Chapter 8

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The birth of the “neoliberal” city and its media

James Hay

 

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Beyond the “new media” city

This chapter’s account of the birth of “neoliberal” city and its media shares with various veins of research in Communication and Media Studies, Urban Sociology, and Geography an interest in the “new media” city. However, this chapter proposes an alternative theory, history, and analysis of the past and current relation between media and cities, specifically questioning recent formulations of the (new) media city. To what extent have recent theories’ and analyses’ understanding of the linkage between media and urban space emphasized that one is the primary determination of the other? To what extent have they emphasized politics, economy, culture, or technology as the single, primary, or most important determination? To what extent have they understood any of these determinations as singular and self-determining? These questions lead me to ask another set of questions. What would a study of the production of a media city involve if it did not place “media” or media-making at the center of a chain of productivity? What would be involved instead in an analysis that considers the current media city (the “newness” of the linkage between media and the city) through a history of spatial practice and the production of space? Addressing these questions involves recognizing the Modern bias of most studies of the media/city, as well as the possibilities of a counter-Modern form of thought and analysis from and about the media city.

Addressing these questions also allows me to examine how the current formation of the new media city has called forth, instrumentalized, and/or targeted specific technologies (“media”) of freedom and government. In this way, the chapter considers how the new media city became the object of liberal programs and policies (a recent rationality and arrangement of liberal government) oriented toward a new regime of urban renewal. The current liberal city’s formation and reformism as media space and network are not new; the city has been a laboratory and performance stage of liberal reform since the nineteenth century. By charting this history, the chapter examines how a recent discourse and reasoning about the new media city develops out of and perpetuates a Modern reasoning about progress, renewal, and reinvention, but also how new media have become different instruments or targets of urban reform than in the past (even as what is new in the present context acts on and rematerializes old spaces and media). The chapter proposes an analytic assembled out of several theoretical orientations, none of which are overtly focused on communication/media, though they are indispensable for thinking about liberalism, the city, and their media – historically and geographically.

Rethinking spatial materialism … of the “urban revolution” and its media

One starting point for thinking about the birth of the neoliberal city and its media, and for rethinking the “media city” through an alternative account of materialities, is Henri Lefebvre’s reformulation of Marxist historical or dialectical materialism as, what I have termed, a spatial materialism (Hay, 2001, 2004, 2005, 2009). In Everyday Life in the Modern World (1971/1994), Lefebvre proposed that accounting for Modern life entailed a form of philosophical, scientific, and critical thought that grappled with its own embeddedness in the everyday. He thus proposed that Marxist conceptions of history required a keener sense of the littleness and insignificance of everyday recurrence – as a structuring and ordering dimension, as well as the flux and complexity, of Modern life. For Lefebvre, Modernity was too grand and general a concept – one that always needed to be squared with and adduced through the quotidian as “material culture.” Historical and political “revolution” occurred daily. No historical epoch is settled; the Modern world can not be generalized through descriptions such as “technological society,” “consumer society,” or “cybernetic society.”

Lefebvre continued these themes as he turned his attention during the 1960s to “the production of space,” a phrase that he exploited wonderfully for its double meaning. First, the term emphasized that space is produced, a perspective that ran counter to the Modern view of space as abstract (computed mathematically or made rational through technicians such as city planners). In that sense, he emphasized the historicity and provisionality of space and of the abstractions of space dear to science and philosophy. Space can not be seen as globally uniform, as historically stable, or as abstract if one recognizes that every society makes, practices, and lives its spatial relations. In The Production of Space (1972/1991), he emphasized both the economic and cultural (artistic/representational) practices that produce and determine space, but by describing space as practiced and lived he also highlighted the little everyday making of space. However, “the production of space” also referred to space as productive of social relations. In this second sense, space is a condition of future practices – a basis for “making History.” In both these senses, “the production of space” is a means and an end, but an end that is never finished and settled.

By construing “the production of space” in these dialectical terms, Lefebvre cast History and Space as mutually constitutive. In so doing, he also recast Marxist historical materialism’s dialectical account of the material means of making and reproducing social relations, which Lefebvre viewed as operating with an overly or narrowly economistic understanding of “production,” work, and their role in “making History.” But Lefebvre’s formulation of the “production of space” went further than simply decoupling historical materialism from purely economic determinations; he also complicated the Marxist formulation of base and superstructure as the theoretical and historiographic lens for understanding how social relations were produced and reproduced. He discussed social space as produced by economic determinations as well as a system of representation, art, and culture, describing Venice (at length) as both a “work of art” and financed labor. In this way, his explanation of “the production of space” responded to the two dominant veins of French Marxist theory in the 1960s – political economy and Structuralism. However, by emphasizing that space is not simply produced but also productive, and that the productivity of space occurs up through everyday spatial practice and through space as lived, “the production of space” became a strategy for underscoring the radical overdetermination of social relations. Studying the production of space became a means of turning historical materialism onto the multiple, everyday spatial practices of living social relations, and onto the emergent and residual spatial practices that settled and unsettled the living of those relations. Lefebvre’s “spatial materialism” emphasized the need for a heuristic that avoided reducing a historical context to a single motor of history by emphasizing instead the importance of mapping the historical complexity of materials for producing social relations and living life spatially.

Lefebvre offered a parallel or counter-history to a Marxist history of the emergence of an industrial society and capitalist economy, describing Modernity as productive of “abstract space,” and the Modern city as the primary location of abstract space (particularly as the city and urban life drifted by the 1960s toward suburbanization). However, he also made a distinction between “the city” (connoting a fairly delimited social space) and “the urban” (a complex of conditions, a thick texture of Modern life). So within his history of Modern social space, he charted an “urban revolution”: the birth or ascendance of a “period when the urban problematic becomes predominant, when the search for solutions and modalities unique to urban society are foremost” (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p. 5). Although he considered the “urban problematic” as not absorbing all questions about Modernity, his argument provides a lens through which to examine a coalescence of “solutions and modalities” considered Modern. Just as importantly, his use of the term “revolution” cast the urban as a spatial and historical stage for contemporary politics – albeit a politics and form of political thought located in the flux and overdeterminedness of the everyday. The analysis of a “revolutionary” urban politics proposed by Lefebvre also cast urban space as an increasingly crucial stage for reproducing social relations economically and culturally. The urban revolution is thus a critical point – a space of crisis requiring an ongoing “search for solutions and modalities unique” to it.

There are two implications of Lefebvre’s writing about “the production of space” and “the urban revolution” that I want to pursue further in this chapter. One has to do with the (re)production of urban space and the urban revolution as a (Modern) history of “urban renewal.” As I explain in the next section, urban renewal is a Modern problem requiring solutions and modalities, but it is an unfinished project – productive of and shaped by the spatiality of social relations and life. This brings me to a second implication that pertains particularly to solutions and modalities of urban renewal as a problematic. My project asks how media have mattered within the production of urban space, and of urban renewal construed this way. Given that Lefebvre had relatively little to say about communication media, some effort is necessary to pull his thought in that direction. However, moving his thought that way introduces a perspective about the “media city” that is uncommon in Media Studies which tend to place media at the center of the world and any question about it, and tend to explain the history of media (and the media city) as driven primarily by media industries and/or representations.

Liberalism, governmentality, and the modern history of urban renewal

Although thinking about urban renewal through a spatial materialism helps focus attention on the materials, modalities, and “media” involved in the Modern (re)production of urban space (asking which kind of media practices are called forth by and instrumental to the reproduction of space), my interest in urban renewal opens onto a slightly different (though not contrary) set of questions than Lefebvre addressed. Because urban renewal, as a Modern problem and solution, is a moral project oriented toward improving cities and urban populations, it occurred through the birth of liberal government, and through the proliferation of what Michel Foucault referred to as the “technologies of government” accompanying that birth.

Foucault considered liberalism a governmental rationality that not only recognized the virtue of individual sovereignty, freedoms, and rights but also relied on the proliferation of technologies throughout society for knowing, improving, and disciplining the behavior of individuals and populations. He described these means of “watching over” populations as a Modern “pastoral power” that rechanneled pre-Modern Christianity’s techniques of salvation through Modern forms of “welfare” administered by the State and an increasing number of institutions and programs in “civil society.” For Foucault, the Modern programs overseeing the health and security of individuals and populations worked simultaneously towards “social improvement” and maintaining “order.”

In this way, Foucault’s early writing about the “birth” of the asylum, the clinic, and the prison provided a way of thinking laterally (rather than head-on) about political and economic Modernity – through histories that decentered the primacy of liberalism and capitalism and that highlighted the relation between the rationality and authority of political science and economics. To the extent that liberalism and capitalism were part of the Modern exercise of power, their practice was diffused through micrologics, differentiated and differentiating techniques, dispersed authorities/rationalities, and networks of power – and thus could not be readily abstracted as autonomous, except by the Modern differentiating machinery that separated and ordered the Modern world in that way. In this way, Foucault famously provided an alternative to Marxism’s penchant to explain liberalism and capitalism primarily in terms of political economic processes.

In his late career, Foucault re-thought liberalism through the history of programs and technologies of “security,” “governmentality,” and “biopower.” His lecture “On Governmentality” (1978) proposed¹ that the Modern conception (and problem) of “government” involved the dispersion of practices and technologies of governance and management (of children, family, oneself) which operated separately from but interdependently with forms of State government – the latter of which, he suggested, should be studied as the last (rather than the primary) locus of government. Liberalism, in this sense, was not only “born” in conjunction with the government of patients, criminals, the “mad,” the poor, or any potentially unruly or ungovernable individual/population but also in conjunction with the “positive” forms of “police”/policy and administration that worked continuously to keep society “healthy.”

In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault offered a sustained and explicit account of the connections between liberalism and capitalist economy by charting the historical and geographic variation and transformation of liberalism and political economy – across eighteenth-century French Physicocracy, nineteenth-century British liberalism, 1950s and 1960s German “ordo-liberalism,” and a post-1960s US “neoliberalism.” Because Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism were given in the late 1970s, they introduced a way of thinking about neoliberalism that was ahead of a critical discourse about neoliberalism which developed in the West over the 1990s and 2000s, and they now comprise an important alternative to that discourse. A critical discourse about neoliberalism has tended to think about neoliberalism as economic deregulation and globalization. In this way it often has intersected with accounts of “global cities” as economic capitals and as part of a new space of financial and information flows. Foucault situated neoliberalism within a long history of the “reason of State” and of how “political economy” had become instrumental to different “governmental rationalities” concerned with the limits and capacities of the Modern liberal State.

Foucault argued that a US neoliberalism (already in the 1970s) was a governmental rationality invested in the health of an “enterprise society,” and a form of social administration that relied on economic assessment in (re-)evaluating noneconomic forms of behavior and programs of social welfare. As he notes, an enterprise society and its principle subject/agent (the homo oeconomicus) are rationalized as a maximization of rights and freedoms, rather than negatively as the loss of rights, security, and welfare otherwise accorded by the State. There are many reasons to think that, had Foucault continued to write into the 1990s, he would not have considered “neoliberalism” to be settled or transposable across nations as is often suggested when neoliberalism is cast as unimpeded global financial networks and as a new stage of global capitalism. My qualification of the term “neoliberalism” in this chapter’s title represents my sense that Foucault’s account of the birth of neoliberalism as a governmental rationality can work as a counter-point to the view that neoliberalism is primarily an economic formation, or a spatial, social, or cultural formation driven mostly by economic determinations.

There are two implications of Foucault’s thought about the birth of liberalism and neoliberalism that bear on my consideration of the technologies, media, and spatial materialities of “urban renewal.” One concerns his account of the city. He never wrote about the city per se, never suggested that Modernity be examined as an urban revolution, and deflected efforts to fold his histories into sciences such as Geography, urbanism, or architecture. However, he discussed the city repeatedly in his histories of the birth of the asylum, the clinic, the prison, and (in that way) liberalism. In this sense, he approached the Modern city laterally, as he does the State and economies – liberalism and capitalism. The late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century city is the stage for Modern, liberal arrangements of government – for deciding the proper location of the General Hospital, the asylum, and the prison. Cumulatively, Foucault’s work thus considered the Modern city as an object of reform and “renewal” – a perspective elaborated in Thomas Osbourne’s history of how the nineteenth-century city became the target of increasingly multiple programs of environmental hygiene, and in Patrick Joyce’s (2003) history of the nineteenth-century city as the Modern center of freedoms and liberal programs of normalization.

Unlike Lefebvre, Foucault never conceptualizes (urban) space as a determining condition of history and social relations. However, his view of power and government as a dispersion, network, and arrangement – the spatial rationalization of bodies, movements, knowledge, and observation – provides an important corollary to understanding the long history (the ongoing problem and instrumentality) of “urban renewal” in liberal government, and for recognizing the term’s mattering (its discursive and nondiscursive formation) historically in specific nation-states. The remainder of this chapter contemplates four historical conjunctures of media and urban renewal, in part as a history of the present conjuncture, as an alternative account (a long history) of the “new media” city, and in part as a demonstration of how media have mattered in different times in different ways in the (re)production of urban space – as instruments of “urban renewal.”

Advancing liberalism through urban renewal and its media – four historical conjunctures

Although the term “urban renewal” acquires a fairly technical and decidedly political tenor in the United States after World War II, its discursive formation and its deployment as governmental program at that time (and to this day) developed out of a history in which communication and cultural technologies performed a significant role. The historical outline that follows considers their instrumentality not simply within a history of communication media but as civic technologies in the production of the space of urban reform and renewal.

The birth of the liberal metropolis and its media

Liberalism has most often been associated with the government of the nation–state; however, by the nineteenth century the Western metropolis became (as Patrick Joyce has noted) a domain where the freedoms of the liberal subject were most concentrated and naturalized, and simultaneously the most active point of “reformist” policy and administration. Joyce’s history of the “liberal city” underscores that the active creation of liberal subjects depended on fashioning an urban center not only as a rational space (a space of planning) but also as a complex of interdependent technologies for “illuminating” citizens, and through which citizens could improve themselves. The tools for cultivating liberal citizens and a “social man” included the creation of public library networks (a Central Library and its outlying “branches”). As Tony Bennett (1995) has noted, the “birth of the public museum” operated as a “cultural technology” whose spatial rationalization of exhibits and patrons’ movements was integral to its civic and “governmental” mission – “enlightening,” “cultivating,” and “civilizing” citizens. The naturalization of the city center as a rationalized space of reform and enlightenment also depended on cultural technologies such as public zoos – the London Zoo in 1847, followed by public zoos in Melbourne and New York in 1860 – which were educational and civilizing spheres that spatially organized, differentiated, and made rational the free/liberal subject’s relation to caged animalia. Often these facilities folded into one another, as when some of the first public zoos were built adjacent to botanical gardens.

To speak of the birth of liberalism as a governmental rationality is not only to emphasize a “reasoning” that played out in deliberations (policies and urban planning) but also to recognize that this rationality was produced through particular sites that collectively comprised an effective spatial arrangement of government. In other words, achieving a propitious governmental arrangement involved the production of a spatial arrangement, a complex of interdependent facilities (the “mediations” and “cultural technology”) of liberal citizenship. Collectively these sites and networks comprised an urban core that operated as a self-governing motor of civic reform, reproducing a “moral city” and enlightened citizen. Each site, and the power grids that connected them, contributed to the urban center’s operation as a machine with interlocking “governors” – a term that, in that day, linked liberal political apparatuses to a phalanx of self-regulating devices and their networks on which Modern cities depended (Otter, 2007, 2008). It is no small coincidence that the location and (as Joyce notes) the architecture of the buildings of city administration in the city center made them organically part of the urban complex/concentration of sites, networks, and cultural technologies, each supporting the others as spaces of ongoing reform, enlightenment, and reason. The urban center became, in this sense, an object of particular spatial strategies of social welfare geared to cultivating, securing, and individualizing incentives for a civic man.

The cinema city and the birth of urban planning as liberal reform

Facilities such as libraries, zoos, museums, botanical gardens, and parks which comprised the urban core as a space of civic reform and public good continued into the early twentieth century but were rearticulated through an urban fabric and governmental arrangement into which new facilities such as the movie theater emerged – and through which the “cinema city” developed. The cinema city was a historical and geographic synergy between the production of urban space and the sites/spaces for producing, distributing, and exhibiting “cinema.” In that this historical synergy developed through the reformist plans and programs of the liberal city, its development was materially part of strategies and problems of governance and the provision of welfare.

Although the programs of “enlightenment” and cultural uplift that Joyce associates with the birth of the Western European liberal city also occurred in the United States, the US city developed within a somewhat different mentality about urban planning, and with an ambivalence about Western European plans. In the United States, planning was not about “renovating” often centuries-old structures typical of Western European cities. The US programs of urban planning modeled themselves on French and British precedents, while claiming a broader and bolder canvas for urban government, civic uplift, and reform. Shaping the US city as a healthy and rational “economy” involved a stronger commitment to cities’ flexibility for development (maximum reproduction and renewal), even as this commitment involved more ambitious programs of planning, particularly to achieve efficient transportation in densely populated areas in the first decades of the twentieth century. In the United States these reforms may have been overseen by municipal government but, unlike the Paris Renovation under Napoleon III, they tended to be initiated and financed by a city’s business corporation and its formal, civic associations.

One noteworthy instance where these strategies found a much broader space of operation was in turn-of-the-century Chicago. Chicago is a noteworthy site to understand how the movie theater was put to work within a new rationality and arrangement of liberal government in US cities because, at the very moment when the cinema city was born, Chicago became the laboratory – the shining demonstration – of the world’s most massive program of urban planning, considered as a new stage of urban renewal (aka the City Beautiful) and what Charles Wacker’s Manual of the Plan for Chicago (1912) described as “making a practical, beautiful, finished fabric out of Chicago’s crazy quilt” (p. 81). The 1909 Plan for Chicago culminated out of a series of plans and projects in the decades following the fire that destroyed much of the city’s center in 1871, the most notable project being the city’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Whereas the early liberal city in Western Europe and the US northeast was a collection of cultural facilities folded into one another in the urban core, the Chicago exposition magnified this trend’s virtue into a resplendent (electrically illuminated and white plaster) city within the city, christened the White City – a term that implicitly affirmed the racial exclusivity of the “civilization” being secured by an urban core organized as a space of enlightenment.

The political rationality and administration of public welfare as a moral/civic project in the early twentieth-century United States involved an alliance between the new regime of planning/planners and business leaders. The Chicago Plan in particular linked “public works” to “public uplift,” affirming planning’s ability to secure a relatively permanent orderliness, built into the urban fabric, as a means to the city’s “moral economy” – its healthy growth, unpollutedness/Whiteness, and capacity to engender a culture of enlightened citizens (beauty, green spaces, and arts). Its commission invoked “public uplift” as the most significant reason for the undertaking:

More than the early liberal city, this project assumed that enlightenment was not located in any one public cultural facility but in their interstitial and connecting sinew – in every building block of urban renewal as civilizing program and public welfare.

Establishing and circulating a rationale for the plan involved multiple media and actors. The head of the planning commission, Charles Wacker, authored Wacker’s Manual for the Chicago Plan, which was distributed through Chicago’s public schools as a civics lesson and citizenship training. The commission authorized a two-reel film, A Tale of One City, that circulated through Chicago movie theaters – its premier attended in some of the city’s fledgling downtown theaters by government officials and business leaders. Like the manual, the film was a civics lesson about government and citizenship in a city leading the world in urban renewal. Whereas the manual documented and reproduced the vision of the plan through photographs and print illustrations, the film put the plan, the city, and government in motion.

Understanding how A Tale of One City mattered and materialized as an instrument in the Chicago Plan involves mapping not only its relation to a theater circuit (a circuit of film distribution and exhibition) but also the theaters’ physical and material relation to the reproduction of urban space, a stage of urban renewal represented as new and unprecedented. That line of analysis could consider how the movie theater, as a specific site and platform for public and civic education traversed other networks and sites of public and civic education such as the schools and libraries through which Wacker’s manual was distributed. The analysis also could consider how Tale inserted itself into a regime of civic education films, such as the ones cataloged in Ina Clement’s Visualizing Citizenship (1920), which were integrated into feature-length exhibitions at the downtown theaters as well as across other exhibition sites.

The emerging downtown theaters in Chicago, and other US cities, may have developed for a relatively specific function – to show films. However, their architectural design (often in the neo-classical style of other public cultural/educational facilities) and their concentration in particular zones of the city made them building blocks of urban renewal. The Chicago Plan recognized the importance of and accommodated places for “recreation,” though in so doing it mostly emphasized public parks. The large downtown movie theater, as a building/facility that could stand amidst the cultural and recreational institutions of the Chicago Plan, improving on the immorality of smaller, earlier nickelodeons, mediated the space/distance between public recreation and public education – as public good and welfare. And more than early twentieth-century neighborhood theaters, and the future rise of the suburban theater, the downtown theaters were, for a time, central to realizing public works, public welfare, and a public good.

Rising above the old liberal city: the radio city and liberalism’s air space

The Chicago Plan emphasized the administrative and cultural center of the city, not only by clearing a massive open/public space in the city center and by encircling the center with concentric rings of park space but also by designing a transportation grid (of streets, rails, and harbors) that made the city center a meeting point – a hub on a wheel of radiating spokes, put in motion by modern transportation vehicles. The radial city in this plan promised a solution to the city as a space of crowds and “congestion” by distributing public spaces and expediting movements through the city. European urban planning (most famously the Paris renovation) early conceived of the health of the liberal city as a rationally articulated and communicative space whose free-flowing arteries of transportation could relieve “congestion” and assure both orderly and maximum movement.

The Chicago Plan, and successive planning in the United States through the mid-twentieth century, became absorbed (arguably more than in Europe) with the efficiency of urban transportation, particularly in its relation to a discourse about urban “congestion.” The strategies of laissez passer (unimpeded movement) became a more central preoccupation for US cities where the commitment to public forms of transportation, as one form of public welfare/service, was giving way to private forms of transport more rapidly than any place in the world. To the extent that the (privately driven) plans for US cities in the first half of the twentieth century were preoccupied with reorganizing the city as an efficient network for public and private transportation, the reasoning about civic improvement increasingly became oriented toward the city as a healthy (“uncongested”) circulatory system to which every citizen (as a pedestrian, passenger, or driver) contributed through their movements.

In these respects, the spatial and governmental rationality of the early twentieth-century city not only emphasized the beauty and scientific management of a civic center but also the unity and economy of the city radiating from that center, made possible through networks and grids for increasing the ease and efficiency of communication from one part of the city to another, and between the center and all its parts. The “radio city” was born through this spatial arrangement and rationality for liberal government, welfare, and reform – through the earlier ideal of the radial city. By the 1920s radio had become a buzzword for electromagnetic waves that “radiated” from a center-source outward. Over the 1920s and 1930s, radio became the invisible but audible and felt connectivity of the city as communicative space, and communicative space operated as an emerging space of citizenship and civic progress. As radio companies formed in/from United States cities, the city became a space of “broadcasting” – a term that referred in early years to the wholeness of an urban market, population, and citizenry through radio transmission. The national connectivity that began to occur by the late 1920s was initially an expansion of the radio city – of the nation modeled as radio city and of national broadcast space comprised of radio delays between cities.

Radio transmission “covered” urban space through “air waves” and “air space,” a term that by the 1920s referred to both flyover space and radio space (Hay, 2012). Radio transcended earlier urban space, even as the radio city became a purer and more efficient way of achieving the radial city. Signal strength, and the location of transmitters, maximized range – with high-signal strength allowing radio transmissions to penetrate or circumvent tall buildings that increasingly comprised the US city at the time of radio’s rapid emergence. Over the 1920s and 1930s, fledgling radio broadcast companies sought the highest buildings from which to transmit in cities. In Chicago, the Chicago Daily News’ new radio wing, WMAQ, began broadcasting in 1922 from the La Salle Hotel, then the tallest building in downtown Chicago, while the same year WGN began broadcasting from the Wrigley Building in the city’s center. In New York City, Lee de Forest engineered one of the first public broadcasts to that city in 1910 from New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, thus acting on/through the (relatively exclusive) cultural facilities in the city’s center. By the 1920s and 1930s, fledgling radio companies in New York transmitted from the Metropolitan Life Building (then the city’s tallest); both the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings were designed with spires for radio broadcasting. The construction of Rockefeller Center as the headquarters of Radio Corporation of America and its subsidiary National Broadcast Company encased the building’s public center, the Radio City Music Hall, and became the hub of New York as the world’s paradigmatic radio city.

The radio city was not separate from, or more important historically than, contemporaneous city newspapers and urban telephone networks, because often they developed and operated interdependently (as when the Chicago Daily News and the Tribune Company added radio divisions). Collectively and interdependently, they reorganized the US city as communicative space, and reinforced a relation between urban communication and transportation. The liberal city’s organization for enlightenment depended more than before on networks for radiating/dispersing civic knowledge, albeit from an administrative and cultural urban center outwards. However, the radio city (more than the city newspaper and telephone network) acted on the transcendence of liberal government through the free-est, most unfettered means – an air space that supposedly solved the problem of urban congestion.

One of the most vivid paradoxes of the radio city as a space/strategy of urban welfare and reform was its contemporaneous relation to an emerging discourse, policy, and implementation of urban renewal as arteries of rapid transport that cut up the city, erasing earlier zones and displacing some of the most impoverished populations. The project of maximizing the city as communicative space was not simply about transcending terrestrial impediments through radio; it encouraged expanding the corridors of transportation to the city’s furthest and newest edges. “The City,” a film presented at the 1938 New York World’s Fair, projects the solution to the social ruination engendered by urban congestion and alienation (the unhealthy social body) onto a hyper-rationally designed edge-“community” navigated through a first wave of “free-ways.” The film’s exhibition in New York was no small coincidence since that city (led by Robert Moses) was undergoing one of the most massive urban roads projects in the world, connecting Manhattan to its boroughs, and particularly after World War II to the rapidly growing suburban areas. Whereas early in his career (1920s–1930s), Moses had been a leading agent in the creation of numerous city parks, his later career was marked by construction of the city’s expressways – the Bruckner, the Staten Island, the Cross-Bronx, the Long Island, the Major Deegan, and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressways. New York City’s planning program recast urban welfare and reform (the reinvention of the liberal city) with twin aims: the aim of an “expressway city” and “commuter city” and of slum clearance and public housing as a robust program of urban “redevelopment.” Both were considered (not incommensurate) liberal virtues of, and part of the legacy of, the radio city as a new spatial and governmental rationality.

The televisual city and mass suburbanization as liberal ideal

Many accounts of television emphasize its development in the second half of the twentieth century as a national broadcast medium. TV’s culture, commercial potential, and governmentalization all are typically construed as a national, nationalizing, and/or nationalistic project. Hence the geography of television tends to map TV’s reach as reinforcing or leaping over national borders, complicating national sovereignty. Some (particularly critical and cultural studies) accounts of TV have mapped a more complicated geography through its historical relation to house and home, and along this path to “homeland” (Morley, 2000).

In the United States, TV developed as a broadcast medium for and from cities and continued to be a profoundly urban medium (mediated through cities) that loosely conjoined national broadcasting and subsequently cable/satellite networks. TV’s metropolitan orientation was partly a legacy of earlier synergies between the liberal city and its media such as radio, city newspapers, and telephony – media that were supposed to have brought progress, modernization, and reform in solving urban problems, making cities more communicative, and advancing liberalism from the city’s core outward. However, this is where TV’s relation to the residual regime of urban reform gets complicated. TV became a founding condition of the mass suburbanization that dramatically reshaped US cities in the second half of the twentieth century, accomplishing (building on top of) earlier strategies of urban renewal by leaving behind the urban core. However, TV also bore a significant (and seldom acknowledged) relation to the emergence of a governmental discourse and program objectified as “urban renewal,” which targeted the urban core that TV helped evacuate.

Accounts of TV’s instrumentality in mass suburbanization often have acknowledged Raymond Williams’ point that TV emerged through a regime of mobility and privacy – what he termed “mobile privatization” – rather than simply as an outcome of communication institutions or the invention of communication technologies (Williams, 1976/1992). For Williams, TV’s (or other communication technologies’) birth can not be understood simply as an outcome of “media history” but through a historical relation to the changing models of domesticity/privacy and mobility. TV’s relation to a contemporaneous mobile privatization comprised, according to Williams, a new way of life situated increasingly “at a distance” from earlier urban and rural environments as well as from one’s neighbors. Though he does not offer an explicit accounting of mass suburbanization as White-flight from the urban core, or as the mass migration of populations from the earlier zones where cities had been concentrated in the United States (the northeast and upper midwest) to the southern and southwestern zones of the United States, his historiographic strategy is salient for understanding the new telegeography in the United States, particularly how TV broadcast networks were assembled (differently than radio) through a massive reorientation of urban geography. As I have noted in earlier work, tele-vision (vision “at a distance”) and its imbrication in a regime of mobility and domesticity suggest an emergent spatial and governmental rationality – one that valued the “privatization” as “auto-mobilization” of government, and what Nikolas Rose, in a different way, has referred to as “governing at a distance” (Rose, 1999; Hay, 2003).

Recognizing TV’s mattering/materialization as part of an assemblage of technologies of “self-government” and of “governing at a distance,” and as instrumental in this way to the spatial arrangement/production of liberal government, helps highlight TV’s historical and geographical relation to the discourse and policy initiatives about “urban renewal.” Whereas the US Housing Act of 1937 “linked slum clearance and public housing in one program, focusing on the treatment of urban blight” (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1974, p. 1), “urban renewal” became the key word in the rationales of the Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954 – a period when the energetic productivity of mass suburbanization began to require an equally broad response (a “total solution”) to the urban cores that were being evacuated in a mass migration to suburbs. Rationalized as a comprehensive strategy, “urban renewal” sought to incentivize various stake holders in local projects, often sponsoring the formation of leagues, councils, commissions, and committees comprised of representatives from various municipal and commercial institutions as well as nonprofit civic associations. Urban renewal thus became a rationale for coordinating a network of public–private oversight (“government” in the Foucaultian sense), mobilizing entities such as the Build America Better Committee, the Citizens Committee for Urban Renewal, and the Friends Self-help Housing of Philadelphia. These collectivities of activists/agents primarily produced printed “guides,” brochures, and handbooks for making renewal rational (i.e., developing a plan of action and review).

Within this transformation and rearrangement, the vestiges of the cinema city and its relation to nineteenth-century cultural facilities became problematic spaces – indices of blight, degeneration, and the need for urban renewal. The old movie palaces in the urban core survived for a limited period as porn theaters. The provisional status of drive-in movie theaters setup along the urban frontier’s outer edges and outside the urban core in small towns carried the cinematic city forward, even as it rearticulated it to a new regime of mobile privatization whose suburban technology is the “multiplex” cinema attached to the shopping center (an anchoring space in the poly-centrism of the TV city).

Like radio during the 1930s and 1940s, television operated across, throughout, and in a certain sense above the city, but unlike the radio city, television reorganized and represented the life/growth (the biopolitics) of the city’s newest zones against the backdrop of “blight” and the “darkness” of an “inner city.” By the 1960s and early 1970s, urban stations and their national affiliations became circuits for re-distributing urban renewal, as a project targeting increasingly expansive areas of the urban core but always integral to (as a dark shadow and the corrective moral economy created by) the broadly cast media of mass suburbanization. The representation of the newly settled suburbs as a setting for TV domestic comedy during the 1950s thus operated in synergy with (albeit on a different register than) TV crimes series set in the inner, decaying “noir-city” – for example, Peter Gunn as the noir-ish antipode of the Nelson, Anderson, and Cleaver neighborhood. By the early 1970s, the strategies for reassessing and even reclaiming the liberal city’s core occurred through TV on multiple fronts: Norman Lear’s TV cities (the mixed-race row-housing of All in the Family, the “east-side” condo where the Jeffersons “moved on up,” and particularly the “ain’t we lucky we got-em” Good Times of Chicago’s public housing projects), Mary Tyler Moore Production’s resettlement and refurbishment of presuburban zones of Minneapolis in The Mary Tyler Moore Show and some of its spin-offs, Public Broadcasting Service’s (PBS) fashioning of neighborhoods such as Mr. Rogers’ and Sesame Street which were oriented to learning the rules of cooperation and teamwork and which reproduced many of the rationales of the political and technical discourses of urban renewal. The PBS programs represented a mythic, future-oriented city – a city that was utopian because it was no place and every place, and that was seminal because it was in the early throes of renewal as a televisual public education of a new generation of children and their citizen parents. These PBS children’s programs operated alongside TV news and documentaries, such as CBS’s “Special Report – The Cities” (1968) and the New York City PBS-affiliate’s “People Power,” that represented “urban renewal” in real and specific US cities.

These TV programs affirmed that even though television was instrumental in mobilizing (a mobile privatization of) urban expansion, it also was capable of demonstrating the techniques/experiments of renewing and infilling the residual, eroding space of the urban core. Because TV rapidly had become a technology of mass suburbanization, TV productions such as these contributed to imagining, increasingly from the suburban settlement, a future resettling of the urban core as a space knowable and available to suburbanites and tourists. In New York, a local program such as “People Power” represented to the city’s burrows (and not simply outlying suburbs) models and strategies whereby citizens were performing, and acting through, the new political programs for governing cities through “urban renewal.”

Why a historical geography of the liberal city and its media matters now

There is a long history of liberalism that continues to shape the present, and the remnants of that history are the materials through which the present production, renewal, and governmentalization of the liberal city and its media occur. The historical geography sketched in the previous sections underscores that the arrangements and programs targeting the city as a problem space have been messy and contradictory, that historical projects of the liberal city have lacked clean breaks from the past (the liberal city as laboratory for the play of emergent and residual strategies), and that specific cultural and communication technologies (as networks, technologies, and media of government) have materialized and mattered within the reproduction and renewal of the liberal city as a spatial and governmental arrangement.

This path of analysis is an alternative to accounts of a “neoliberal city” that cast neoliberalism as a space produced primarily through economic determinations (Brenner & Theodore, 2003; Davila, 2004; Hackworth, 2006; Harvey, 2007). The analytic that I am proposing also is an alternative to studies of media and cities. Whereas urban sociology and urban geography often generalize “media,” media historians have been slow to explain the historical and geographic relation between media and (urban) space, and even slower to explain how media matter within governmental networks, rationalities, and spatial arrangements. To the extent that a discourse about “neoliberalism” figures into Media Studies, it typically appears as general, secondary referencing of the political economy and sociology cited above. So while this chapter is engaged in a conversation about neoliberalism, its turn toward the historical intersections of liberal government and the city not only recognizes how “media” matter within these articulations and conjunctures but also how “media” have been put to work within the emergent and residual technologies and networks of government. This historical geography of the “birth” of the current liberal city and its media should help underscore that the current mediation of the city makes that city “neoliberal” in its relation to a history of the reproduction of urban space (strategies of “urban renewal”) as a governmental arrangement. With that in mind, let me conclude with several brief observations about the problems and contradictions on which the current liberal city is being restrategized, remade, and “advanced.”

First, as the discussion above of the “TV city” demonstrates, the technical discourse and the policies about “urban blight” and “urban renewal” are coterminous with the history of broadcast television, roughly from the late 1940s through the 1970s. The erosion of the spatial arrangement and economy of “broadcasting,” the rise of “narrowcasting,” and the current convergence of cinema, radio, and TV with “interactive” media whose hybrid forms often are generalized as “new media” all have strengthened a new arrangement of liberal government – one where the political and sociological discourse of “blight” and “urban renewal” is gradually replaced with a discourse about urban “obsolescence” and “enterprise” (e.g., the G. H. W. Bush administration’s targeting of urban “enterprise zones,” the Clinton administration’s creation of a program for Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities, and the G.W. Bush administration’s vision of an Ownership Society). The assumption that an “information city” involves the transcendence of the physical city through “new media” (as William Mitchell’s City of Bits imagined in the 1990s) was in many ways congruent with the political and governmental discourse of urban obsolescence and enterprise. The discourse of obsolescence and self-enterprise underpins the valorization of personalized/customized mobile media (particularly GPS) for navigating the expansive, unknown, or risky territory of cities.

Second, the resettlement of the urban core (what Neil Smith has referred to as “the new urban frontier” and what Andres Duany and his cohorts christened as the New Urbanism) involved a more robust exercise of the governmental rationality of “public–private partnerships” and “entrepreneurial citizenship” represented by one-time TV specials such as “The Cities” and very localized TV programs such as “People Power.” In the valorization of enterprise, the liberal virtue of freedoms (breaking the chains of enslavement) translated into initiatives that supposedly “empowered” cities and their states, while making cities more reliant on partnerships with corporate and nonprofit providers of services. In the United States, this reinvention of liberal government involved refashioning the cinema city by repurposing the remnants of cinema theaters within programs to “gentrify” and “reclaim” the downtown as a revitalized center of a new business and governmental arrangement (i.e., an arrangement oriented to entrepreneurialism and public–private partnership). The theaters also hinged together a new arrangement of urban government, as focal points of civic pride and of displaying the accomplishments of public–private partnerships (Jones, 2001; Stenger, 2001). Recognizing how the current liberal city acts on the old materials of the cinema city, and is born out of the role of the television city in making the downtown an object (from the suburbs) of pathways to a new regime of urban renewal, complicates the discourse of modernization that has cast the “neoliberal city” as a “new media city” – or, to use John Hannigan’s (1998) expressions, a “postmodern metropolis” and “fantasy city.”

Third, the TV city is not replaced with a “new media city”; rather, it is reinvented through the networks of government discussed above and powerfully through the rise of programming about the “makeover” of home, neighborhood, and town as spaces of a new model of citizenship. To the extent that Reality TV became a new paradigm in the current mediascape, its emphasis on “makeover” as an objective and array of techniques of self-improvement made it highly instrumental for the current rationality about liberal government and citizenship. Examples include Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and shorter-lived Reality TV programs about the “recoveries” of towns (Town Haul), struggling cities’ experiments to “reinvent government” (Cory Booker’s Newark, NJ in Brick City), the government of affluent private communities (the format launched by Real Housewives of Orange County, and the controversy surrounding the never-broadcast Welcome to the Neighborhood), the government of middle-class neighborhoods (There Goes the Neighborhood), the partnering of TV and city government to stage police sting operations (Cops, To Catch a Predator and Police Women of Dallas), and the everyday government of urban environments (Parking Wars). Collectively these programs provide an array of technical demonstrations and experiments for contemporary liberal government’s current response to urban renewal (Ouellette & Hay, 2008).

The proliferation of these programs over the first decade of the twentyfirst century bespeaks the economic value and political virtue of reinventing TV as a stage/laboratory for reinventing government. However, they also affirm a growing precarity and coming crisis of the current liberal city. The proto-documentary TV comedy Parks & Recreation represents the utter dysfunction of municipal government, its citizens’ profound cynicism about the capacity of municipal government to work for them, and the cartoonishness of the rationality of the public–private partnership – particularly in a small city that increasingly is expected to provide services with limited State resources and to display an entrepreneurialism in lining up private, contracted providers (Hay, 2010a). The precarity of the current liberal city lampooned in Parks & Recreation also has been evident in television and related media’s role in managing recent financial crisis. Following the Bush-era’s valorization of an Ownership Society, a regime of customizable media facilities were designed to aid the enterprising citizen–consumer whose estate became the inflated collateral and currency of a “housing bubble” and its subsequent bursting (Hay, 2010b). As the transactional reality of a new homo oeconomicus, these media supported a “subject of interest and investment” that gradually became a crucial contradiction and eventually a crisis in the Bush-era rationality about the means of urban renewal. Since the crisis years of 2007–2009, however, there also is evidence that this nexus of media technologies is becoming integral to programs for “renewing” cities (one property owner at a time) through a new “moral economy” – a new (?) reasoning about the responsibilities, ethics, and role of the State and corporate/financial institutions, in consort with their consumer–citizens, in “recovery.” Any response to the current crisis involves recognizing not only that the crisis is unprecedented (i.e., it is specific to the current arrangement and crisis that urban renewal acts on) but also that the crisis is part of old contradictions and a changing geography of liberal government and its technologies for urban renewal.

Note

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