Beginning in the 15th century, the Age of Discovery, Europeans carried the capitalist system burgeoning at home to distant places, whose labour and productivity were harnessed to the European core in an unequal, colonial relationship. The result was the capitalist world system, as Immanuel M. Wallerstein in The Modern World-System (1974) terms it. There was increasing economic and productive specialization among the world’s regions, as a pattern of unequal exchange developed between the industrial commodities of the advanced European nations (at the world system’s core) and the raw materials from underdeveloped Asia, Africa, and the New World (at the world system’s periphery). By the 18th century a worldwide urban culture had come into existence. It took variant forms of economic, political, and urban organization in the colonizing core and in the colonized periphery. Although the following discussion treats urban cultures in the core and in the periphery separately, it must be remembered that they—and the urban cultural roles that typify them—form an interactive unit.
The industrial city
Industrial cities appeared after the full development of industrial capitalism in the core nation-states of the late 18th-century world system. Their urban cultural role fit well with the capitalist economic order that came to dominate all other social institutions. Capitalism depended on the production of commodities through wage labour in the interests of capital accumulation. The city became a centre of such production processes and the location for the industrial factories in which this production most typically took place. It was also the residence for the other “commodity” necessary to its productivity, wage labourers. Ancillary urban functions—banking, wholesale and retail trade, transportation and communications nodality—grew up to expedite the factory production or the provisioning of the labour force.
Rapid population increase through in-migration characterized the growth of the industrial city. The most salient aspects of urban cultural forms grew up in the neighbourhoods that housed the newly urbanized labour. Populations with very different cultural characteristics came together in the city, such as the Irish in the British Midlands or the many ethnic groups that formed the urban American melting pot. Ethnic and racial ties often provided the links for migration chains, and they helped recent migrants find jobs, housing, and friendship in a new environment. These ties often resulted in ethnically segregated urban neighbourhoods among the working class.
Two contradictory patterns of organization and conflict characterized this urban population. One pattern grew out of the dense settlement of the working class in the industrial city. Residential aggregation helped organize large-scale working-class protest in the interests of better working conditions and wages. The other, contradictory, pattern consisted of ethnic or racial exclusiveness and competition within the working class. Ethnic or racial residential segregation often provided the base for competition among members of the working class for jobs and urban locations convenient to the workplace. Characteristically, one ethnic population in the industrial city guarded its neighbourhood against invasion by another—or, in times of rapid economic growth and social mobility, ethnic succession, wherein an upwardly mobile ethnic population would leave its neighbourhood to a newly urbanizing ethnic grouping, would occur. The retention or strengthening of ethnic or racial identities in industrial cities commonly took place under these conditions.
The industrial city is the terminus for two conflicting processes emanating from the capitalist character of the wider society: capitalist investment in urban property for profit making, and class conflict. The former process subjects the human and natural environment to the interests of capital accumulation; the latter makes for the formation of urban neighbourhood associations, ethnic associations, and other sorts of class alliances that organize local resistance to this profit taking. The city then becomes a battleground for these opposing forces. Castells in The City and the Grassroots (1983) has studied a range of social movements in present-day American and European industrial cities that arose in resistance to capitalist rationalization of the urban environment. The resistance can take different forms but includes attempts to preserve public services or public spaces for their use value against a capitalist rationality that would privatize and put a price tag on them—that is, this resistance aims at making municipalities rather than private enterprise responsible for provisioning good schools, recreational facilities, museums, and parks. Other forms of resistance consist of attempts to preserve the cultural identity of neighbourhoods and subcultures against residential blockbusting and attempts to develop neighbourhood decentralization so that the urban population takes control over its own living environment.
The mass-communications city
The industrial city, consonant with the rise and consolidation of capitalism in the western European and North American core nations, appears to be rapidly giving way to what has been termed the mass-communications city in the advanced industrial nations. Cities such as New York, London, Tokyo, and other metropoles increasingly perform a primary cultural role as centres of managerial control, based on high-technology mass communication and data processing, over far-flung manufacturing activities. Old urban manufacturing centres in the core of the capitalist system, like Birmingham, Eng., Detroit, and Glasgow, have declined as their role in industrial production has become less important.
The movement toward the mass-communications city has to do with changes in the urban culture of the core brought on by changes in the world system since the 20th century began. This development of “late capitalism,” “monopoly capitalism,” or the “welfare state,” as it is usually labeled, depended on the investment of capital from the core to generate industrial production in the periphery, usually through the institution of multinational corporations. The cultural role of core cities is shifting away from manufacturing as they come to house the advanced means of communication and data analysis necessary to manage this worldwide industrial production.
The mass-communications city ceases to be primarily a habitation of the industrial working class. Instead, those working mainly in high technology industry and service (the middle class) define urban cultural forms. For example, suburbanization and gentrification, two characteristic urban residential patterns of the middle class, become important cultural forms in such cities. Both show the emerging importance of the new social class and the provisioning of new urban spaces (the suburbs) or the renovation of old ones (gentrified inner cities) for it. Again, these new urban locales represent the larger capitalist society, in that they are locales for profit making as well as arenas of class resistance. Harvey in Consciousness and the Urban Experience (1985) argues, for example, that the suburbanization process typical of American cities, especially after World War II, was motivated by the need to foster a new life-style of consumption to negate problems of capitalist overproduction. It also minimized class violence by spreading population out from the old, dense, inner-city neighbourhoods. These suburbs, however, once created in the service of capitalist profit making, can become the locales for resistance against further capitalist rationalization of urban space and against the inroads of welfare statism on local decision making.
As the mass-communications urban cultural role further develops in the advanced industrial societies and industrial production is exported, whatever urban manufacturing continues must meet the competition of imported commodities. Various new means of urban labour use develop to make production cost-effective. For example, manufacturing is left to the lowest strata of the urban population, either illegal migrants, such as Mexicans or Haitians in the United States, or the most underprivileged of the national population, such as American blacks, or foreign workers, such as eastern Europeans or Turks in France, who do not have full citizen rights. Often, manufacturing that once was done in factories is now done in homes as a way of minimizing costs, especially by avoiding government regulations and taxation. Thus, because they work at home or because they are illegal migrants or because they are subject to racial prejudice, the labourers have little legal protection and welfare support. In the face of this massive insecurity they depend on extensive mutual-aid networks, in which the poor share the risks of poverty among themselves. Their abject condition—and their attempts at security—mirror the practices of poor shanty-town dwellers in neocolonial cities, as described below.
Colonial and neocolonial urban cultures
The colonial city
Colonial cities arose in societies that fell under the domination of Europe and North America in the early expansion of the capitalist world system. The colonial relationship required altering the productivity of the colonial society in order that its wealth could be exported to the core nations, and colonial cities centralized this function. Their major cultural role was to house the agencies of this unequal relationship: the colonial political institutions—bureaucracies, police, and the military—by which the core ruled the colony, and the economic structure—banks, merchants, and moneylenders—through which wealth drained from colony to core.
Bombay and Calcutta under the British, the European trading cities in China and West Africa, the British East African and Dutch East Indian urban centres for the collection of plantation crops—from the 18th through the mid-20th centuries—represent this urban type. The core capitalist nations implanted colonial cities as new growths into preexisting precapitalist state societies in many world regions, just as they altered the societies by making them unequal participants in world capitalism. The resulting urban culture represented a novel amalgam of the core and the periphery, with qualities not found in either parent culture.
This new combination was most in evidence in the elite population of the colonial city and its cultural forms. For example, new classes and urban lifeways appeared among the indigenous population. Most of the time the cultural role of the colonial city required the creation of an indigenous urban lower-middle class of merchants, moneylenders, civil servants, and others who were educated to serve the colonial political and economic establishment. For instance, Thomas Babington Macauley, a British Indian administrator in the mid-19th century, hoped to create an elite through Western-style education that was “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and intellect.” The colonial educated lower-middle class often attempted to reform its culture in line with that of the colonizing power, most often through new urban institutions like schools, welfare associations, and sectarian or secular reform groups. A generation or so later, this class transformed by these urban institutions, commonly formed the leadership of nationalist, anticolonial movements. Thus, the colonial city, which began as an instrument of colonial exploitation, became a vehicle of anticolonial protest through this lower middle class and the cultural institutions, schools, newspapers, and other urban cultural forms it had constructed.
After World War II many new nations in Asia and Africa gained independence. Although no longer the direct political colonies of Western countries, these urban cultures and their cities continued in a dependent economic relationship with the advanced industrial nations.
The neocolonial city
The latest type of urban development in the periphery of the capitalist world system, or what is often called the Third World, is the neocolonial city. This urban type has arisen in relation to the development of monopoly capitalism and the mass-communications city in the core. Export capital from advanced industrial nations has created enclaves of industrial production in Third World cities, thus replicating in these urban places many of the cultural roles played by the industrial city in the core. There are urban factories and urban-resident wage labourers. There is a developing infrastructure of urban transport and communication by which these commodities and labourers are allocated. There is massive urban-ward migration from neighbouring rural areas.
The neocolonial city, however, does not exactly duplicate the cultural role of the industrial urban type precisely because of its dependent relationship with the core. One major difference is that the commodities produced in neocolonial cities generally are destined for export rather than for home consumption, except perhaps by a small home elite. The neocolonial city does not serve an indigenous hinterland; it serves the wider world economy. Its rural environs are important only because they provide a large and readily available labour supply.
The large-scale urbanization in the neocolonial city differs from the urbanization that characterized the industrial city earlier. It gives rise to what has been called the informal economy in these cities. The informal economy consists of urban services and products provided by the neocolonial city’s poorest denizens, the petty hawkers, the shoeshine boys, the household help, the rag pickers, and others who form a class of petty commodity producers and sellers. The common image of these people is highly pejorative: they are marginal to the city, usually unemployed and often criminal, unmotivated and dysfunctional to urban life, characterized by a “culture of poverty” that, at the same time, makes them accept their wretched condition and keeps them in it. Their marginality is often said to be exemplified in the shantytowns, tin can cities, or squatter settlements that they build at the borders of the city and that blight it. This “myth of marginality” as Janice Perlman calls it (The Myth of Marginality, 1976) obscures the importance of shantytown inhabitants in defining the nature of the neocolonial city.
To compete successfully in the world market, commodities manufactured in Third World cities have to be less expensive than the comparable items produced in the core. Wage labour in the industrial sector of these cities is considerably cheapened because many services and small commodities that wage labourers require are supplied through the informal economy. As Larissa Lomnitz indicates in Networks and Marginality: Life in a Mexican Shantytown (1977), recent rural migrants and shantytown dwellers act as maids, gardeners, and handymen to the industrial workers and the middle class at costs well below what would be charged if the formal sector supplied these services (comparable to domestic labour and baby-sitting supplied well below minimum wage in the core nations).
The informal urban economy never provides security, and the inhabitants of shantytowns in neocolonial cities have had to develop cultural means of survival over the hard times that commonly befall them. Rather than being places of anomie, shantytowns are made up of highly intimate webs of relationship and mutual dependence, based on carefully fostered kinship, ethnic, sectarian, or friendship networks. These networks succor those temporarily out of money and provide some security for those otherwise economically unprotected, who have neither job security nor welfare institutions to fall back on, given the informal sector work that they do.
These networks, which are in fact adaptations to the exigencies of neocolonial cities, often appear as survivals from the peasant or rural backgrounds of the shantytown dwellers—they are said to be “peasant urbanites” rather than truly urbanized, and this image incorrectly strengthens the notion of their marginality. The tribal identities found among recent urban migrants in African cities are actually instances of “retribalization,” a strengthening or redefinition of tribal identity to form networks among urban migrants for mutual aid. Similarly, extended family networks may not disappear in the city; they became wider and stronger among Mexican shantytown inhabitants, for example. New sectarian identities can play an equivalent role: Bryan Roberts in Cities of Peasants (1978) shows that the growth of Pentecostal and other Protestant sects in Guatemala fulfills needs for mutual support networks in poor neighbourhoods and for those without kin ties.
Although shantytown inhabitants in the informal economy are impoverished and insecure, it is not certain that they can organize and struggle for better urban living conditions, as did wage labourers in industrial cities. Whereas some scholars have argued for the revolutionary potential of this class, others are persuaded that it does not form a proletariat and will not engage in revolutionary confrontation. The fact that the people who live in shantytowns are “self-employed” and do not enter a wage relationship with the urbanites whom they provide with services apparently limits class antagonisms. Furthermore, both the middle class and shantytown dwellers often perceive their real enemies as the Western imperialist nations or the national government said to be in league with international capital. This perception recognizes that the travails of all classes in the neocolonial city have more to do with external economic relationships in the world economy than class exploitation within the city.
