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SUPERLATIVE URBANISMS: The Necessity for Rhetoric in Social Theory

Bob Beauregard’s Voices of Decline is a wonderfully nuanced meditation on the ways cities are made.  His recent paper “City of Superlatives” turns attention from how we make cities to how we know about them.  Readers of this essay and these commentaries should understand that earlier drafts of Beauregard’s paper stimulated a rush of criticisms that soon became as long as the original essay.  I am happy that the editors of City and Community elected to publish these criticisms alongside the paper that stimulated them.  I am also grateful to Bob Beauregard for his spirited engagement in these debates.

Beauregard’s paper is essentially an extended complaint about the “rhetorical turn” (my term) in urban studies.  This he ascribes to many factors, including the advent of postmodern thought, globalization, and the structure of academic incentives and rewards.  Examining urbanists’ use of superlatives and firsts, plus advocates’ quest for paradigmatic pre-eminence, Beauregard pleads for relief from rhetorical excess as well as a better balance between engaged analysis and critical distance.  His principal points of empirical reference are the literatures on Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Miami—the upstart “brat pack” in urban studies.

The necessity for rhetoric

Let me get straight to the heart of the matter.  Beauregard dislikes what he perceives as rhetorical excess, leading as it seems to unnecessarily inflated claims, a crude boosterism, and exclusionary tendencies in theoretical discourse.  Nowhere in his catalogue of complaints does he recognize the gains that rhetoric brings.  My brief, in a nutshell, is that without these “superlative urbanisms”, we would still be mired in the old traditions—employing Chicago School precepts as the basis for understanding, and regarding the east coast and Midwest as home to the only cities of consequence.  But, truth be told, Los Angeles and Las Vegas are different, and are representative of certain urban trends emerging across the nation and elsewhere.  In this sense, the rhetoric of difference draws our attention to important correctives (counter-factuals, if you prefer) in theory-building.

There is another reason that firsts and superlatives have a proper place in urban discourse.  “Rhetoric,” as persuasion or argument, has a long and honorable tradition in human affairs.  (Think, for example, of the importance of metaphor in theory construction, as in the city as organism.)  The purpose of rhetoric is to persuade interlocutors of the validity of alternative propositions.  Hence, when advocates make boisterous claims on behalf of their city, they are simply doing what is necessary in order to scour the scales of dead traditions from others’ eyes.  Their rhetoric encourages new ways of seeing, and, as such, is a vital foundation in any emerging discourse (see Dear, 2000, Ch. 15, for a discussion of how this process has worked differently in geography and urban planning).  Had we not had the rhetorical rumblings that accompanied the birth of the Los Angeles School, for instance, I very much doubt we would today be seriously evaluating the claims of alternative urban theories.  And the success of LA’s rhetorical strategies has not been lost on the new kids on the block (from Las Vegas, Miami, etc).

And yet, if rhetoric is good, even necessary, how shall we distinguish among the competing claims of rhetoricians?

Standards of evidence

Argument proceeds in many different registers, but one of the most common hortatory devices is the appeal to evidence (of whatever kind).  In an essay that is deeply critical of the way some urban theorists marshal their facts, Beauregard is surprisingly inattentive to his own standards of evidence.

It is transparently clear that different standards of proof apply to Beauregard’s three principal evidentiary categories: superlatives, firsts, and paradigmatic shifts/claims.  The use of superlatives belongs to a long-established rhetorical tradition, as I have just outlined, in which language is properly used to draw attention and to persuade others of the value of one’s perspective.  These devices are intended to do little beyond commanding attention, however, and rarely endure as a justification for sustained analysis.  For instance, Gottdeiner’s 1991 claim for Orange County, California, as a suburban prototype gained little or no purchase, and he himself has since gone on to embrace Las Vegas as prototype.  Beauregard’s example of Camden, New Jersey, is an amusing case of the perils of overstatement, although equating urban theory with the place-marketing and publicity-seeking activities of civic boosters is seriously off-target!  In sum: I do not think it is worth getting overly exercised by the use of superlatives as openers in urban discourse.

Paradigmatic shifts/claims are much more difficult to measure or demonstrate.  Although Beauregard claims that the “quest for paradigmatic status” is the “main issue”, or the “real objective” of the upstart urbanists, no-one writing on Los Angeles (to stick with what I am familiar) is advocating a new paradigm.  The term is simply too confusing to be useful, and should promptly be deleted from this inquiry.  (For instance: a “paradigm” does not imply uniqueness, as Beauregard states, rather the reverse; moreover, a “prototype” is not the same as a paradigm; and so on.)  I prefer to employ the notion of a “school”, with its inherent presumption of multiple different classrooms, each requiring systematic assessment (Dear, 2002a).  The postmodern in me wishes most emphatically not to steer anyone toward a misplaced adherence to a single paradigm.

Finally, claims of first-place ranking are, on the face of it, often easily verified empirically; Miami either is, or is not, the murder capital of the USA.  But it is in this most straightforward of cases—standard empirical verification—that Beauregard does most damage to his position.  By lumping together Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Miami in a single breathless flourish of rejection, he ignores the fact that the present-day LA school of urbanism has emerged from almost two decades of sustained scholarly efforts.  With all due respect to contenders from Las Vegas and Miami (whose work I prize), the burgeoning evidence from these cities is nowhere near the storehouse of accumulated knowledge regarding LA.  Simply stated, there is already sufficient historical, contemporary, and comparative data to begin assessment of LA’s claims to prototypicality; this is not true of Las Vegas and Miami.  Beauregard seriously errs when he equates the vastly different knowledge bases regarding those three cities.

Critical social theory

In the conclusion of his essay, Beauregard appears to blame the rhetorical excesses he describes for the decline in critical urban theory.  While I am truly sympathetic with his desire for such a theory, he makes very little progress with this agenda, beyond a few rhetorical flourishes of own.

Beauregard concedes that many analysts he criticizes do evince a “critical stance,” in that they condemn the material conditions that many city-dwellers are obliged to endure.  He goes on to assert the importance of “self-criticism”, understood as awareness of the form and rhetorical construction of one’s own arguments; he links this to “objectivity”, i.e. problematizing the connection between who we are and what we study; and pleads for a “critical engagement”, a balance between reflection and attachment (self-critique).  The “critical distance” that Beauregard embraces would replace “detachment” with a “reflective and involved objectivity”.  These are, as Beauregard readily concedes, “problematic practices”, but he does little to resolve their contradictions, or to point ways ahead in urban theory and practice.

Today, most social theorists would quickly protest that (of course) they self-consciously practice some combination of the potpourri of critical approaches served up by Beauregard.  In a postmodern world, only the brave and misguided (some do exist!) would disavow difference.  So: the value of a critical theory of how we know cities is by now well-established.  But what does a critical analytical practice look like?  Here, Beauregard is silent.  For me, the most promising answer to this question may be found in comparative urban analysis.

Comparative urbanism

The current proliferation of competing schools of urbanism should be welcomed as one basis for self-reflexive, critical urban theory and analytical practice.  The claims made by Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Miami (among others) are a necessary piece of an emerging comparative urbanism that I take to be the single most compelling agenda in contemporary urban studies.
 
Urban theory is necessarily constructed out of particular places and particular times.  The time-space matrix of late-19^th and early-20^th century Chicago indelibly framed the precepts of the Chicago School and the Chicagonistas.  It should not be surprising that the greatest challenge to contemporary urban theory is now deriving from the distinctive urbanisms of the sunbelt cities. My current work, for example, has extended beyond Los Angeles to California as a whole (what used to be called Alta—or Upper—California during periods of Spanish and Mexican provenance).  Applying the precepts of the LA School to the Mexican state of Baja (Lower) California has inspired us to develop an integrated view of international urban process in the region we call “Bajalta California” (Dear, 2002b; Dear and Leclerc, 2003).  Most recently, this project has extended to encompass the entire USA/Mexico border, which is undoubtedly one of the most dynamic urban regions in the American continent.

The dynamics forging these (and other) cities are increasingly well-documented: globalization, the information revolution, economic restructuring and social polarization, immigration, and the crisis of environmental sustainability.  Such social processes are dialectically related to concomitant spatial forms; respectively, world cities, cyber cities, dual cities, hybrid cities, and green cities.  These (sometimes literal) concretizations of social process are themselves determinant of social practices, and find expression at multiple urban scales. For me at least, they form the bases for a revitalized urban theory and empirical practice.

I believe that a comparative urbanism requires that world cities, megacities, ordinary cities, and cities of the developing world be axiomatically incorporated into our analytical purview.  The closest we may get to objectivity or critical distance is when we are obliged to confront difference through others’ eyes.  This seems to me to be the most promising way toward the kind of critical urban theory that Beauregard espouses.

References

Beauregard, Robert.  2002 (2^nd ed.) Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of US Cities. New York: Routledge.

Dear, Michael.  2000. The Postmodern Urban Condition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Dear, Michael.  2002a. “Los Angeles and the Chicago School: Invitation to a Debate.”  City and Community 1, 1:5-32.

Dear, Michael.  2002b. “Mexicali: Ciudad Mundial de ‘Bajalta California’,” in Héctor Manuel Lucero Velasco (ed.), Mexicali, 100 Años: arquitectura y urbanismo en el desierto del Colorado, pp. 43-54.  México D.F.: Editorial Patria.

Dear, Michael and Gustavo Leclerc (eds.) 2003.  Postborder City: Cultural spaces of Bajalta California. New York: Routledge.

MICHAEL DEAR is a Professor of Geography and Director of the Southern California Studies Center at the University of Southern California.  He is author of The Postmodern Urban Condition (Blackwell, 2000), and editor, most recently, of Postborder City: Cultural Spaces of Bajalta California (Routledge, 2003).

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