This dissertation discusses the interconnections between coffee and urban life; the term “urbanity” is a central term in this discussion. The original Latin root of the word is “urbs”, or city. Urbanity generally connotes sophistication, politeness and polish; its antonyms include rustic and rural.
Urbanity is also a personal trait; being “citified” would be roughly synonymous.
In our everyday language the term “urbanity” is used in a somewhat greater variety of contexts. For some it indicates a densely populated city; for others a mental state of mind; while for others, it may be used to describe a city with a vibrant street life. Many of the informants use the term in various contexts, and their understanding of the word emphasizes meanings related to city density, solitude in the company of others and sociality on a semi-public level. The first factor highlighted by many of my informants is density. One informant, Ole, said:
A coffee bar is one of the most urban things in a city. It is here you find true urbanity…, urbanity that’s the special feeling of a densely packed room, where people come and go all the time, and where there’s always a buzz in the air, that’s urbanity.
The second feature the informants like to emphasize is the role of solitude and interaction between strangers; one informant, Olga, expressed the following about coffee bars:
It’s something urban, and it’s a bit of luxury. And you’re alone in the crowd. A place like this is somehow dynamic. You feel like you’re on your own, but then you can go out and find a slice of life. It’s all about the urban.
Anders, an informant who usually sits alone by the window in his favorite coffee bar, highlighted another aspect:
At the observation post here, by the window, looking out on the street, and the street looking in, maybe that’s the most urban feeling I get. Kind of lonely, kind of integrated in a mute relationship... between the city and me. See what I mean?
Olga uses the word “urban”, and Anders the phrase, “urban feeling”, which are closely related; the words are also used frequently by the other
informants. Olga emphasizes the blend of solitude and company, an observation that is shared by most of the informants.
The factors of friendships and common interests are defined by many of the informants as being typical traits of “urbanity”. Caroline, who often uses coffee bars as meeting places, draws attention to the social quality of coffee bars; in her words that special attribute – being a meeting place – concerns urbanity:
To have a place that is social, where you can go without a lot of formal procedures, only being a very cozy and relaxed place; that’s very urban. You just drop in.
Anders and several of my other informants also explicitly described the relationship coffee bars have to new customers:
I mean, we’re all strangers to each other at some level. Here it’s easy to observe; there’s a certain honesty to that observation, and that’s a special feeling as well. When I see someone I’ve never seen before entering the premises here at
Java, I feel comforted. This isn’t a club, it’s an open space.
That’s very urban.
On the basis of the interviews I have conducted, I would suggest that the term
‘urbanity’ is used by the coffee bar customers to express the following:
• A physically densely-packed space
• Sharing the same space without being befriended
• A space open to strangers, not only formally, but also in reality
• A space where people can meet and talk without being in a closed club or a private sphere
A range of studies in the field of urbanism describe the term in ways similar to the explanations given by my informants:
What I think of as urbanity is precisely making use of the density and differences in the city so that people find a more balanced sense of identification on the one hand with others who are like themselves but also a willingness to take risks with what is different, unknown.... It is these kinds of experiences that make people find out something about themselves that they didn’t know before. That’s what urbanity is at its best....To me, how to privilege the notion of difference, that is what urbanity is all about.
These reflections belong to Richard Sennett. It is cited from a lecture he gave in Copenhagen in 1994, where he was asked to elaborate on the meaning of the term urbanity (Grønlund 2007). Sennett’s view as expressed here is symptomatic of the often normative use the term has achieved. “Urbanity” is described as being something valuable, as a social and cultural quality for enriching urban life; and for Sennett, it is more than anything else “to privilege the notion of difference”.
Sennett has a clear understanding of the term “urbanity”, but in the following I would like to sketch out a more precise meaning, and less normative. From my perspective, the term is related to the rise in theories on urban life at the end of the nineteenth century, namely the thematization of the relationship between structure and agency in the growing metropolises
during this period in history. When Max Weber, Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel (among others) described the new challenging conditions for individuals in the urban landscape, they focused on a set of different complex conditions.
For Max Weber, the European city, only about 1000 years old, was distinctively different from other types of urban concentrations in history, first and foremost due to its development into a democratic administrative entity. Max Weber established a theory of the European city (in his book, The City5
Siebel’s view may be understood in relation to Georg Simmel’s essay
“Metropolis and Mental Life” from 1903 (Simmel 1950), which is an important milestone in the area. This essay is crucial to an understanding of how the human mental condition is altered by urbanization – the densifying of a physical entity. In his essay, Simmel undertakes a journey into the various types of psychological situations that a metropolis projects on individuals, and situations that only can occur in densely populated environments. He follows the tradition of Weber and establishes a firm
), as a phenomenon reflecting five distinct features. A European city as the cradle for the Western European democracy and modernity existed through a sharp division from the rural areas surrounding it, and often consisted of buildings enclosed by walls. A European city also contained a market (where goods were bought and sold), a class of free citizens, an independent political administration, and it was judicially autonomous.
Weber’s definition of the European city was connected to a specific time in history and lost relevance as the European national states gained dominance.
However, the national state built its fundament on these city structures, as Walter Siebel emphasizes {Siebel, 2000 #12}. Siebel defines what he calls
“European urbanity” as consisting of three components: “First, centrality: the contrast of town and country; second, a way of life: the polarization of everyday life into a private and a public sphere; third, a hope: European urbanity cannot be understood without the hope for emancipation that has always been associated with urban life.” He concludes that the classical European urbanity is more a memory than a reality; today he believes that urbanity is often destroyed through an escalating privatization of public spaces through rigid zoning policy and planning; through security and police policy and through new internal borders between immigrants and more wealthy citizens: “Heute aber ist die amerikanische Stadt zumindest für Teile der schwarzen Bevölkerung und die europäische Stadt zumindest für einige Migrantengruppen nicht mehr Ort der Integration, sondern Ort der
Ausgrenzung” (p. 34).
5 The City was published posthumously in 1921 as a part of Wirtschaft and Gesellschaft. This work was translated into English under the title Economy and Society in 1958 (Weber 1978).
division between rural and urban life. For Simmel, the big city represents modernity in its clearest form, where specialization and segmentation processes unfold, and thereby also pave the way for increased
individualization. Simmel carved out a theory on urban identity and a specific urban psychology.
The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli. Man is a differentiating creature. His mind is stimulated by the difference between a momentary impression and the one that preceded it. Lasting impressions, impressions which differ only slightly from one another, impressions which take a regular and habitual course and show regular and habitual contrasts—all these use up, so to speak, less consciousness than does the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing
impressions. These are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates. (Ibid.,. 414)
He states that a psychology adjusted to the needs of a rural reality was not only insufficient, but also dangerous when applied to an urban reality. In a rural environment individuals survived through personal knowledge and acceptance of all the other individuals, at an individual level. In the metropolis, it is necessary to create a distance to the other individuals, what Simmel labels as ‘blasé’.
…the metropolitan type of man – which, of course, exists in a thousand individual variants – develops an organ protecting him against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his external environment which would uproot him. He reacts with his head instead of his heart.
The need to depersonalize and to understand human beings in a more systemic context marks the transition from community to society6
This state where the value of roots is deflated, is also where the
cosmopolitan personality is created, and where the emancipating potential of the city is revealed.
; this is exactly what many of my informants identify as “urbanity”, a situation often existing in the coffee bars.
…the bodily proximity and narrowness of space makes the mental distance only the more visible. It is obviously only the obverse of this freedom if, under certain circumstances, one nowhere feels as lonely and lost as in the metropolitan crowd.
For here as elsewhere it is by no means necessary that the freedom of man be reflected in his emotional life as comfort.
(p. 414)
Simmel also interprets the urban sphere as a mechanism closely connected to the money economy – in German ‘geldwirtschaft’. Money is the physical manifestation of impersonal relations. A system where money is the essential exchange mechanism will in Simmel’s understanding by its own logic develop into a capitalistic society. Money enables the economy to work more efficiently. Vigorous competition results in an escalation of specialization, and thereby intensifies the division of labor. Georg Simmel states that capitalism and modernity are connected and mutually depend on the existence of an urban entity, and that this phenomenon also has an effect on the moral compass of most urban citizens.
Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference, becomes the common denominator of all values; irreparably it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability… (Simmel 1950, 420)
It is here in the big city that “urbanity” emerges as an independent and characteristic feature of modernity. The development of the cultural aspects of life of urban entities at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the
6 Another way to identify this schism is to use other terms from sociology: Ferdinand Tönnies uses terms such as ‘gemeinschaft’ to ‘gesellschaft’. For further reading see a textbook in sociology like Diana Kendall’s Sociology in our times (Kendall 2008, 128).
social psychological features as described by Georg Simmel add to and expand Max Weber’s definition.
Walter Benjamin, a later theorist, attempted to understand the totality of modern life, and developed a highly original project: The Arcades Project.
Portraying urban life in Paris at the turn of the century, he describes the city as “the capital of the nineteen century”. Paris was rebuilt using Baron von Haussmann’s new city plan and consisted of more easily controlled spatial features. The arcades that provide the title to Benjamin’s project mentioned above were iron-columned and glass-covered structures, and were mostly built in the 1820s and 1830s7
Benjamin focuses on the emergence of a new urban individual, the flâneur; a flâneur is literally translated as “stroller”. Benjamin found the term
‘flâneur’ in the work of the poet Charles Baudelaire. Benjamin identifies Baudelaire’s descriptions of the flâneur as the most poignant observations of the soul of modernity. Benjamin understood Baudelaire to be someone who investigated the fabric of the new urban capitalist society that had
materialized in the French capital during the middle of the nineteenth century. The flâneur is the individual who can overcome and identify himself with the contradictory situations that emerge in this society. The flâneur is a child of a society going through rapid and radical modernization, where the growth and emergence of capitalistic society based on mass consumption and wide spread commodification are the key requisites.
.
The arcades were in Benjamin’s time the most vibrant and lively public spaces of Paris; they were places full of visual pleasures and commoditized relations, and here in the midst of the maelstrom the flâneur finds his terrain8
The flâneur is a person who lives with the ambivalence of the huge urban structure. At one level the flâneur is a person who takes part in the flow of the masses; a person who can identify himself with the crowd, with the energy created through the totality of material and immaterial life in a huge city. The
. The flâneur moves slowly and without purpose, freed from the demands of work, consuming the streets with his eyes, and imagining, daydreaming, reflecting about the state of himself, and the state of the world as he explores it. As Amanda Williams has formulated it: “At the intersection of mobility, imagination, and urban visual culture stands the flâneur.” (Amanda Williams 2009, 46).
7 The American sociologist Richard Prouty writes in an essay called “The Origin of the Shopping “Mall (postet in his blog One way Street, aesthetics and politics 17.10.2009, (Prouty 2009)) that the arcades represented the most modern shopping environment the world had seen, and were the cradle for two defining new inventions in retailing: “With haggling time eliminated and fresh inventory immediately available, these innovations improved product turnover, efficiencies that would later make possible the large department stores. “
8 When Benjamin strolled the streets of Paris most of the original 150 arcades still existed, today there only about 20 left.
flâneur embraces the impersonality of the urban landscape, both mentally and physically. However, the flâneur also experiences the loss of traditional ties as troublesome; the flâneur also develops repulsive feelings for the
massiveness of this urban setting. Nevertheless, this understanding is overcome by a vital impulse to take part in modernity. Benjamin’s hero, the French poet Baudelaire, describes the modernity of the urban city, as a river one has to dive into, a “maelstrom”. There is no way back, modernity cannot be avoided, it has to be lived, not by resentments, but by participation.
Therefore Baudelaire’s descriptions of loss of meaning in a modern world, are often descriptions of solitude, of melancholia, of the outsider’s position and destiny. Modernity for Benjamin is not a one-way track to happiness and joy, but a complicated situation asked to be explored by every individual.
The flâneur is a person who has the capacity and the energy to operate in this mental landscape of double folded meaning; the flâneur is a character that personalizes what Georg Simmel understood as being the uniqueness of metropolitan life – the individual’s permanent inner conflict between detachment and attachment.
Urbanity understood in this context is more than anything else the daily absorption of modernity and its complicated and nerve intensifying potential.
As Simmel and Benjamin among others illustrate, urbanity is modernity in its essence. For the individual it is the endeavor to connect to a common cosmos on one level, and on another level, it is a permanent struggle to emancipate and fulfill private ambitions.
When Anton C. Zijderveld in his book: A Theory of Urbanity: The Economic and Civic Culture of Cities (Zijderveld 2008), identifies and uses the term “urbanity” he hints at that specific discussion on the effects of modernity that was raised by Simmel and Benjamin, amongst others.
Zijderveld avoids a clear definition; he also points towards the idea that urbanity is “... a vigorous and vital economic and civic culture.”
…lacking urbanity, that is, lacking a vigorous and vital economic and civic culture, is, in fact, robbed of its most essential source of energy and vitality. It is a source that is neither monetary and economic, nor administrative and political, but cultural. This culture consists of values, norms and meaning. Its ultimate goal is legitimacy and averting anomy. (ibid., 164)
In the current policy and planning discourse, urbanity is often used as an expression for the “good life” or, as Alan Latham identifies in his study of urban policy in Auckland, New Zealand (Latham 2003, 1701):
Urban policy practitioners, planners, architects and town hall administrators have over the past two decades rediscovered an enthusiasm and belief in urban life.
It is as Latham writes a: “..Belief in urban life”. This belief and enthusiasm is possibly a neoliberal revamped edition of the idea of urbanity, totally removed from the complexity Simmel and Benjamin emphasize. I therefore rebuff this one-dimensional insight and in this dissertation, I relate my definition of “urbanity” to the perception developed during the nineteenth century by sociological and psychological observations of metropolitan life.