse for including an article on it is weak). The key actors in most of these stories are politicians, officials, and political activists of one stripe or another.

Despite the lack of formal divisions, the thirty-one essays do proceed in rough chronological order (with a few baffling exceptions), and they can be placed into four rough categories. The first and largest category is a series of ten selections on colonial America, taken from three books.[4] These cover native, French, and Spanish settlements, as well as English colonies. Eight of these selections, four of them by John Reps, are mainly about town planning, and were presumably included to give readers a sense of what American towns were like before the application of industrial technologies to city building. In this section, only the two essays by Carl Condit on building techniques address what most readers will consider matters of technology, rather than of planning and landscape.

The next largest grouping consists of seven selections that examine the effect on urban form of transportation technology, from trolleys to passenger jets. The authors of these essays identify key political decisions that determined the ways in which these technologies were deployed, showing that private entrepreneurs could only use new technology to open land for development within the constraints imposed by government. Included are some very helpful essays comparing American transportation and land policies with the more restrictive regimes of Europe.

A third group consists of five selections that extrapolate from the history of transportation to gauge, or guess, the impact of digital telecommunications on development patterns in the late twentieth century and beyond. (The title of James Martin's article on the promise of telecommunications, "New Highways," makes the comparison explicit.) Comprising over half of the reader, these two groups of essays on transportation and communications are the heart of the book. Together, they sketch a narrative of important choices, and the capacity of new technology to bring disruption and waste as well as health and prosperity. These essays speak to each other, providing the fuel for many potential questions for discussions or exams.

In contrast, the remaining nine selections are something of a hodgepodge: two on metropolitan planning in the early twentieth century, two on waste disposal, and one each on urban hierarchy, prefabricated housing, skyscraper design, street lighting, and high-tech manufacturing. Individually, these essays are every bit as exciting as those on transportation and communications, and like those sections, they do explore the key role of policy in shaping technological decisions. But they remain isolated snapshots. For example, Mark Bouman's gorgeously illustrated article on public lighting in Chicago makes an important point about how a single technology can have multiple, not always compatible, uses. But without some kind of complement--an article on public lighting in a different city or era, or a piece by an author with a different interpretation of similar events--it is hard to know how Bouman's work would fit into a lesson plan.

The reader's most obvious flaw is that there is almost nothing on the hundred years between 1780 and 1880 except for a thirteen-page series of excerpts from William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis.[5] Cronon may well be the best single source on the role of technology in urban history in the early and mid-19th century, but surely there is more to say about this period of dynamic urban growth and technological change. Where is the Fairmount Water Works of 1815? The Croton Aqueduct? Cast-iron buildings? Suspension bridges? The telegraph? This gap not only glosses over important events; it also splits the book. In effect, one gets a seventy-five-page reader on colonial planning and building techniques, followed by a two-hundred-page reader on post-1880 infrastructure. An instructor using this reader will need more than a dash of Cronon to preserve a sense of continuity.

The second, and more serious, flaw is the methodological narrowness of the book. Roberts writes that she wants to "correct any illusion of perspective that all major changes in urban form and fabric might be sufficiently explained by technological innovations." (1) Indeed, twenty or so articles on political decisions about technology should be enough to kill any belief in technological determinism. But such a belief is a straw man to begin with. Forty years ago, perhaps, most histories of technology focused on invention. But in recent decades, historians have worked on a far more complicated narrative, of which the policy history presented in this anthology is just one part. To take two examples just from case studies of urban infrastructure, Mark Rose on agents of diffusion or Thomas Hughes on postmodern engineering could have added cultural and social forces to the reader's strong suits of politics and economics.[6]

In particular, the narrowness of the reader shows up in the near-total absence of any discussion of how race, class, and gender affected decisions about urban technologies. The focus on public works and buildings is partially to blame, for it excludes such smaller-scale technologies as beauty parlors and saloons, over which less powerful groups had more control. Even so, Roberts could still have put in some Dolores Hayden on feminist critiques of traditional housing design. Richard Harris's work on Toronto could have shown that higher housing standards were a mixed blessing for working-class families who could not afford electricity and piped-in water. Ronald Bayor might have reminded students that public investments can be used to reinforce racial boundaries.[7] Some selections do describe conflicts, but they are between members of the establishment, e.g., Thomas Adams vs. Lewis Mumford, rather than between broader social groups. As it stands, there is a danger of replacing one oversimplified narrative of inventors with an equally oversimplified story in which cities are homogeneous, atomic entities where planners and government officials make all the choices. Perhaps more seriously for a book targeted at undergraduates, the absence of stories about individual people, social justice, and the human consequences of technological decisions makes the book duller than it had to be. Many of the authors in this anthology have elsewhere written passionately about the shaping of the American landscape and control of public space, but Roberts has picked some of their driest work.

In a narrative history attempting to trace the evolution of urban technology, these omissions would be grave flaws. But this is a reader, intended to be used as part of a broader syllabus, in which the gaps can be filled by other readings or lectures. Like a cereal advertised as one part of a balanced breakfast, the reader does not give students everything they need but does give them much that is good for them. Given the high quality of the individual components, it may be possible to overcome the quirkiness of their selection and organization.

In short, The American Cities and Technology Reader fails to live up to its grandiose title, and making the pieces fit together will require some imagination on the part of the instructor. But it is a start in presenting the political economy of urban infrastructure.

Notes:

[1]. Witold Rybczinski, City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World (New York: Scribner, 1995), 35.

[2]. The Journal of Urban History special issues are May 1979, November 1987, and March 1999. Joel Tarr edited all three, collaborating with Mark Rose on the 1987 and 1999 issues. The introductory essays in each issue are brief but quite helpful. The Temple series includes its own anthology, Joel A. Tarr and Gabriel Dupuy, Technology and the Rise of the Networked City in Europe and America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), which, but for being out of print, is in general a much superior introduction to this literature than the reader being reviewed.

[3]. Alexander B. Callow, Jr., ed., American Urban History: An Interpretive Reader with Commentaries, 3d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Raymond A. Mohl, ed., The Making of Urban America, 2d ed. (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1997); and Tarr and Dupuy (n. 1, above) contain both introductions and section divisions. Stephen H. Cutcliffe and Terry S. Reynolds, eds., Technology and American History: A Historical Anthology from Technology and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) does without section divisions, but an ample historiographic essay puts the individual articles into context.

[4]. Michael P. Conzen, ed., The Making of the American Landscape (London and New York: Routledge, 1990); John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965); and Carl W. Condit, American Building: Materials and Techniques from the First Colonial Settlements to the Present, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).

[5]. William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).

[6] Mark H. Rose, Cities of Light and Heat: Domesticating Gas and Electricity in Urban America (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). Thomas Parke Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998).

[7]. Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981); Richard Harris, Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto's American Tragedy, 1900 to 1950 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), especially chapter 6; Ronald H. Bayor, "Roads to Racial Segregation: Atlanta in the Twentieth Century", Journal of Urban History 15 (November 1988): 3-21. It may be worth noting that thirty of the reader's thirty-one selections were written by men.

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Citation: Zachary M. Schrag. Review of Roberts, Gerrylynn K., ed., The American Cities and Technology Reader: Wilderness to Wired City. H-Urban, H-Net Reviews. April, 2000.
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