Seeing Cities Change demonstrates the utility of a visual approach and the study of ordinary streetscapes to document and analyse how the built environment reflects the changing cultural and class identities of neighbourhood residents. Ayona Datta finds this book raises the most important question for urban studies on how best to ‘see’ cities change through a scholarly lens, however, she is disappointed that it fails to show just how this ‘seeing’ is structured by the knowledge and power of the researchers themselves

Datta, Ayona

English

LSE Research Online

blo gs.lse.ac.uk http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2013/03/11/book-review-seeing-cities-change/blog adminBook Review: Seeing Cities Change: Local Culture and ClassSeeing Cities Change demonstrates the utility of a visual approach and the study of ordinary streetscapes todocument and analyse how the built environment reflects the changing cultural and class identitiesof neighbourhood residents. Ayona Datta finds this book raises the most important question for urban studieson how best to ‘see’ cities change through a scholarly lens, however, she is disappointed that it fails to showjust how this ‘seeing’ is structured by the knowledge and power of the researchers themselves.Seeing Cit ies Change: Local Culture and Class. Jerome Krase.Ashgate. February 2012.Find this bookJerome Krase is an eminent visual sociologist who has f or decadesphotographed the ways that cit ies in North America have changedthrough immigrant lif e and practices. Seeing Cities Change is one of  hismore important publications which brings together his collection ofphotographs into a study of  urban transf ormation through photo-documentation. The book is f ocussed on particular ‘immigrantneighbourhoods’ such as the Chinatowns, Litt le Italies and Litt le Polandsin ‘western’ cit ies such as New York, Paris, London, Belgium. The author ’smain argument is that it is possible to visually “read” how the “meaningsof  urban spaces are changed by ordinary people…and in the processhow their agency helps them to become both producers and products ofthose spaces” (p 250). At the heart of  this book is the importantassertion that spaces matter, material culture matters, architecturematters in terms of  how we understand migration, transnationalism and urban lif e. Since itspublication, this book has been mentioned in Choice Reviews, one of  the most prestigiousacademic accolades ever possible f or a scholar.Architects or planners might ask however – ‘Do we not always see cit ies change?’ ‘Isn’t that howbuilt environment prof essionals f rame their practices?’ The author would argue that it is only when we dothis through a rigorous visual methodology that we begin to understand how notions like multiculturalism,diversity and transf ormation are embedded in local and material contexts and are produced through links tothe routes/roots of  migrant lives. The aims of  the book theref ore are both novel and noble in terms ofproviding a methodological and conceptual alternative to the grand narratives of  urban development,gentrif ication and transf ormation that has currently prolif erated urban studies.Little  Italy, Ne w Yo rk City: Pho to  b y d avid p c_Theintroduction tothe bookprovides agood mappingof  the potentialof  a visualapproach inunderstandingchange. Giventhat visualsociology is arelativelymarginalisedstream withintradit ionalsociology,Krase providesus with acomprehensiveargument ofthe importanceof  the visual inurban studies.This is in linewith recent calls f rom other urban scholars towards including the sensory aspects of  urban landscapes –sound, sight, touch smell and so on. Krase’s argument is that we should attend to the signs and symbols inurban spaces and ‘decipher ’ how these are more than aesthetic. In other words, Krase argues that thevisuality of  urban transf ormation conveys essential messages to us about who is the product andproducer of  this place. While Krase is right about the need to mainstream visual sociology, it should benoted though that a number of  scholars are already working in the area of  sensory urban landscapeswithout necessarily identif ying this as ‘visual sociology’. Indeed in recent years there has been aprolif eration of  scholarship on what Krase calls “vernacular” landscapes and what is widely understood asvisual, participatory and ‘transnationalism f rom below’ approaches to urban studies. The new and emergingstreams of  transnational urbanisms and translocal geographies f or example make precisely the samearguments that we now need to look more caref ully at the material geographies of  migrant home andbelonging in ways that these are transf orming both host and home societies socially, culturally, polit icallyand materially.The main argument comes across most strongly in the chapters that discuss the transf ormations inChinatown, Litt le Italy and Litt le Poland in New York. The author distinguishes between these by callingChinatown a type of  ethnic “theme park” while the latter two are called “ethnically def ined settlements”. Thereason behind this labelling is that while the f ormer is based primarily upon the creation of  ‘authentic’spectacles through f ood and f estivals, the latter two also incorporate residential immigrantneighbourhoods. The notion of  these as “vernacular” is repeatedly made by ref erring to their relationshipto integration and multiculturalism within host societies. Related to this is the idea of  ‘community’, aperennial sociological ‘problem’. The troubled academic history of  ‘community’ is addressed by Krase byaligning it to how residents see themselves as part of  a neighbourhood or city. This idea of  community andurban change thus challenges some of  its more oppressive material manif estations such as in ArjunAppadurai’s “ethnoscapes” – ethnic neighbourhoods that are both controlled and contested and whereurban warf are is waged between the migrants and the state. Oscillating between the visible and thesymbolic content of  ethnic neighbourhoods, Krase suggests that they are also reminders of  the links thatmigrants make and maintain between ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘then’ and ‘now’, ‘us’ and them’.As a book that makes a methodological and conceptual contribution, it will be usef ul to a range of  studentsand scholars f rom sociology, geography, urban studies as well as architecture and urban planning.However, it also stands out by being controversial in its approach. Sociologists and ethnographers mightquestion the conceptualisation of  Polish migrant identit ies through their links to ‘peasant’ landscapes andtheref ore the rigour of  this visual methodological approach. They might argue that a project that relies onphoto-documentation and semiotic analysis by the same researcher is a double oxymoron. How can oneinterpret one’s own photos of  ethnic neighbourhoods through the perceived geopolit ical history of  thosewho occupy these spaces? How might these researcher-documented photographs be a product of  theresearcher ’s own perceptions?This book nevertheless raises the most important question f or urban studies – is it possible to ‘see’ cit ieschange through a scholarly and crit ical lens that goes beyond the tourist gaze? Krase makes a boldattempt at showing us how. In doing so, he joins other urban scholars who are working with crit ical visualand participatory methodologies to highlight the material geographies of  migrant home-making in westerncit ies. However, we also need to attend to how ‘seeing’ is structured by knowledge and power of  theresearcher themselves – something that the book is relatively silent on. This is what f eminist scholarswould call polit ics, posit ionality and ref lexivity. In other words, who we are, structures how and what we see.Once we acknowledge that, visual sociology can become much more attendant to the polit ics of  powerthrough which urban spaces are presented and re-presented. Af ter all, seeing is polit ical, and urban changeis all about the polit ics of  seeing.———————————————————————————Ayona Datta is Senior Lecturer in Citizenship and Belonging in the School of  Geography at University ofLeeds. Her broad research interests are in the social and cultural processes shaping the polit ics andpractices of  cit izenship in cit ies in the global north and south – London, Delhi, Mumbai and Izmir. She usesinterdisciplinary approaches f rom urban studies, f eminist geography, and sociology f ocusing specif ically onthe connections between social, polit ical, and material geographies of  urban spaces. She is author of  TheIllegal City: Space, law and gender in a Delhi squatter settlement and co-editor of  Translocal Geographies:Spaces, places, connections and has also published widely around cosmopolitanism in global north andsouth; translocal city, polit ics of  eco-cit ies, material geographies of  home; home, migration and the city;and participatory visual methodologies. Read more reviews by Ayona.

Book review: Seeing cities change: local culture and class

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