Urban Life

Readings in the
Anthropology of the City
Fourth Edition

George Gmelch
Union College

Walter P. Zenner
State University of New York at Aíbany

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Preface ix

PART 1
THE CITY IN HISTORY

Cover Photograph: Charles Marden Fitch/SuperStock Introduction 1

The Earliest Cities 3
Michael E. Smith

The Preindustrial City 20

Gideon Sjoberg

Human Health and the City 32

Lawrence M. Schell

Beyond Urban and Rural:

Communities in the 21st Century 53
Copyright © 2002,1996,1988 by Waveland Press, Inc. Walter P. Zenner
ISBN 1-57766-194-X

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system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writ-
ingfrom the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America

9 8 7 6 5 4 3
92 Thc Urhan Experience: A I'sychological Analysis

facilities in the city (the subway rush; the fight for taxis; traff'ic jams; standing
in line to await services). I suggest that contrasts between city and rural be-
havior probably reflect the responses of similar people to very different situ-
ations, rather than intrinsic differences in the personalities of rural and city
dwellers. The city is a situation to which individuáis respond adaptively.

NOTES The Metrópolis and

1
2
New York Times (June 15,1969).
L. Wirth, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 44, No. 1 (1938). Wirth's ideas have come under
Everyday Life
heavy criticism by contemporary city planners, who point out that the city is broken down into
neighborhoods, which fulfill many of the functions of small towns. See, for example, H. J. Gans,
People and Plans: Essays on Urban Problems and Solutions (New York: Basic Books, 1968); J.
Jacobs, TheDeath and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961); G. D. Robert Rotenberg
Sutiles, The Social Orderofthe Slum (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968).
3
G. Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. K. H. Wolff (New York: Macmillan, 1950).
[English translation of G. Simmel, "Die Grossstádte und das Geistesleben," Die Grossstadt
(Dresden: Jansch, 1903).]
4 In urban studies, many scholars focus on negative aspects ofcity Ufe, especially
L. Wirth, American Journal of Sociology.
5
R. L. Merer, A Communications Theory of Urban Growth (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1962). with regará to central cities. It is refreshing to read works that stress the attrac-
6
S. Milgram and P. Hollander, Nation, Vol. 25, No. 602 (1964). tions the metrópolis holds for many people. Here, Robert Rotenberg, who has
7
S. Gaertner and L. Bickman (Gradúate Center, The City University of New York), unpub- devoted much ofhis research to the analysis oflife in Vienna, Austria, reminds
lished research.
8
D. Altman et al. (Gradúate Center, The City University of New York), unpublished research. us of this fact. He also points out that each city has individual features which
9 musí be learned anew when we go from one city to another. He documents this
J. Waters (Gradúate Center, The City University of New York), unpublished research.
10
L. Wirth, American Journal of Sociology. by examining the Viennese identity and the metropolitan knowledge one needs
11
R. L. Meier,yl Communications Theory of Urban Growth. to understand how Ufe is scheduled and the meaning and uses of places in cities.
12
(Gradúate Center, The City University of New York), unpublished research. In reading Rotenberg's article, readers may wish to contras! his analysis with
those of Wirth, Milgram, Merry, Schell, and Sjoberg.
REFERENCES
Altman, D., et al. Gradúate Center, The City University of New York. Unpublished
research.
Gaertner, S., and L. Bickman. Gradúate Center, The City University of New York.
Unpublished research. With each crossing of the street, with the lempo and multiplicity of eco-
Lewis, O. 1966. The Culture of Poverty. Sáentific American, 215:19-25. nomic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with
Meier, R. L. 1962. A Communications Theory of Urban Growth. Cambridge, MA: small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of
MIT Press. psychic life.
Milgram, S., and P. Hollander. 1964. The Murder They Heard.Nation, 198:602-604. Georg Simmel, The Metrópolis and Mental Life
Simmel, Georg. 1903. Die Grossstádte und das Geistesleben. InDie Grossstadt, ed.,
T. Petermann. Dresden: Jansch. Reprinted in Class Essays on the Culture of Cit- We must always infer that urbanism will assume its most characteristic
ies, ed. R. Sennet. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969. and extreme form in the measure in which the conditions with which it is
Waters, J. Gradúate Center, The City University of New York. Unpublished research. congruent are present. Thus, the larger, the more densely populated,
Wirth, L. [1928] 1956. The Ghetto. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. and the more heterogeneous a community, the more accentuated the
characteristics associated with urbanism will be.
Louis Wirth, Urbanism As a Way ofLife
Source: Article written expressly for Urban Life.

93
 94 The Metrópolis and liveryclay Life
In the tradition of urban social science, theorists categorize cities as hav-
ing a life of their own, or as social experiences that are not unique in time
and place. One theory takes the view that city life is different only because of
the dense concentration of social power and knowledge. As the quote from
Louis Wirth notes, the signs and behaviors of urban life differ from those of
nonurban places only in degrees. Another theory views the city as having dif-
ferent characteristics, because of the qualities of the place. The quote from
Simmel comes from this tradition. Cities may achieve their location and size
because of regional processes, but after that, life within the city changes in-
dependently of regional forces. I am not satisfied by either approach. I have
observed that some cities will reflect dense concentrations of what is hap-
pening in the nearby suburbs and rural surroundings. Others will offer quali-
ties of life that are sharply different from their surroundings. I want to focus
on these qualitatively different cities to understand their differences. To set
them apart, I propose we cali them metropolises and begin to explore metro-
politan effects of various kinds.
To the outsider, a metrópolis is not merely a populous city. It is a city
with a strong, internationally projected identity. The Oxford Universal En-
glish Dictionary defines "metrópolis" as a city of enduring political, eco-
nomic, and cultural power. Other cities may specialize in politics, hoard
economic wealth, or possess culturally valued institutions, but in a metrópo-
lis, all three resources of power are fully developed, sustained over time, and
dominant within the surrounding región. The identity of the metrópolis is in-
dependent of the economic fortunes of a región or a state, although those
fortunes influence the comfort of the people living there. Instead the me-
trópolis participates in international flows of people, capital, and informa-
tion that connect it to other metropolises. The metrópolis need not be the
political capital of the state. The metrópolis is an attractive place to live. Its
residents enjoy a wide cholee of career opportunities, since the ever-growing
administrative institutions in the metrópolis are voracious employers. New
industries are likely to lócate there. The largest market for artistic and craft
production is located there, as are markets catering to rare and expensive
tastes. The metrópolis will have museums, theaters and concert halls, univer-
sities and research institutes, charitable organizations and religious centers,
and similar institutions judged to be of great valué to the society as a whole.
The most easily recognized metropolises have large, concentrated popu-
lations. This guarantees that two conditions will be present. First, compared
to other cities in the región, there will be many more local communities,
neighborhoods, and enclaves. These will persist through time and will be
highly varied. Second, because of the problems of maintaining the stability
and security of the large and dense population, various civic institutions will
be powerful shapers of public life. It is difficult for metropolitans to resist
the influence of these institutions in their lives.
This tensión between the institutional momentum of the large city and
the prívate struggles of individuáis and households is worth looking at in
Robert Rotenberg 95
greater depth. Metropolitans develop a widely dispersed, shared knowledge
of their world even though frequent face-to-face communication among mil-
lions of people is impossible. In some áreas of metropolitan experience, this
knowledge includes shared valúes and priorities. This shared knowledge is a
direct result of the power of institutions to impose conditions that constrain
all residents, without regard to the social distinctions between them. Of
course, the more powerful residents can occasionally find ways around some
of the constraints. The sharing of this knowledge is obvious. Some of it
forms the silent backdrop of everyday life, such as the arrangements of
schedules, the meanings of places, and the identities of people that permit
metropolitans to find each other. This shared knowledge constitutes the cul-
ture of the metrópolis. It represents the contribution by residents of large
cities to the pan-human effort to make sense of the world. I cali this metro-
politan knowledge.
Metropolitan knowledge, like all of culture, is composed of the symbols
that give meaning to people's everyday lives. Metropolitan knowledge comes
in at least two different varieties: an abstract or technical form, and an expe-
riential or pragmatic form. This means, for example, that some people live in
a city of streets, buildings, and parks. This way of constituting the space of
the city symbolically belongs to the technical worlds of mapmakers, automo-
bile clubs, fire departments, school teachers, and urban planners, to ñame a
few. Ordinary metropolitans, on the other hand, experience the city as paths
that connect people with destinations, as building addresses that refer to dif-
ferent levéis of social status, and as places of safety or harm in a dangerous
environment. This pragmatic knowledge is crucial for negotiating everyday
life in large cities. City spaces concéntrate and magnify the ordinary experi-
ence of social space to a point where specialized knowledge is required to
find one's way around the block successfully.
Each metrópolis generales its own particulars. These can be so city-
specific that it is impossible to predict where the paths, addresses, and safe
places are before actually living in a city and learning its ways. For newcom-
ers to the city, the need to learn so many things for the first time can be so
exhausting that it leads to a form of culture shock. Among those who move
from one large city to another, the experience of learning the previous
city's peculiarities does not prepare them for the new city's peculiarities. It
makes them aware that learning the paths of the new city is crucial to their
survival in it.
One can argüe that people in the smallest villages gain knowledge just as
metropolitans do. The difference lies in how critical that knowledge be-
comes for the people involved. The best way to fathom the difference is to
consider a traffic jam, which arises when there are more vehicles on a road
than it can accommodate. Traffic jams are something that most people have
experienced in cities. There are other kinds of jams as well, such as shopping
lines or queues at a bus stop. In fact, having to wait to accomplish something
we want to do because other people are trying to do the same thing is a good
96 The Metrópolis and Everyday Lil'e
definition of a jam in general. Jams are critical to understanding the differ-
ence between the metropolitan experience and the experiences of smaller
communities. Jams are the way we become aware of the density of a place.
For the metropolitan, a traffic jam is a condition of existence. Metropolitan
life is a series of jams of people, of commodities (opening night for a popular
movie, fuel shortages), and of information (busy telephone circuits, long
waits for Internet connections) that few residents can escape. Although the
villager might experience a jam under unique conditions, the metropolitan
faces the possibility of a jam of one sort or another every day. Metropolitans
can be either continually surprised by lines of people that interfere with their
aims and schedules or they can develop strategies to anticípate and avoid
these delays. These strategies depend upon knowledge of the activities of
their fellow metropolitans, the patterns of these activities, and the ways
these patterns can be used to avoid waiting and queuing.
If the everyday knowledge of metropolitans was nothing more than
knowing how to find one's way around the streets, or knowing the best pizza
shop in town, it would not hold our interest for very long. This knowledge
has a more significant side. The meaning that metropolitans impose on their
everyday world reflects the way they live their lives. That means that streets
are not only paths between destinations. People might choose to use one for
reasons that are unrelated to the destination, perhaps a path that leads to a
place full of childhood memories, the home of a friend, or along a street with
high status houses. Among safe parks, they might choose one where there is
tacit permission for adults to lie on the grass or climb in the trees. These fac-
ets of metropolitan knowledge tell us about the people who live there, about
their priorities and their goals. They inform us about people's understanding
of their relationship to each other, their institutions, and their world. Explor-
ing metropolitan knowledge permits us to use the city as a mirror of these
unique and powerful social experiences.
Our efforts to talk about culture require us to créate categories that fo-
cus on some aspects of the invented world while ignoring other aspects. In
my research, I have found three such categories particularly useful for dis-
cussing metropolitan knowledge. These are identities, schedules, and places,
I want to give an example of metropolitan knowledge for each of these cate-
gories. I will show that in Vienna, Austria, the scale of metropolitan life de-
termines people's understanding of their identities, their schedules, and
their places. For each category, I will begin by showing the particular issues
that life in the metrópolis brings to the category, and will describe how indi-
viduáis and institutions deal with these issues in Vienna.
KNOWLEDGE OF IDENTITY
The metrópolis generales a particular knowledge of one's identity and
the identities of others, all of which is bound up in the issue of who considers
himself or herself to be a metropolitan. Like most of us, the Viennese live in
Robert Rotenbcrg 97
a world in which their city is part of a large state that contains other prov-
inces, cities, towns, and villages. How, then, among all these other kinds of
Austrians do the Viennese know who is a Viennese and who is not? Does it
matter that one is or is not a Viennese? When you are far from home, and
people ask you where you are from, what do you answer? People from non-
metropolitan regions might answer defensively, "You've never heard of the
place. It's called Elmwood." If you live in a metropolitan región, the image
of your street or neighborhood might briefly come to mind, but you will
quickly seek another image. The center of the large city is the part of your
metropolitan región that strangers are most likely to know. This is appropri-
ate because for foreigners the center of the metrópolis symbolically repre-
sents the seat of power in every realm of social experience: the political, the
economic, the social, the artistic, and the technological. The center is where
it all happens.
Associating yourself with life in the center of the metrópolis is a more
powerful, more important statement of who you are, or of who you want to be.
Since the metrópolis is more like an onion, with many layers of boundaries, ev-
eryone who lives within bragging distance of the metropolitan center can claim
it as their home. All of these metropolis-identified people form an imaginary
community that distinguishes them through a connection to an elevated, more
sophisticated, and more powerful social experience. Metropolitans claim the
center as their home, even if they do not live there, because their sense of who
they are is bound up with the powerful images of that central place.
In Europe, tensión between the metropolitan and the person from the
provinces reflects a long-standing conflict between two views of what is most
meaningful in defining one's place in the world. This conflict is best illus-
trated with the following question: Is it more meaningful for a person to fa-
vor ties to local people, to give priority to community duties and to devote
most of their time and thoughts to personal obligations? Alternatively, is it
more meaningful to spend time developing ties with strangers, to give prior-
ity to universal duties, and to devote time and thoughts to regional and for-
eign opportunities? Those who answer the first question in the affirmative '
have an orientation known as provincialism. Those who answer the second
question in the affirmative have an orientation known as cosmopolitanism. \
Over the last two hundred years these questions have spawned social move-
ments that have transformed the European political landscape. Nationalism,
fascism, and libertarianism all grow out of the provincial view. They attribute
the greatest importance and build their political program from relationships
between people involved in local communities. They favor a political future
in which the state becomes the local community at large.
The European Community, socialism, and the Christian democratic !
movement derive from the cosmopolitan viewpoint. They attribute the great-
est importance to relationships that transcend borders. They offer a political ,
future in which local borders disappear and the state becomes a huge me-
trópolis. Metropolitan residents are more likely to favor a cosmopolitan
98 The Metrópolis and Bveryday Life
viewpoint trian their suburban and rural neighbors. The diversity of social
groups, the large number of immigrant communities, the dependence on a
single system for water, electric, gas and sewerage, the presence of foreign
goods in the market, the importance of international trade for local business,
and the tourist economy work together to support a cosmopolitan worldview.
We can now return to the question that introduced this section: How do
the Viennese know who is a Viennese and who is not? To be a Viennese is to
associate oneself not only with the seat of enormous cultural power, but with
universal law, with cosmopolitan political altitudes, and against narrow pro-
vincialism. When I ask the people who live there how they identify other Vi-
ennese, the most common answer is through the way people talk. Most
Austrians along with Bavarians speak the southern dialect of Germán. This
dialect differs from standard Germán. It includes the substitution of certain
vocabulary terms and a shortening of final consonant sounds. These sound
shifts produce a softer, drawling quality to the dialect. The Viennese have a
peculiar way of pronouncing certain vowels, even when they are speaking the
educated standard language.1 How we pronounce our words is a habit that
becomes fixed in our brains at puberty. It is very difficult to overeóme this
habit. This means that people who speak with a Viennese accent must have
lived in Vienna as children, a sign that they are true Viennese.
It is very difficult to distinguish between Viennese dialect and the dialect
of the people who live in the towns immediately surrounding the city. Lan-
guage does not recognize political boundaries. Crossing the boundary be-
tween Vienna and Lower Austria, the province that surrounds Vienna,
produces only the beginning of a very gradual shift away from the Viennese-
specific pronunciations and toward the southern Germán dialect. Language
is a necessary sign of being a Viennese, but by itself, it is not sufficient.
Another common answer among my Viennese acquaintances is the
question of family composition. They say that a true Viennese is someone
whose family includes at least one grandparent from Hungary, Bohemia,
Moravia, or Slovakia. These were the provinces in the oíd Austro-Hungarian
Empire from which many industrial workers emigrated to Vienna in the
nineteenth century. So many people migrated that by 1900, only 40 percent
of the Viennese population of two million had been born in the city! To be
Viennese, in this sense, means to come from a multicultural family. It also
means that one's family is directly related to the pluralistic society of the oíd
Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is different from families in the provinces.
While selected regions experienced some in-migration in the nineteenth
century, most Austrian towns contain the same family ñames they did two
hundred years ago. There is a deeper sense of being rooted in a local tradi-
tion in these towns. Even in large cities, like Graz and Innsbruck, people are
proud to point out grandparents who were natives of the town, rather than
trióse who were immigrants. This way of constructing identity through family
history sepárales the cosmopolitan Viennese from other provincial Austri-
ans. It is a boundary the Viennese and the provincials like to maintain.
Robert Rotenberg 99
Both of these ways of understanding the Viennese identity are prívate
features of people's lives. People do not have to speak in public, giving away
their accent. People certainly do not have to relate their family history in
public. The Viennese identify each other by observing these subtle signs of
identity: a certain pronunciation of a standard word, a certain last ñame, or
the use of a word known only to the Viennese. Even I can signal my mem-
bership in this exclusive Viennese identity by dropping the few dialect
phrases I have learned to pronounce properly at the appropriate moments in
the conversation. This usually delights my conversation partners.
Who is a Viennese and who is not a Viennese is very important to the
officials who must manage large sums of social service money. There is an
institutional interest in providing the necessary assistance to everyone who
is entitled to it, but not to anyone else. To simplify their identification of
needy Viennese, the rule the bureaucrats have come up with is that every-
one must register their address with the authorities. Everyone who is regis-
tered as residing at a Viennese address at the time that their needs arise is
entitled to Viennese assistance, regardless of how they pronounce words or
where their grandparents were born. On the other hand, no one registered
at an address outside Vienna is eligible for Viennese assistance when they
become ill, regardless of how they pronounce words or where their grand-
parents were born.
There is a tensión between the interest of metropolitan institutions
charged with administering to the needs of the large urban population and
people's everyday knowledge of who is a Viennese. This produces two differ-
ent understandings of Viennese identity: a communal sense of self, shared
among the broad urban population and based on the echoes of language and
family history; and the public identification of self, as understood by the
city's administrative institutions and based on registered address. People act
on their communal knowledge of self. In the end, it is clear where the power
lies. As people act on their understandings of who they are in the metrópolis,
they must eventually encounter administrative institutions that define their
identities in a different way, thwarting or redirecting their actions. Through
this interaction, they become enculturated to the possibilities for resisting,
circumventing, or transforming the institutional rules to suit their sense of
themselves, a highly particularized form of metropolitan knowledge.
KNOWLEDGE OF SCHEDULES
Schedules are a fundamental dimensión of all social life. In the metróp-
olis, time is a contested resource. Institutions compete with each other to
claim the attention of the residents. To manage the conflicting claims of in-
stitutions, cities develop public schedules. These include the operating hours
of work places, shops, schools, offices, and agencies. These schedules permit
potential conflicts to become known so that steps can be taken to avoid
them. The process of putting a public schedule in place is itself highly con-
100 The Metrópolis añil liveryday Life
tested. Consider the political conflicts that might revolve around the pro-
posal of adding Saturday as a sixth public school day in your hometown.
Parents would protest the loss of a family day. Stores would protest the loss
of young customers. Soccer coaches would protest the loss of practice time.
Teachers would demand extra pay, increasing the tax burden on homeown-
ers. The five-day school schedule is held in place by the intractability of these
potential conflicts. What is true of the school week is true of many other fea-
tures of institutional schedules throughout the metrópolis. As the schedule
develops through history, different constellations of local forces shape its
fate. This results in each metrópolis developing its own unique public sched-
ule (Rotenberg 1992).
It is possible to describe activities as having certain duration, as occur-
ring in a certain sequence, as recurring at a certain rate, or as taking place at
the same time as alternative activities. These constitute the four dimensions
of social time. One of the ways in which institutions can exert influence over
people is to emphasize some of these dimensions to the exclusión of the oth-
ers. The public schedule concerns itself with fixing the duration of certain
public activities, especially work, school, and shopping hours, and the rate of
their recurrence. The effect is to make these activities highly predictable.
The emphasis on these dimensions créales a system of activity limits. Within
these limits people can choose to do less work, but they cannot choose to do
more. In this way these activities can be better coordinated with each other
and conflict less often with nonpublic activities.
The current system of limits includes store-closing ordinances that be-
gan in 1959. Though based on social justice principáis that were progressive
in the post-war period, many argüe these laws are irrelevant today. In that
era, store clerks were mostly women who worked in small shops with few
employees. If the government did not regúlate store hours, their employers
could demand that these women work during the hours they were not in
their households. This was felt to undermine the healthy development of
family life and to add to the economic exploitation of the clerks. The laws
were created out of a social consensus that it was unfair for some employees
to be forced to work shifts that conflict with the family life. For that reason,
shops must cióse at 6:00 or 6:30 P.M. on weekdays and 12:00 P.M. on Satur-
day. All shops are closed on Sunday.
Since the mid-1970s there have been concerted efforts to liberalize this
store-closing ordinance. Not being able to shop whenever they wanted frus-
trated many families, especially those with two wage earners, neither of
whom had time to shop during the restricted schedule. More and more peo-
ple found themselves caught up in this conflict over the years. Initially, the
store-closing ordinance insured that people would have at least ninety min-
utes to shop before the stores closed on weekdays. However, shopping activ-
ities eventually migrated to Saturday morning.
Since the 1960s, there has been a 70 percent decline in the number of
family-run shops employing less than five employees. Large chain stores em-
Robert Rotenberg 101
ploying hundreds of people replaced the small shops. Small shops cannot
handle the volume of shoppers or goods when people shop on a once a week
basis, while the chain stores can.
The shift in the market structure of the neighborhoods was costly. The
small shopkeepers had múltiple ties to their clients and knew each other's
ñames and backgrounds. The small shops were places to socialize. Storeown-
ers extended credit to long-standing clients. The quality of the goods the
stores sold was very high. Customers were treated with respect.
The chain stores were impersonal and foreign. Their prices were initially
cheaper, but it required more time and effort to shop in the large stores.
Carrying a week's worth of groceries to an apartment even a few doors away
was an extra burden. People began to use their automobiles to travel to large
supermarkets where they could cart shopping bags directly to the car. This
increased car traffic on Saturday morning, making the shopping trip longer.
Once the groceries were home, there was not enough room to store all the
goods. Refrigerators are small and pantry space is at a premium in Viennese
apartments. People either invested in rebuilding their kitchens, buying larger
refrigerators, or figured out some way to return to shopping on a daily basis.
A variance went into effect in 1988. It permitted stores to stay open ei-
ther one Saturday afternoon, or one Thursday evening per month. For the
first six months of the experiment, the neighborhood shops reported that
very few customers were taking advantage of the liberal shopping hours. The
large drive-in supermarkets were reporting only modérate sales on Saturday
afternoon. The variance had come too late. Householders had already rear-
ranged their Uves to cope with the restrictions, and these rearrangements
had become rigid parts of the household schedule. It will take a decade of
new households establishing themselves in the new conditions for the neigh-
borhood shops to fill up during these new hours. Since so many institutional
interests are involved in setting these public schedules, they are not easily
changed. In Vienna, it took twelve years from the initial protest until some
liberalization of the ordinance was possible.
When the duration of institutional activities in the public schedule is
changed, families cannot immediately take advantage of it because their
household schedules are rigid too. Changing the sequence of household ac-
tivities also changes the choices available among various activities for house-
hold members. Finding time to shop is not merely a matter of not having
other conflicting activities. It is also a matter of who in the household is free
from other activities to do the shopping. Large shopping trips may require
help with carrying the bags. Small children may require supervisión. Since
the household schedule evolves to deal with many different problems, peo-
ple could not radically alter it without upsetting the balance. This prevented
many households from taking advantage of the new shopping hours that be-
came available in the late 1980s.
How does this relate to metropolitan knowledge? First, this shopping
schedule conflict is exclusively a metropolitan problem. The higher concen-
 102 The Metrópolis and Everyday Lii'c
tration of people in a metropolitan store makes shopping much more un-
comfortable. This forces people to find ways of solving their shopping
problem in a more relaxed fashion. They change stores, move to a suburb,
try to shop at a different hour, or send someone from the household who has
more time to the store instead.
Second, the metropolitan ethic that underlies the public schedule is a
universal one. Everyone is affected equally by the constraints of the law. One
cannot cali up a shopkeeper on a Sunday morning to buy a liter of milk. It is
not even clear who among the nameless employees of the modern supermar-
kets would have the key. This is not the case in smaller communities. It was
also not the case in Viennese neighborhoods before the demise of the small
shops in the 1960s and 1970s.
] Third, there is no previous social experience that prepares one for nego-
: tiating the distribution of shopping activities within the household in Vienna.
It is a fact of life that applies to this particular metrópolis. There may be
other cities that restrict shopping hours in different ways, or not at all. It
doesn't take long to figure out the system when encountering the schedule of
a metrópolis for the first time, but one cannot figure it out ahead of time.
The public schedule not only engenders conflict; it also inspires solu-
tions. In the end, it is clear where the power to shape the flow of public activ-
ities really lies. As people act to fulfill their household's needs in the metróp-
olis, they encounter institutional entanglements in scheduling that constrain
: and redirect their actions. Through this experience, metropolitans become
exquisitely knowledgeable of their public schedule.
KNOWLEDGE OF PLACES
i As with identity and time schedules, conflicts arise between individuáis
and institutions over the meaning and use of places in the metrópolis.
Knowledge of this conflict is particular to a specific city. It pertains only to
the city and not to the surrounding región. It must be learned within the con-
texts of that city. The meaning of a place is made up of what the place con-
tains and what the place permits. Metropolitan institutions have an interest
in restricting as much activity in public as possible. All use of public space in-
creases maintenance costs. From the point of view of the people who must
manage the city, everything would work much better if there were no people.
People, on the other hand, need public spaces of various kinds, from roads
to parks, to re-create the social ties that make their lives meaningful. This is
a problem that all cities have in common. Large cities experience this con-
flict in even greater measure because of the increased scale in the size and
use of public space. The following example shows how the different needs of
institutions and people in a metropolitan park produce knowledge that is
specific to that metrópolis.
!
t Like París and London, Vienna modernized its downtown área in the
! middle of the nineteenth century. The ñame of this massive redevelopment
Rohcrt Kotcnberg 103
project was the Ringstrasse Project. The Ringstrasse is a circular boulevard
the surrounds the oldest part of the city. The walls of the oíd city were torn
down to créate the Ringstrasse as well as to make room for the many new
streets and new apartment buildings. In the process, a large open área in
front of the city walls known as the Glacis was destroyed. It was an urban
place that contained hundreds of different activities, from begging and sell-
ing of handicrafts to music concerts and the consummation of love affairs. It
was what McDonogh has called an "empty" urban space: "empty" of having
its function pre-defined, and therefore, a place that was full of possibilities
(1993). The people loved it because it was a place that permitted them the
freedom to do whatever they wanted to do. Thieves and other crimináis also
used the park, but frequent pólice patrol on horseback guaranteed the safety
of ordinary citizens. All of this was destroyed when the Ringstrasse was built.
The Ringstrasse was not something ordinary people had demanded. It
was an effort at increasing the cultural and economic importance of the city
in Europe and was the project of the city's business élite. Ordinary Viennese
were very angry at the destruction of the Glacis. To make amends, the plan-
ners pushed the completion of a much smaller park on the edge of the Gla-
cis as the first completed piece of the redevelopment project. The smaller
park is called the City Park. People immediately adopted it as the successor
to the Glacis.
This was precisely what the city council feared. In the discussions sur-
rounding the planning of the park, many councilmen expressed the fear that
the many trees in the park would permit hiding places for thieves, prosti-
tutes, and people wanting to use the park as a toilet. They preferred an open
landscape of low flowerbeds and statues, like the oíd aristocratic gardens
that were all over the imperial city. They believed the new style in landscap-
ing parks permitted too many activities to occur beyond the ability of the pó-
lice to observe them. Others on the city council argued that giving the people
a park that was beautiful would instill a sense of pride. This would make
them responsible citizens who would self-consciously restrict their activities
to those which were publicly acceptable. Their view prevailed and the park
was opened with only a few posted restrictions: no tobáceo smoking, no
dogs, no cooking fires, and no walking on the grass.
The park opened in September and was an immediate success. After the
first hard freeze of the winter, a new crisis developed. People were ice skat-
ing on the small shallow duck pond in the center of the park. The council at-
tempted to prohibit ice skating, citing safety concerns. This issue was later
dismissed and funds were appropriated to build a small shack with benches
where people could sit to put on their skates and get warm. They also li-
censed a vendor to sell coffee and roasted chestnuts to the skaters. The peo-
ple had won a victory for re-creating the kind of space the Glacis had been
where anything that was not harmful was permitted.
People use the City Park in creative ways. I have observed unofficial art
exhibitions, women sunbathing topless, people openly gambling with cards
 Thc Metrópolis and Everytlay Life
or backgammon, tcenagcrs dancing to tape recorded rock music right next to
the outdoor cafe where tourists listen to a live band play waltz music, and
similar affronts to official park behavior. The City Park has developed a
unique set of rules that are interesting for their permissiveness. Every public
space has such rules. They are rarely posted. You have to learn them as chil-
dren or through experience. The stranger can also learn them, as I have had
the opportunity to do (Rotenberg 1995). Still, nothing in our previous expe-
rience with cities predisposes us to know what specific possibilities for public
behavior exist for each place in a particular city.
j People play around the edges of the constraints of the park to find the
permissive underbelly of the institutional framework, just as they seek ways
'» to solve their shopping problem. In the end, it is clear where the power to
circumscribe public behavior really lies. With the stroke of a pen, the respon-
sible bureaucrat can wipe out specific behaviors from public places, as was
the case during the skateboarding craze of the 1980s. It took less than two
months for the park administration to ban skateboarding from parks. As
young skateboarders learned to their frustration, the permission to engage
in new public behaviors exists only as long as the public administrators are
willing to tolérate it.
DEFINING THE METROPOLITAN EXPERIENCE
In each of these examples from Vienna, I show how the increased scale
of the metrópolis determines people's experience. That is, the size, density,
and heterogeneity of the people who live there make it a different kind of
place, just as Wirth argued. The experiences are different from those of peo-
ple in a small town and this difference is a matter of kind, not of degree. The
increased scale introduces unique issues and singular solutions in people's
everyday lives. People in smaller cities or towns may experience special cir-
cumstances owing to geography or history, but this could be truc of any hu-
man settlement. All metropolises must contend with the effects of scale.
Is there an absolute threshold in size below which one cannot describe
an urban experience as metropolitan? I believe the answer to this question is
yes, but not in the sense of an absolute number of people. Instead, the size
threshold for a metrópolis lies in its heterogeneity: the size and importance
of groups in the city. Some of these groups will be powerful enough to con-
trol the economic processes of the surrounding región. This powerful social
formation was one of the features I cited at the beginning of this essay as dis-
tinguishing the metrópolis from other cities. Other groups will be clients of
the powerful. These more or less powerless groups build strategies, at both
the group and individual levéis, to maintain their employment, housing, and
access to markets. All of these groups, the powerful and the powerless, may
be defined through race and ethnicity, class, place of birth, language, or po-
litical characteristics. Regardless of the criteria used, the effect is the same.
The powerful groups will see themselves as closely aligned with the institu-
Robert Rotenberg 105
tional agenda of the city. The less powerful will feel themselves at odds with
it and seek to mitígate its influence on their lives. Almost every human set-
tlement distinguishes between people to some extent. What makes social
stratification in the metrópolis different is that the importance and influence
of the powerful group extends well beyond the immediate boundaries of the
city. Their power produces disproportionate wealth for the metrópolis, at-
tracts people from everywhere to live there, and shapes the priorities of the
institutions that develop there. Their power is not absolute, however. It is
best thought of as the power to encourage the growth in scale that defines
the metrópolis. Once that scale begins to emerge, it sets in motion the pro-
cesses of defining time, space, and identity to which even the powerful élite
must succumb.
Why should such a large and diverse group of people lacking sustained
face-to-face contact with each other begin to share so many features of a
common communal life? By focusing on the knowledge that people créate to
adapt to and give meaning to their lives in large cities, the anthropologist can
write about urban culture as a dynamic, changing forcé in people's lives. In
metropolitan knowledge, we discover that part of the human experience that
only large cities can produce. Ultimately, the question of what we mean when
we describe a human experience as urban may depend on demonstrating the
imbalances in power between households and institutions. This focus on the
meaning that people give to schedules, places, and identities describes the re-
lation between power centers and various groups in the city. In this way, met-
ropolitan knowledge becomes the basis for an anthropology of the city.
NOTE
1
For those of you who understand a bit about phonology, the crucial sounds include the inter-
consonantal diphthong /ie/, as in the word Zeit, meaning "time." In the standard dialect, this
word is pronounced /tsiet/. In Viennese dialect, the diphthong is medialized to become /tsait/.
Initial /u/ as in the word und, the conjunction "and," is also medialized to /ont/. Overall there
is a tendency to bring vocalic sounds toward the center of the mouth and this is the quality that
stands out when Viennese are trying to speak standard Germán. When they speak their home
dialect, there are a number of consonantal shifts that take place, especially with /!/ and /r/, that
are too technical to go into here.
REFERENCES
McDonogh, Gary W. 1993. Empty Space. In The Cultural Meaning of Urban Space,
eds. R. Rotenberg and G. McDonogh. Amherst, MA: Bergin and Garvey.
Rotenberg, Robert. 1992. Time and Orderin Metropolitan Vienna: A Seizure of Sched-
ules. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press.
. 1995. Landscape and Power in Vienna. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.