Hans-Christian Petersen (ed.)
Spaces of the Poor
Mainz Historical Cultural Sciences | Volume 17
Editorial
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Hans-Christian Petersen (ed.)
Spaces of the Poor
Perspectives of Cultural Sciences
on Urban Slum Areas and Their Inhabitants
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Contents
Introduction
Hans-Christian Petersen | 7
A Janus-Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure
A Sociological Specification of the Ghetto
Loïc Wacquant | 15
The Subalterns Speak Out
Urban Plebeian Society in Late Imperial Russia
Ilya V. Gerasimov | 47
“… not intended for the Rich”
Public Places as Points of Identification for the Urban Poor –
St. Petersburg (1850-1914)
Hans-Christian Petersen | 71
Blood in the Air
Everyday Violence in the Experience of the Petersburg Poor,
1905-1917
Mark D. Steinberg | 97
Outcast Vienna 1900
The Politics of Transgression
Wolfgang Maderthaner | 121
Revisiting Campbell Bunk
Jerry White | 135
Creating the City of Delhi
Stories of Strong Women and Weak Walls
Sonja Wengoborski/JaspalNaveelSingh | 147
Urban Meeting Locations of Nicaraguan Migrants in Costa Rica’s
Metropolitan Area and the Spatial Effects on their Social Support
Networks
Hauke Jan Rolf | 169
Urban Poverty and Gentrification
A Comparative View on Different Areas in Hamburg
Ingrid Breckner | 193
Europe’s only Megacity
Urban Growth, Migration and Gentrification in 21st
Century Mos­cow
Julia Röttjer/Jan Kusber | 209
Contributors | 237
7
Introduction
Hans-Christian Petersen
What do we know about the urban impoverished areas of the world and the
people living in them? When looking at research reports available so far, the
answer to this question is relatively sobering. Still, one narration is dominating
according to which the habitats of the urban poor were solely places of dull
backwardness, characterised by spatial and mental narrowness. The world of
the people at the bottom rung of society appears to be widely homogeneous and
is drawn in grey and black colours. Queries beyond this are rarely found so that
Markus Schroer correctly speaks of “a reproduction of always the same imag-
es”1
in respect of ghettos, favelas and banlieues.
When applying this perspective, the question of what these ‘narrow habitats’
meant for their inhabitants, is ignored. The view from the outside is blind to the
perspective from the inside. This starts already with the language and the terms
in which we describe the world surrounding us. The word slum, mentioned in
the subtitle of this volume, has never been an absolute and neutral term since its
emergence in the first half of the 19th
century, but conveyed stigmatising associations
from the very beginning. Slums were not only places of urban blight and
utmost poverty, but at the same time ‘conglomerations’ of the ‘outcasts’ of society,
of the ‘undeserving poor’ who stood outside of society and who could not
expect any help from it.2
This is why Alan Gilbert has pointed out that language
matters,3
especially when we are talking about poverty and the people struck by
it. Terms such as slum are predestined for political instrumentalisation – to mention
only the so called ‘slum clearances’as a wrongly perceived ‘solution’to the
1	 Schroer, 2006, p. 250.
2	 Cf. amongst others: Dyos, 1967; Jones, 1971; Gaskell, 1990; Green, 1995;
Lindner, 2004; Koven, 2006.
3	 Cf. Gilbert, 2007.
Hans-Christian Petersen
8
problem, be it in Victorian London of the 19th
century4
or in current-day Rio de
Janeiro, where the favelas are ‘cleaned’ by the forces of police and military for
the FIFA World Cup 2014 as well as the Olympic Games 2016.
If the term gets used in this volume despite its problematic etymology, it is
due to the circumstance that it is de facto the common description for an urban
spatial concentration of poverty. This is true historically as well as today and
is not limited to the English-speaking world, as is demonstrated by the contributions
to this volume. This is not designed to advocate a perpetuation of the
associations inherent to the term, but quite the contrary, these are taken by the
authors as the starting point for critical reflections and looks behind the allegedly
unambiguous facade of the slums.
The volume at hand is the outcome of a conference which was organised
by the Research Unit Historical Cultural Sciences (Historische Kulturwissenschaften,
HKW) of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz from March 30th
until April 1st
2012.5
Almost all of the speakers have prepared their papers for
publication. Additionally, there are three articles by authors who were contacted
for the conference, but were unable to attend due to scheduled obligations and
by those who decided to write a contribution after having taken part in the
conference (Loïc Wacquant, Sonja Wengoborski and Jaspal Naveel Singh, Julia
Röttjer and Jan Kusber). The main concern of the conference was an interdisciplinary
dialogue on the topic as to how far approaches of cultural sciences can
contribute to overcome the “exotification”6
of the urban poor and to look at heterogeneities
and individuality instead of alleged unambiguousness. The concept
follows pioneering studies by Pierre Bourdieu7
, Loïc Wacquant8
and others, who
perceived the inhabitants of slum districts as individuals, as actively engaged
people who shape the precarious social conditions around them themselves in a
process of purposeful adoption.
The contributions to the volume at hand do not apply a uniform approach,
but represent just that multiperspectivity which was intended. This is not synonymous
with arbitrariness, but results from the consideration that a broad discussion
of different theories and methods is the best way to achieve a picture of
the urban poor as multifaceted as possible. However, all texts have in common a
4	 Cf. Yelling, 1986; Allen, 2008.
5	 Cf. the conference report by Paul Friedl, in: H-Soz-u-Kult, 27.06.2012: http://
hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/id=4281, 07.05.2013.
6	 Wacquant, 1998, p. 203.
7	 Bourdieu et al., 1993.
8	 Wacquant, 2004.
Introduction
9
concurrent examination of structures and individual agency. Processes of social
polarisation and displacement are linked with the question of what we can say
about those who are struck by this development. With this in mind, the volume
is also an appeal for a return of the social question as it has been discussed in the
English-speaking debate since the middle of the 1990s – for a “New Social History”,
which preserves the critical impetus of social history without abandoning
the cultural-his­torical progresses of knowledge gained in the last decades.9
The chronological frame of the contributions ranges from the 19th
to the 21st
century. As well as a number of historical analyses, there are also articles focusing
on present-day developments. Geographically, case studies of North and
Latin American, European as well as Indian cities are included, which naturally
covers only a part of a global theme. Hopefully, the publication of the volume
may be an incitement for further research in the future.
At the beginning of the volume stands a text of LOÏC WACQUANT, in
which the already mentioned question of terminology is examined in detail.
Wacquant develops an analytical concept of the ghetto as a spatially based implement
of ethno-racial closure. At the same time, he strongly argues against an
intermixture of the terms ghetto und slum by emphasising “that not all ghettos
are poor and not all poor areas are (inside) ghettos”. In this context he advises
against an indiscriminate transfer of concepts and terms, originating from the
US American debate on other - for instance European - societies in order not
to dilute the analytical categories. Looking at the ghetto, Wacquant makes an
argument for a perspective which sees the ghetto simultaneously as a sword (in
the sense of an instrument of isolating certain groups of the population) as well
as a shield (in the sense of a potential place of mutual support for its inhabitants).
The following texts are investigating further the possibilities and limits of
writing about the urban poor. On the basis of examples from early 20th
century
Russian cities Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Vilnius and Odessa, ILYA V. GERASIMOV
opposes applying discourse-analytical methods on the main sources
(i.e. newspaper reports, police and court documents) for the social history of the
urban poor. Referring to the concept of subalternity, he argues that since lower
strata did not use discourse, the method of discourse analysis would produce
misinterpretations. Instead, one would have to go beyond the texts to see actual
(non-discursive or non-verbal) social practices and their users in a wider con-
9	 Cf. amongst others: Eley, 2005, as well as the correspondent discussion of his
theses in the forum of the Am erican Historical Review, 2008. As a brilliant
German-speaking, combative representative is to be named: Maderthaner/
Musner, 2007.
Hans-Christian Petersen
10
text. Since these practices, the “body talk” of the subalterns as he calls it, also
carry meanings, and since the historian can learn to understand them, they too
are open to interpretation.
My contribution is shedding light on another Russian example: St. Petersburg,
the capital of late imperial Russia. Looking at two types of sources that are
quite different at first sight (on one hand a series of articles from a Petersburg
newspaper and on the other several petitions submitted by ‘itinerant peddlers’
from Petersburg’s Haymarket), the epistemic possibilities and limitations are
discussed to discover the urban poor of former times by documents we find in
the archives today. The method suggested in the article is a spatial approach, by
looking at concrete places. Beyond stylistic devices, both types of sources provide
us with information about places which were important to their inhabitants
and which they regarded as ‘their own’.
MARK D. STEINBERG is also dealing with St. Petersburg, namely with a
phenomenon which was characterised by Petersburg’s newspapers at the beginning
of the 20th
century as a “traumatic epidemic of blood and violence”. On the
basis of a rich collection of contemporary articles, he demonstrates to which extend
everyday violence shaped the life of the inhabitants, particularly in the poor
districts of the city, how this development was perceived at that time and which
explanations can be found from today’s point of view. According to Steinberg,
the violence can be understood best as a blocked agency, resulting from the
extensive exclusion of the poor from the urban discourse. At the same time he
is rather sceptical in reading too much into the violence from a retrospective
viewpoint, concerning, for example, the political dimension of such an agency.
WOLFGANG MADERTHANER takes the well-known picture of Fin de
Siècle Vienna as a place gathering central cultural innovations of modernity as
a starting point for shedding light on the ‘other’, the poor Vienna. He makes an
argument for reading the metropolis as a social text in order to develop an understanding
of the mass culture of the city. According to Maderthaner, descriptions
of Vienna can be found especially in the new genre of urban reportage, developed
by figures such as Emil Kläger or Max Winter, which draw another picture
of the city than the myth produced by elitist discourses and the tourism industry.
At the same time, reports about these phenomena reflect changes in political culture,
e.g. when the poor masses, which first showed up only as chaotic hordes in
hunger revolts, became the grass roots of figures such as Franz Schuhmeier and
Karl Lueger, who, although with quite diverging purposes, now made politics
with the support of the masses.
JERRY WHITE presents Campbell Bunk, a street in the North London district
Islington, which became one of the poorest slums of 19th
century London.
Introduction
11
White, having worked himself as a public health inspector in Islington in the
1970s, some 15 years after Campbell Bunk had been demolished, brings in a
special perspective. Starting his job, he soon realised that the reputation of the
former slum was hardly less vivid than it had been. He kept on hearing stories
about it, and in 1986 he published a fascinating study on Campbell Bunk between
the wars based on interviews he conducted with the local inhabitants. His
contribution to the volume at hand can be characterised as a reappraisal after
25 years – from the viewpoint of the ‘practitioner’, the historian as well as the
people living in Campbell Road today.
The article by SONJA WENGOBORSKI and JASPAL NAVEEL SINGH
also covers the gamut up to the present. They examine the development of the
Indian metropolis Delhi from two different perspectives: In the first part of the
article, Wengoborski and Singh are drawing on official documents of city planning
and academic or journalistic writings to characterise the city’s management
of urban poverty. In the second part, this viewpoint is contrasted with insights
of modern Hindi literature, which emphasise the lived experiences of the individual
social actors in the poor milieus of Delhi. In this way, the important role
women play in keeping families and communities functioning becomes clear
– an important corrective as against the dominating narrative of official city
planners, politicians and other ‘strong men.’
HAUKE JAN ROLF addresses the issue of the spatial organisation of Nicaraguan
immigrants in Costa Rica’s metropolitan area. Based on interviews he
conducted with the local inhabitants during his many years of research, he offers
an intriguing insider perspective on the social networks of the immigrants and
the importance of certain places for their solidarity. Using the examples of a
suburban squat, a baseball stadium in San José as well as an inner-city park, Rolf
is able to demonstrate how Nicaraguan immigrants shape the respective quarters
and the different functions these places hold. Among others, he identifies transnationalised
places – evidence that opens new perspectives for future research.
The two concluding articles are focusing on urban socio-spatial developments
at the beginning of the 21st
century and particularly on gentrification processes.
INGRID BRECKNER presents three Hamburg city districts as examples
of a polarised urban development that is in different stages of gentrification.
Ottensen experienced urban renewal since the 1970s and gentrification from
inside as well as from outside. The same process is much younger in St. Pauli,
where gentrification started after the closing of a huge brewery, which created
space for new construction process. Something similar is expected or feared to
happen in Wilhelmsburg – up to now the ‘district of outcasts’ – where two big
international exhibitions have opened this year. At the same time the examples
Hans-Christian Petersen
12
of Ottensen and St. Pauli make it clear that resolute and enduring protest is not
without influence and that it can at least partially change the direction of the
development of city districts.
JULIARÖTTJER and JAN KUSBER are dealing with similar developments
in 21st
Century Moscow, the only Megacity in the European context. Looking at
urban growth, migration and gentrification, they manage to successfully combine
historical perspectives with those of the social sciences and to shed light
on processes that make a currently lacking comparison with Western Europe on
these topics look promising. The final assessment of Röttjer and Kusber, namely
that the development of today’s Moscow can serve as “an example of neoliberal
growth and the absence of comprehensive urban planning”, is appropriate for
other cities as well. The same can be said for their appraisal that the article is at
the same time an appeal for a closer collaboration of historical and social sciences
mainly dealing with the phenomena in question.
Three further contributions, by Johannes Niedbalski (Berlin) on “Funfairs
and Amusement Parks. A Social Topography of Pleasure in Early 20th
Century
Berlin”, by Monika Murzyn-Kupisz (Cracow) on urban development and gentrification
processes in today’s Poland and by Yury Basilov (St. Petersburg) on
21st
century St. Petersburg could not be realized for personal reasons, respectively
just due to lack of time. As regrettable as this may be for the volume at hand,
it is at the same time absolutely understandable. Maybe these yet unwritten texts
can serve as stimulation for further research and collaboration.
Concluding, I would like to express my gratitude to the Research Unit Historical
Cultural Sciences (HKW) of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.
The financing of the conference as well as the admission of this volume in the
series “Mainz Historical Cultural Sciences” (Mainzer Historische Kulturwissenschaften)
were the indispensable basis for the publication at hand. The two
colleagues working in the Research Unit’s Office, Kristina Müller-Bongard and
Cathleen Sarti, were at all times very kind and competent advisors – thanks a
lot to both of you for the wonderful collaboration! Furthermore I would like to
thank the head of the Department for East European History at the Historical Institute
of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Jan Kusber, for his valuable
support in developing and realising the project. I am grateful to my colleague
Christof Schimsheimer for the assistance during the conference and to Diana
and Helga Weilepp for their patient and very competent replies to quite a few
questions from my side during the translation of my text. The Department for
Research and Technology Transfer of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
offered the opportunity to proof read the contributions to this volume – a process
highly appreciated by all authors. And last but not least I am grateful to all au-
Introduction
13
thors who – despite so many other obligations – found the time and the energy
to revise their presentations for publication. It would be great if this would prove
to be a beginning for future collaboration.
Literature
American Historical Review Forum, Geoff Eleys‘ A Crooked Line, in: American
Historical Review 113, 2 (2008), p. 391-437.
Allen, Michel, Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London,
Ohio 2008.
Bourdieu, Pierre et al., La misère du monde, Paris 1993.
Dyos, Harold J., The Slums of Victorian London, in: Victorian Studies 11, 1
(1967), p. 5-40.
Eley, Geoff, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 2005.
Gaskell, Martin (ed.), Slums, Leicester et al. 1990.
Gilbert, Alan, The Return of the Slum: Does Language Matter?, in: International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31, 4 (2997), p. 697-713,
Green, David R., From Artisans to Paupers: Economic Change and Poverty in
London, 1790-1870, Aldershot, Brookfield 1995.
Jones, Gareth Stedman, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between
Classes in Victorian Society, Oxford 1971.
Koven, Seth, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London, Princeton
2006.
Lindner, Rolf, Walks on the Wild Side. Eine Geschichte der Stadtforschung,
Frankfurt/Main, New York 2004.
Maderthaner, Wolfgang/Musner, Lutz, Die Selbstabschaffung der Vernunft.
Die Kulturwissenschaften und die Krise des Sozialen, Wien 2007.
Schroer, Markus, Räume, Orte, Grenzen. Auf dem Weg zu einer Soziologie
des Raums, Frankfurt/Main 2006.
Yelling, James Alfred, Slums and Slum Clearance in Victorian London, London
et al. 1986.
Wacquant, Loïc, Drei irreführende Prämissen bei der Untersuchung der amerikanischen
Ghettos, in: Die Krise der Städte. Analysen zu den Folgen desintegrativer
Stadtentwicklung für das ethnisch-kulturelle Zusammenleben, ed.
by Wilhelm Heitmeyeret al., Frankfurt/Main 1998, p. 194-211.
Id., Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer, Oxford 2004.
Hans-Christian Petersen
14
Friedl, Paul, Conference Report: Looking Behind the Facade of the Ghetto:
Perspectives of Cultural Sciences on Urban Slum Areas and Their Inhabitants.
30.03.2012-01.04.2012, Mainz, in: H-Soz-u-Kult, 27.06.2012: http://
hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/id=4281, 07.05.2013.
15
A Janus-Faced Institution
of Ethnoracial Closure
A Sociological Specification of the Ghetto1
Loïc Wacquant
The scientific mind must form itself by
continually reforming itself.
(Gaston Bachelard, Psychoanalyse de l’esprit
scientifique, 1938)
It is a paradox that, while the social sciences have made extensive use of the
“ghetto” as a descriptive term, they have failed to forge a robust analytical concept
of the same. In the historiography of the Jewish diaspora in early modern
Europe and under Nazism, the sociology of the black American experience in
the twentieth-century metropolis, and the anthropology of ethnic outcasts in East
Asia and Africa, its three traditional domains of application, the term “ghetto”
variously denotes a bounded urban ward, a web of group-specific institutions,
and a cultural and cognitive constellation (values, mind-set, or mentality) entailing
the sociomoral isolation of a stigmatized category as well as the systematic
truncation of the life space and life chances of its members. But none of these
strands of research has taken the trouble to specify what makes a ghetto qua
social form, which of its features are constitutive and which are derivative, as
they have, at each epoch, taken for granted and adopted the folk concept extant
in the society under examination.
1	 First published in Haynes/Hutchison, 2012, p. 1-33.
Loïc Wacquant
16
This explains that the notion, appearing self-evident, does not figure in most
dictionaries of social science.2
It is also why, after decades employing the word,
sociologists remain vague, inconsistent, and conflicted about its core meaning,
perimeter of empirical pertinence, and theoretical import. The recent “Symposium
on the Ghetto” organized by City & Community in the wake of Mario
Small’s critique of the central theses of my book Urban Outcasts richly documents
the myriad observational anomalies and analytic troubles spawned by
the unreflective derivation of social-scientific from ordinary constructs.3
These
troubles are not resolved but redoubled when the composite US imagery of the
(black) ghetto (after its collapse) gets transported to Western Europe and Latin
America, and they are trebled when scholars attempt cross-national comparisons
of patterns of urban marginality and/or ethnoracial inequality based on the national
common sense of their home societies as to the meaning of “the ghetto”.4
This debate vividly demonstrates that the ghetto is not a contested concept à la
Gallie5
so much as a confused conception that comes short of the level of analytic
specificity, coherence, and parsimony minimally required of a scientific notion.
This chapter clears up this confusion by constructing a rigorous sociological
concept of the ghetto as a spatially based implement of ethnoracial closure.
After spotlighting the semantic instability and slippage of the notion in American
culture and scholarship, I extract the structural and functional similarities
presented by three canonical instances of the phenomenon: the Jewish ghetto of
Renaissance Europe, the black American ghetto of the Fordist United States, and
the reserved districts of the Burakumin in post-Tokugawa Japan. Against thin
gradational conceptions based on rates (of ethnic dissimilarity, spatial concentration,
poverty, etc.), which prove promiscuous and prone to metaphorical bleeding
as well as inchoate, I elaborate a thick relational conception of the ghetto as a
2	 Remarkably, “ghetto” receives no entry in the nineteen-volume International
Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences published in the United States
just as the country was being shaken to its core by a wave of ghetto riots, cf. Sills/
Merton 1968. Even specialized dictionaries of racial and ethnic studies give the
notion short shrift: definitions in them are typically terse, limited to the mention
of ethnic segregation in space and to a descriptive denotation of particular ghettos
(those of the Jewish and black diasporas).
3	 Cf. Haynes/Hutchison, 2008.
4	 An extended argument in favor of epistemological rupture as the only viable
solution to the ‘demarcation problem’ in the comparative sociology of urban
marginality is Wacquant, 2008(1), p. 7-12, 135-162, 233-235, 272-276.
5	 Cf. Gallie, 1956.
A Janus-Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure
17
sociospatial institution geared to the twin mission of isolating and exploiting a
dishonored category. So much to say that the ghetto results not from ecological
dynamics but from the inscription in space of a material and symbolic power
asymmetry, as revealed by the recurrent role of collective violence in establishing
as well as challenging ethnoracial confinement. Next, I unscramble the connections
between ghettoization, segregation, and poverty, and I articulate an ideal-typical
opposition between ghetto and ethnic cluster with which to carry out
measured comparisons of the fates of various stigmatized populations and places
in different cities, societies, and epochs. This points to the role of the ghetto as
organizational shield and cultural crucible for the production of a unified but
tainted identity that furthers resistance and eventually revolt against seclusion.
I conclude by proposing that the ghetto is best analogized not with districts of
dereliction (which confuses ethnoracial seclusion with extraneous issues of class,
deprivation, and deviance) but with other devices for the forcible containment of
tainted categories such as the prison, the reservation, and the camp.
A fuzzy and evolving notion
A brief recapitulation of the strange career of “the ghetto” in American society
and social science, which has dominated inquiry into the topic both quantitatively
and thematically, suffices to illustrate its semantic instability and dependency
on the whims and worries of urban rulers. For the past century, the range and
contents of the term have successively expanded and contracted in keeping with
how political and intellectual elites have viewed the vexed nexus of ethnicity
and poverty in the city.6
At first, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the ghetto designated
residential concentrations of European Jews in the Atlantic seaports and
was clearly distinguished from the “slum” as an area of housing blight and social
pathology.7
The notion dilated during the Progressive era to encompass all
inner-city districts wherein exotic newcomers gathered, namely, lower-class immigrants
from the southeastern regions of Europe andAfricanAmericans fleeing
the Jim Crow regime of racial terrorism in the US South. Expressing upper-class
worries over whether these groups could or should assimilate into the predominant
Anglo-Saxon pattern of the country, the notion referred then to the intersection
between the ethnic neighborhood and the slum, where segregation was
6	 Cf. Ward, 1989.
7	 Cf. Lubove, 1963
Loïc Wacquant
18
believed to combine with physical disrepair and overcrowding to exacerbate
urban ills such as criminality, family breakdown, and pauperism, and thwart participation
in national life. This conception was given scientific authority by the
ecological paradigm of the emerging Chicago school of sociology. In his classic
book The Ghetto, Louis Wirth assimilates to the Jewish ghetto of medieval
Europe the “Little Sicilies, Little Polands, Chinatowns, and Black Belts in our
large cities”8
, along with the “vice areas” hosting deviant types such as hobos,
bohemians, and prostitutes. All of them are said to be “natural areas” born of the
universal desire of different groups to “preserve their peculiar cultural forms”
and each fulfills a specialized “function” in the broader urban organism.9
This
is what one may call Wirth’s error: confounding the mechanisms of sociospatial
seclusion visited upon African Americans and upon European immigrants by
conflating two urban forms with antinomic architectures and effects, the ghetto
and the ethnic cluster. This initial error enabled the ecological paradigm to
thrive even as the urbanization of African Americans blatantly contradicted its
core propositions.10
It would be repeated cyclically for decades and persistently
obfuscate the specificity of ghettoization as an exclusive type of enclosure.
The notion contracted rapidly after World War II under the press of the Civil
Rights movement to signify mainly the compact and congested enclaves to which
African Americans were forcibly relegated as they migrated into the industrial
centers of the North. The growth of a “Black Metropolis in the womb of the white”
wherein Negroes evolved distinct and parallel institutions to compensate for and
shield themselves from unflinching exclusion by whites11
contrasted sharply with
the smooth residential dispersal of European Americans of foreign stock. And the
mounting political mobilization of blacks against continued caste subordination
made their reserved territory a central site and stake of sociopolitical struggles in
the city as well as a springboard for collective action against white rule. Writing at
the acme of the black uprisings of the 1960s, Kenneth Clark made this relationship
of ethnoracial subordination epicentral to his dissection of the Dark Ghetto and
its woes: “America has contributed to the concept of the ghetto the restriction of
persons to a special area and the limiting of their freedom of choice on the basis
of skin color. The dark ghetto’s invisible walls have been erected by the white
8	 Wirth, 1928, p. 6.
9	 A useful analytic survey of the works of the Chicago school on this front is
Hannerz, 1980; a cutting critique of the biotic naturalism of Park, Burgess and
Wirth is in Logan/Molotch, 1987, chap. 1.
10	 Cf. Wacquant, 1998.
11	 Cf. Drake/Cayton, (1945) 1993.
A Janus-Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure
19
society, by those who have power.”12
This diagnosis was confirmed by the Kerner
Commission, a bipartisan task force appointed by President Johnson whose official
report on the “civil disorders” that rocked the American metropolis famously
warned that, because of white racial intransigence, America was “moving toward
two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.”13
But over the ensuing two decades the dark ghetto collapsed and devolved
into a barren territory of dread and dissolution due to deindustrialization and
state policies of welfare reduction and urban retrenchment. As racial domination
grew more diffuse and diffracted through a class prism, the category was
displaced by the duet formed by the geographic euphemism of “inner city” and
the neologism of “underclass,” defined as the substratum of ghetto residents
plagued by acute joblessness, social isolation, and antisocial behaviors.14
By the
1990s, the neutralization of the “ghetto” in policy-oriented research culminated
in the outright expurgation of any mention of race and power to redefine it as
any tract of extreme poverty (”containing over 40 % of residents living under
the federal poverty line”), irrespective of population and institutional makeup,
in effect dissolving the ghetto back into the slum and rehabilitating the folk
conception of the early twentieth century.15
This paradoxical “deracialization”
12	 Clark, 1956, p. 11.
13	 Kerner Com m ission, 1968, p. 2. This formula was intended as an inverted echo
of the Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) which proclaimed racial
segregation congruent with the country’s Constitution, provided that the dual
institutional tracks thus spawned be “separate but equal” (which they never were,
not surprisingly since the same court studiously omitted to specify any criteria of
equality or the means to bring it about). This ruling provided the juridical basis
for the establishment of six decades of legal segregation in the United States, until
the 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education found that racial separation by
itself implies an inegality that violates constitutional principles. It points to the
pivotal role of the state in the (un)making of the black ghetto and of ethnoracial
domination more generally.
14	 Cf. Wilson, 1987.
15	 Cf. Jargovsky, 1997. At the same time, the ostensibly deracialized conception
of ‘the ghetto’ as a district of widespread destitution kept the focus squarely on
the African-American (sub)proletariat by adopting as its operational cut-off point
the bureaucratic category of a census tract with a 40-percent poverty rate, which
coincidentally ensured its empirical overlap with the remnants of the historic
Black Belt. Like the discovery of the ‘underclass’ a decade earlier, this conceptual
move validated the special worries of state elites about the management of
Loïc Wacquant
20
of a notion initially fashioned, and until then deployed, to capture ethnoracial
partition in the city resulted from the combination of the crumbling of the historic
dark ghetto of the industrial era and the correlative political censorship
of race in policy-oriented research after the ebbing of the Civil Rights movement.
This “gutting of the ghetto”16
was then taken one step further by the rash
proposal to abandon the notion altogether, instead of clarifying it, on grounds
that it cannot capture the complexity, heterogeneity, and fluidity of “poor black
neighborhoods” in the United States17
– as if ghettoization were a flat and static
synonym for impoverishment, occurred only in the United States, and could not
encompass, or partake of, a fluid and differentiated urban formation.
Meanwhile the term was extended to the study of the distinctive sociocultural
patterns elaborated by homosexuals in the cities of advanced societies “in
response to both stigma and gay liberation”18
after the Stonewall riots. It has
also made a spectacular return across western Europe in heated scholarly and
policy debates over the links between postcolonial immigration, postindustrial
economic restructuring, and spatial dualization as the fear of the “Americanization”
of the metropolis swept the continent.19
That European social scientists
took to invoking “the ghetto” to stress the growing potency and specificity of
ethnoracial division in their countries just when their American colleagues were
busy extirpating race from the same notion is an irony that seems only to further
muddle its meaning. Yet one can extract out of these varied literatures common
threads and recurrent properties to construct a relational concept of the ghetto
as an instrument of closure and control that clears up most of the confusion surrounding
it and turns it into a powerful tool for the social analysis of ethnoracial
domination and urban inequality. For this it suffices to return to the historical
inception of the word and of the phenomenon it depicted in Renaissance Venice.
A janus-faced institution of ethnic closure and control
Coined by derivation from the Italian giudecca, borghetto or gietto (or from
the German gitter or the Talmudic Hebrew get: the etymology is disputed), the
black marginality in the inner city while eliding the latter’s roots in ethnoracial
domination and regressive state policies.
16	 Wacquant, 2002.
17	 Cf. Sm all, 2009.
18	 Levine, 1979, p. 31.
19	 Cf. Musterd et al., 2006; Schierup et al., 2006.
A Janus-Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure
21
word “ghetto” initially referred to the forced consignment of Jews to special
districts by the city’s political and religious authorities. In medieval Europe,
Jews were commonly allotted quarters wherein they resided, administered their
own affairs, and followed their customs. Such quarters were granted or sold as a
privilege to attract them into the towns and principalities for which they fulfilled
key roles as money-lenders, tax collectors, and long-distance tradesmen. But,
between the 13th
and the 16th
century, in the wake of the upheavals caused by the
Crusades, favor gradually turned into compulsion.20
In 1516 the Senate of Venice
ordered all Jews rounded up into the ghetto nuovo, an abandoned foundry on
an isolated island enclosed by two high walls whose outer windows and doors
were sealed while watchmen stood guard on its two bridges and patrolled the
adjacent canals by boat.21
Jews were henceforth allowed to come out to pursue
their occupations by day, but they had to wear a distinctive garb that made them
readily recognizable and return inside the gates before sunset on pain of severe
punishment. These measures were designed as an alternative to expulsion to enable
the city-state to reap the economic benefits brought by the presence of Jews
(including rents, special taxes, and forced levies) while protecting its Christian
residents from contaminating contact with bodies perceived as unclean and
dangerously sensual, carriers of syphilis and vectors of heresy, in addition to
bearing the taint of money-making through usury, which the Catholic Church
equated with prostitution.22
As this Venetian model spread in cities throughout Europe and around the
Mediterranean rim,23
territorial fixation and seclusion led, on the one hand, to
overcrowding, housing deterioration, and impoverishment as well as excess
morbidity and mortality, and, on the other, to institutional flowering and cultural
consolidation as urban Jews responded to multiplying civic and occupational
restrictions by knitting a dense web of group-specific organizations that served
as so many instruments of collective succor and solidarity, from markets and
business associations, to charity and mutual aid societies, to places of religious
worship and scholarship. The Judenstadt of Prague, Europe’s largest ghetto in
20	 Cf. Stow, 1992.
21	 Cf. Curiel/Cooperm an, 1990.
22	 Cf. Sennet, 1994, p. 224.
23	 Cf. Johnson, 1987, p. 235-245. A functional variant arose with the ghetto of Rome,
which was founded in 1555 on the banks of the Tiber and abolished in 1870. It
purported to foster the religious conversion and cultural dissolution of Jews, but
it ended up having the opposite effects and it did not diffuse geographically. Cf.
Stow, 2001.
Loïc Wacquant
22
the eighteenth century, even had its own city hall, the Rathaus, emblem of the
relative autonomy and communal strength of its residents, and its synagogues
were entrusted not only with the spiritual stewardship but also with the administrative
and judicial oversight of its population. Social life in the Jewish ghetto
was turned inward and verged “on overorganization”24
, so that it reinforced both
integration within and isolation from without.
One can detect in this inaugural moment the four constituent elements of the
ghetto, viz., (i) stigma, (ii) constraint, (iii) spatial confinement, and (iv) institutional
parallelism. The ghetto is a social-organizational device that employs
space to reconcile two antinomic functions: (1) to maximize the material profits
extracted out of a category deemed defiled and defiling; and to (2) minimize
intimate contact with its members so as to avert the threat of symbolic corrosion
and contagion they are believed to carry. If the target population did not serve
an essential economic function, it could be kept out of the city or expelled from
it – as Jews had been periodically in medieval history. If that same group was not
irremediably tainted, it would simply be exploited and allowed to mingle in the
city in accordance with its position in the division of labor. It is the conflictive
combination of economic value and symbolic danger that made handling Jews
problematic and spurred the invention of the ghetto.
These same four building blocks and the same dual rationale of economic
extraction cum social ostracization governed the genesis, structure, and functioning
of the African-American ghetto in the Fordist metropolis during the
half-century after World War I. Blacks were actively recruited into northern
cities of the United States cities at the outbreak of World War I because their
unskilled labor was indispensable to the industries that formed the backbone
of a factory economy fed by booming military production but starved of hands
by the interruption of European migration.25
Yet there was no question of them
mixing and consorting with whites, who regarded them as inherently vile, congenitally
inferior, and shorn of ethnic honor owing to the stain of slavery.26
As
blacks moved in from the South in the millions, white hostility increased and
24	 Wirth, 1928.
25	 Cf. Marks, 1989.
26	 The following disquisition on the ‘Negro character’ published in the journal of the
Hyde Park Property Owners’ Association (cited in Spea, 1968, p. 220) captures the
tenor of the view of African Americans held by white Chicagoans at the close of
the Great War: “There is nothing in the make-up of a Negro, physically or mentally,
which should induce anyone to welcome him as a neighbor. The best of them are
insanitary. […] Ruin alone follows their path. They are proud as peacocks, but
A Janus-Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure
23
patterns of discrimination and segregation that had hitherto been informal and
inconsistent hardened in housing, schooling, and public accommodations and
were extended to the economy and polity.27
African Americans were forcibly
funneled into reserved districts that quickly turned homogeneously black as they
expanded and consolidated. They had no choice but to seek refuge inside the
bounded perimeter of the Black Belt and to endeavor to develop in it a network
of separate institutions to procure the basic needs of the castaway community.
Thus arose a duplicate city anchored by black churches and newspapers, black
block clubs and lodges, black schools and businesses, and black political and
civic associations, nested at the core of the white metropolis yet sealed from it
by an impassable fence built of custom, legal suasion, economic discrimination
(by realtors, banks, and the state), and violence, as manifested in the beatings,
fire-bombings, and riots that checked those who dared to stray across the color
line.
This forced institutional parallelism predicated on enveloping and inflexible
spatial seclusion – not extreme poverty, housing blight, cultural difference, or
mere residential separation – is what has distinguished African Americans from
every other group in US history, as noted by leading students of the black urban
experience from W.E.B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier to Drake and Cayton to
Kenneth Clark and Oliver Cox.28
It also characterizes the trajectory of the Burakumin
in the Japanese city after the close of the Tokugawa era.29
As the lineal
descendants of the eta and hinin, two categories locked out of the fourfold estate
order of feudal Japan (composed of warriors, peasants, artisans, and merchants),
the Burakumin were untouchables in the eyes of the Buddhist and Shinto reli-
gions.30
As a result, they suffered centuries of virulent prejudice, discrimination,
have nothing of the peacock’s beauty. […] Niggers are undesirable neighbors and
entirely irresponsible and vicious.”
27	 Cf. Spear, 1968; Osofsky, 1971.
28	 Cf. Wacquant, 1998.
29	 Cf. Hane, 1982.
30	 The eta (”filth eternal”) were permanent and hereditary pariahs descended from
the occupational guilds tainted by the handling of death, blood, leather, and armor.
The hinin (”nonhuman”) were temporary and nonhereditary pariahs tainted by
criminal punishment (typically banishment for ten to twenty years). The exact
origins, composition, and evolving status of the Burakumin are the objects of fierce
debates in Japanese historiography in relation with contemporary political battles
and policy alternatives (cf. Neary, 2003), and the topic continues to be as sulfurous
as the category.
Loïc Wacquant
24
segregation, and violence that kept them cloistered in social and physical space.
By the nineteenth century, they were legally confined from sundown to sunup
in out-of-the-way hamlets (buraku) that were omitted from official maps; they
were obliged to wear a yellow collar and to walk barefoot; they were expected
to drop on their hands and knees when addressing commoners; and they could
be killed virtually without sanction. Crucially, the Burakumin were barred from
entering shrines and temples and they were restricted to wedding solely among
themselves, based on the belief that the filth of their ancestors was indelible
and communicated by blood. Although they are phenotypically indistinguishable
from other Japanese, they can be identified through the marriage registries
established and diffused during the Meiji era (1868-1912), as well as by their
patronym and place of provenance or residence.
The Burakumin were officially emancipated in 1871, but as they moved into
cities they were funneled against their will into notorious neighborhoods near
garbage dumps, crematoria, jails, and slaughterhouses, that were widely viewed
as nests of criminality and immorality. There, they were barred from industrial
employment and locked in low-paying and dirty jobs, sent to separate schools,
and compelled to remain largely endogamous,31
effectively leading constricted
lives encased by a network of parallel and inferior institutions. By the late
1970s, according to the Burakumin Defense League, they were estimated to
number 3 million, trapped in 6000 buraku districts in some thousand cities
across the main island, with strong concentrations in the Kyoto region. After a
full decade of vigorous programs of affirmative action launched in 1969, onefifth
of the Burakumin were still employed as butchers, shoemakers and in the
leather trades, and over one-half worked as street sweepers, trash collectors, and
public works employees. As a result, their rates of poverty, welfare receipt, and
mortality stood far above the national average.32
Spread over three continents and five centuries, the Jewish, African-American,
and Burakumin cases demonstrate that the ghetto is not, pace Wirth, a
“natural area” arising via environmental adaptation governed by a biotic logic
“akin to the competitive cooperation that underlies the plant community”33
The
mistake of the early Chicago school here consisted in falsely “converting history
into natural history” and passing ghettoization off as “a manifestation of human
nature” virtually coterminous with “the history of migration”34
, when it is a
31	 Cf. DeVos/Wagatsum a, 1966.
32	 Cf. Sabouret, 1983.
33	 Wirth, 1928, p. 284f.
34	 Ibid., p. 285.
A Janus-Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure
25
highly peculiar form of urbanization warped by asymmetric relations of power
between ethnoracial groupings: a special form of collective violence concretized
in urban space. That ghettoization is not an “uncontrolled and undesigned”35
process, as Robert E. Park asserted in his preface to The Ghetto, became especially
visible after World War II in the United States when the black American
ghetto was reconstructed from the top down, and its shelf-life extended by another
quarter-century, through state policies of public housing, urban renewal,
and suburban economic development intended to bolster the rigid rigid spatial
and social separation of blacks from whites.36
It is even more glaring in the
instance of the “caste cities” built by colonial powers to inscribe in space the
hierarchical ethnic organization of their overseas possessions, such as Rabat
under French rule over Morocco and Cape Town after the passage of the Group
Areas Acts under the apartheid regime of South Africa.37
Recognizing that it is a product and instrument of group power makes it
possible to appreciate that, in its full-fledged form, the ghetto is a Janus-faced
institution as it plays opposite roles for the two collectives it binds in a relation
of asymmetric dependency. For the dominant category, its rationale is to confine
and control, which translates into what Max Weber calls the “exclusionary
closure” of the subordinate category.38
For the latter, however, it is a protective
and integrative device insofar as it relieves its members from constant contact
with the dominant and fosters consociation and community-building within the
constricted sphere of intercourse it creates. Enforced isolation from the outside
leads to the intensification of social exchange and cultural sharing inside. Ghettos
are the product of a mobile and tensionful dialectic of external hostility and
internal affinity that expresses itself as ambivalence at the level of collective
consciousness. Thus, although European Jews consistently protested relegation
35	 Ibid., p. viii.
36	 Cf. Hirsch, 1983.
37	 Cf. Abu-Lughod, 1980; Western, 1981. Colonial societies form a vast yet largely
uncharted domain for the comparative study of the dynamics and forms of
ghettoization for three reasons. First, in their settler variant, they were ‘geographic’
social formations, predicated on land spoliation, close control of the circulation
of goods and people, and the rigid regimentation of space. Second, they were
founded on sharp, stiff, and salient ethnoracial divisions that were projected onto
the spatial organization of the city. Lastly, urban forms were major vehicles for
social engineering and identity crafting in the colony. Cf. for illustrations the
complementary studies of French dominions by Wright, 1991, and Çelik, 1997.
38	 Cf. Weber, 1922/1978.
Loïc Wacquant
26
within their outcast districts, they were nonetheless deeply attached to them
and appreciative of the relative security they afforded and the special forms of
collective life they supported: Francfort’s ghetto in the eighteenth century was
“not just the scene of confinement and persecution but a place where Jews were
entirely, supremely, at home”39
Similarly black Americans took pride in having
“erected a community in their own image,” even as they resented the fact that
they had done so under duress, as a result of unyielding white exclusion aimed
at warding off the specter of “social equality,” that is, sexual mixing.40
“I love Harlem because it belongs to me”
The sentiment of being “home” inside the ghetto, in a protected and protecting
space, is expressed with verve in the narrative of the daily foibles of Jesse B.
Semple or Simple, the character created by the poet Langston Hughes to give
voice to the aspirations of urban black Americans at the mid-century point. Thus
when he exclaims about Harlem :
“‘It’s so full of Negroes, I feel like I got protection.’ – ‘From what?’ – ‘From
white folks’, said Simple. I like Harlem because it belongs to me. […] You
say the houses ain’t mine. Well, the sidewalk is – and don’t you push me off.
The cops don’t even say, ‘Move on,’ hardly no more. They learned something
from them Harlem riots41
. […] Here I ain’t scared to vote – that’s another
thing I like about Harlem. […] Folks is friendly in Harlem. I feel like I got
the world in a jug and the stopper in my hand! So drink a toast to Harlem!”42
Acknowledging the double-sidedness of the ghetto spotlights its role as organizational
matrix and symbolic incubator for the production of a “spoiled identity”
in Erving Goffman’s sense of the term.43
For the ghetto is not only the concrete
means and materialization of ethnoracial domination through the spatial
segmentation of the city; it is also a site of intense cultural production and a
potent collective identity machine in its own right. It helps to incrustate and
39	 Gay, 1992, p. 67.
40	 Cf. Drake/Cayton, (1945) 1993, p. 115
41	 In 1935 and 1943, the residents of Harlem rose up against racial exclusion made
unbearable by the economic collapse of the Great Crisis, cf. Greenbert, 1991.
42	 Hughes, 1957, p. 20f.
43	 Cf. Goffm ann, 1963.
A Janus-Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure
27
elaborate the very division of which it is the expression in two complementary
and mutually reinforcing ways. First, the ghetto sharpens the boundary between
the outcast category and the surrounding population by deepening the sociocultural
chasm between them: it renders its residents objectively and subjectively
more dissimilar from other urban dwellers by submitting them to unique conditionings,
so that the patterns of cognition and conduct they fashion have every
chance of being perceived by outsiders as singular, exotic, even “aberrant”,44
which feeds prejudicial beliefs about them.
Next, the ghetto is a cultural combustion engine that melts divisions amongst
the confined population and fuels its collective pride even as it entrenches the
stigma that hovers over it. Spatial and institutional entrapment deflects class differences
and corrodes cultural distinctions within the relegated ethnoracial category.
Thus Christian ostracism welded Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews under an
overarching Jewish identity such that they evolved a common “social type” and
“state of mind” across the ghettos of Europe.45
Similarly, America’s dark ghetto
accelerated the sociosymbolic amalgamation of mulattos and Negroes into a
single unified “race” and turned racial consciousness into a mass phenomenon
fueling community mobilization against continued caste exclusion.46
Yet this unified identity cannot but be stamped with ambivalence as it remains
tainted by the very fact that ghettoization proclaims what Weber calls the
“negative evaluation of honor”47
assigned to the group confined. It is therefore
wont to foster among its members sentiments of self-doubt and self-hatred, dissimulation
of one’s origin through “passing,” the pernicious derogation of one’s
kind, and even fantastical identification with the dominant.48
The ghetto is home,
but it remains an inferior home, built under duress, that exists at the order and
sufferance of the dominant. Its residents know that, as it were, in their bones.
44	 Cf. Sennett, 1994, p. 244; Wilson, 1987, p. 7f.
45	 Cf. Wirth, 1928, p. 71-88; Ibid., 1956/1964
46	 Cf. Drake/Cayton, (1945) 1993, p. 390.
47	 Weber, 1922/1978.
48	 Cf. Clark, 1965, p. 63-67. The phenomenon of “passing” among the Burakumin is
an explosive question in the historical sociology and politics of Japan’s “invisible
race”, cf. Neary, 2003. An abiding sense of disgrace born of the internalization
of stigma is a prevalent theme in the autobiographies of Burakumin activists (e.g.,
Hane, 1982, p- 163-171).
Loïc Wacquant
28
Disentangling poverty, segregation,
and ethnic clustering
Articulating the concept of ghetto as sociospatial mechanism of ethnoracial closure
makes it possible to disentangle the relationship between ghettoization, urban
poverty, and segregation, and thence to clarify the structural and functional
differences between ghettos and ethnic neighborhoods. I tackle each of these
questions in turn.
1. Poverty is a derivative and variable characteristic of ghettos: The fact that
many ghettos have historically been places of endemic and often acute misery
owing to the paucity of space, the density of settlement, and the economic restrictions
and statutory maltreatment of their residents does not imply that a
ghetto is necessarily a place of destitution, nor that it is uniformly deprived.
Indeed the very opposite is true: ghettos have more often than not been vectors
of economic amelioration, even as they imposed multifarious restrictions on
their residents. The Judengasse of Frankfurt, instituted in 1490 and abolished in
1811, went through periods of prosperity no less than penury, and it contained
sectors of extraordinary opulence as court Jews helped the city become a vibrant
center of trade and finance – part of its glamour to this day comes from it being
the ancestral home of the Rothschild dynasty.49
Being forced to dwell within the
walled compound of the mellah did not prevent the Jews of Marrakech from
thriving economically: many of its business leaders were renowned throughout
Morocco for their wealth.50
Turning to the United States, James Weldon Johnson
insisted that the Harlem of the 1930s was “not a slum or a fringe” but the
“cultural capital”51
of black America, a place where “the Negro’s advantages
and opportunities are greater than in any other place in the country.” Similarly,
Chicago’s “Bronzeville” at the mid-twentieth-century point was not only far
more prosperous than the Southern black communities from which its residents
had migrated; it harbored the largest and most affluent African-American bourgeoisie
of its era.52
The ghetto arises through the double assignation of category to territory
and territory to category, and therefore purports to contain the gamut of classes
evolved by the confined group. It follows that, to the degree that this group
49	 Cf. Wirth, 1928, chapter 4.
50	 Cf. Gottreich, 2006, p. 102-105.
51	 Johnson, 1930, p. 4.
52	 Cf. Drake/Clayton, (1945) 1993.
A Janus-Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure
29
experiences socioeconomic dispersion, its reserved district offers extensive avenues
for economic betterment and upward mobility in its internal social order.
Indeed, in the case of African Americans, ghettoization, class differentiation,
and collective enrichment proceeded apace: in addition to allowing the conversion
of peasants into industrial workers, the rise and consolidation of the ghetto
fostered the growth of a black middle class of business owners, professionals,
politicians, teachers, and preachers servicing a captive clientele of lower-class
coethnics that the dispersed rural communities of the South could have never
sustained.53
Whether a ghetto is poor or not, and to what degree, depends on
the overall economic standing of the category it cloisters, its distribution in the
division of labor, and on extraneous factors such as demography, ecology, state
policies, and the shape of the surrounding economy.
Conversely, not all dispossessed and dilapidated urban districts are ghettos
– and if they are such, it is not by dint of their level of deprivation. Declining
white neighborhoods in the deindustrializing cities of the US Midwest and
the British Midlands, depressed rural towns of the former East Germany and
southern Italy, and the disreputable villas miserias of greater Buenos Aires at
the close of the twentieth century are territories of working-class demotion and
decomposition, not ethnic containers dedicated to maintaining an outcast group
in a relationship of seclusive subordination.54
They are not ghettos other than
in a purely metaphorical sense, no matter how impoverished and how isolated
their residents may be. If extreme rates of concentrated poverty breeding
social isolation sufficed to make a ghetto, as argued by William Wilson,55
then
the backcountry of Alabama, Native American reservations, large chunks of the
former Soviet Union and most Third-World cities would be gargantuan ghettos.
More curiously still, by that definition neither Venice’s ghetto nuovo nor Chicago’s
Bronzeville at the peak of their historical development would be ghettos!56
53	 The ghetto of Chicago thus produced the country’s first black national newspaper,
“The Chicago Defender”, whose owner, Robert S. Abbott, was also the city’s first
black millionaire, cf. Spear, 1968, p. 165-167.
54	 Cf. the case of Buenos Aires dissected by Auyero, 2000.
55	 Cf. Wilson, 1996.
56	 Another anomaly generated by the income-based (re)definition of the ghetto is the
following: the same neighborhood, harboring the same population and institutions,
and fulfilling the same functions in the metropolitan system, would alternately
become a ghetto and cease being one with wide variations of its poverty rate
caused by cyclical fluctuations of the economy. This conception not only leaves out
the canonical cases of the ghetto: by making ghettoization a derivative property of
Loïc Wacquant
30
The favelas of the Brazilian metropolis are often portrayed as segregated
dens of dereliction and disorganization, overrun by drugs and violence, but upon
close observation they turn out to be variegated working-class wards with finely
stratified webs of ties to industry and to the wealthy districts for which they supply
household service labor. They display considerable variety in levels of segregation
and situations of collective “socioeconomic vulnerability”.57
As in the
ranchos of Venezuela and the poblaciones of Chile, families that dwell in these
squatter settlements span the color continuum and have extensive genealogical
bonds to higher-income households; they are “not socially and culturally marginal,
but stigmatized and excluded from a closed class system”58
. In any case,
neither their poverty rate nor the mix of functions they fulfill in the metroplis,
from viable reservoir of labor power to warehouse for the rejects of “regressive
deindustrialization,” qualifies them as ghettos. The same demonstration applies
to the ciudad perdida in Mexico, the cantagril in Uruguay, and the pueblo jóven
in Peru.59
Given that not all ghettos are poor and not all poor areas are (inside) ghettos,
one cannot collapse the analysis of ghettoization into the study of slums, impoverished
estates, and assorted districts of dispossession in the city. This conflation
is precisely the mistake committed by those European observers who, smitten
with a vague and emotive vision of the black American ghetto as a territory of
urban dissolution and social dread – that is, with the barren vestiges of the dark
ghetto after its implosion at the close of the 1960s – conclude that “ghettoizaeconomic
inequality and income distribution, it fails utterly to identify a distinctive
sociospatial form.
57	 Cf. Marques/Torres, 2005; Kowarick, 2009.
58	 Perlm a, 1976, p. 195. Cf. also Zaluar/Alvito, 1998.
59	 Cf. Wacquant, 2008(1), p. 7-12. There are at least three major interlinked reasons
why ghettos did not emerge in Latin American cities – a fact attested by Gilbert,
cf. Gilbert, 1998; Ibid., 2011. First, the countries with significant dishonored
populations (descendants of African slaves and native peasants) have evolved
gradational systems of ethnoracial classification based on phenotype and a host
of sociocultural variables, as opposed to categorical systems based on descent
(as define Jews in Europe and blacks in the United States), resulting in fuzzy
and porous ethnic boundaries. Second, and correlatively, they sport low and
inconsistent patterns of residential segregation, and solid segregation is a necessary
stepping stone to ghettoization. Third, Latin American states have spawned
sharply asymmetric conceptions of citizenship, but they have typically not given
legal imprimatur to ethnoracial classification and discrimination.
A Janus-Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure
31
tion” has struck the lower-class zones of the urban periphery of Europe due
to rising unemployment, immigrant segregation, and festering delinquency, or,
worse, because they adopt the fleeting impressions of their residents who think
of themselves as “ghetto” since this is how depressed and defamed neighborhoods
are now publicly labelled in public debate.
“The ghetto” comes to France:
How “everyday usage” drowns out sociology
Didier Lapeyronnie’s thick book on the alleged coalescence of the “urban ghetto”
in France announces a study of “segregation, violence and poverty” in that
country but contains not a shred of data and no analysis on these trends and
their overlap.60
Instead, it uses the word ghetto as a loose synonym for declining
lower-class estates branded as such by journalists and by some of their residents
(who themselves have learned the label from the media). The notion then inexplicably
devolves into a subjective concept pertaining to lifestyle, self-conception,
and “the shared feeling of having been betrayed” by dominant institutions:
“The term ghetto belongs to the everyday vocabulary of the banlieue [lower-class
periphery]. It is used to designate a difficult social or personal situation,
even a psychological situation stamped by disorder, poverty, and sometimes
violence. It is not necessarily associated with urban segregation and
confinement in a territorial sense […]. Many residents can be of the ghetto
without living in the ghetto. They can live it partially, as a function of moments
and interactions.… By following this everyday usage, we understand
the ghetto to be a dimension of individual and collective behaviors […]. The
ghetto is not a situation, it is a category of action in an array of social relations
[…]. We shall seek to evaluate and to define the ghetto as a function of its
effects on the self-construction effected by its residents, as a function of the
capacity of individuals to name themselves and to assert an ‘I’, to establish
or not a positive relationship to self […]. We shall seek the truth, or rather
the truths, of the ghetto, in the words and in the reflections of its residents”61
Characterizing the ghetto as a matter of subjective orientation, “a psychological
situation stamped by disorder, poverty, and sometimes violence,” is both
60	 Cf. Lapeyronnie, 2007.
61	 Ibid., 2010, p. 22-24, 26.
Loïc Wacquant
32
incoherent and inconsistent with the established conceptual usage of the term.
By that definition, neither the Jewish ghetto of Venice nor the black ghetto of
Chicago in their full bloom would be ghettos; any population invoking the idiom
of the ghetto is eo ipso ghettoized; and consequently the simple remedy to
ghettoization is for the residents of lower-class districts to change their representations
of themselves. Not to mention that French citizens residing outside
the country’s “sensitive neighborhoods” who feel “betrayed” by leading institutions
would be surprised to discover that, unbeknownst to them, they “live the
ghetto.”
Echoing Lapeyronnie (on whose views he relies), the sensationalist book
by Le Monde journalist Luc Bronner entitled The Law of the Ghetto provides
a selective account of street delinquency and a long litany of clashes between
unemployed youths and the police in a few banlieues brashly labelled “ghettos”
because of the shock value of the term to describe territories of “social, political,
and economic violence”: “We must dare this term which so frightens the Republic”
to describe “our Gomorra.”62
When the so-called law of the ghetto denotes
the imprint of low-grade criminality, the flourishing of an informal economy,
and assorted urban disorders, we know we have reached the point where the
word has been emptied of any sociological meaning to serve as an ordinary
categoreme, a term of accusation and alarm, pertaining not to social science but
public polemic, that serves only to sell books and to fuel the spiral of stigmatization
enmeshing the unpoverished districts of the urban periphery.
2. All ghettos are segregated but not all segregated areas are ghettos: The select
boroughs of the West of Paris, the exclusive upper-class suburbs of Boston,
Berne or Berlin, and the “gated communities” that have mushroomed in global
cities such as Milan, Miami, São Paulo, and Cape Town are monotonous in
terms of wealth, income, occupation, and very often ethnicity, but they are not
for all that ghettos. Segregation in them is entirely voluntary and elective, and
for that very reason it is neither all-inclusive nor perpetual. Fortified enclaves
of luxury package “security, seclusion, social homogeneity, amenities, and services”
to enable bourgeois families to escape what they perceive as “the chaos,
dirt, and danger of the city”63
. These islands of privilege serve to enhance, not
curtail, the life chances and protect the lifestyles of their residents, and they
radiate a positive aura of distinction,64
not a sense of infamy and dread. In terms
62	 Bronner, 2010, p. 249, 23.
63	 Caldeira, 2000, p. 264f.
64	 Cf. Low, 2004.
A Janus-Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure
33
of their causal dynamics, structure and function, they are the very antithesis
of the ghetto. To call them such, as with variations on the expression “gilded
ghetto,” invites confusion and stretches the semantics of the term to the point of
meaninglessness.65
This indicates that residential segregation is a necessary but not a sufficient
condition for ghettoization. For a ghetto to emerge spatial confinement must first
be imposed and all-encompassing; then it must be overlayed with a distinct and
duplicative set of institutions enabling the population thus cloistered to reproduce
itself within its assigned perimeter. If blacks are the only ethnic category
to be “hypersegregated” in American society,66
it is because they are the only
community in that country for which involuntary segregation, assignment to a
reserved territory, and organizational parallelism have combined to entrap them
in a separate and inferior social cosmos of their own, which in turn bolstered
their residential isolation, as well as enforced their extreme marital isolation,
virtually unique in the world among major ethnic groups.67
That even forcible segregation at the bottom of the urban order does not
mechanically produce ghettos is demonstrated by the fate of the declining lower-class
banlieues of France after the mid-1970s.Although they have been widely
described and disparaged as “ghettos” in public discourse and their inhabitants
share a vivid feeling of being cast out in a “penalized space” suffused with
boredom, anguish, and despair,68
relegation in these depressed concentrations
of public housing laid fallow at the urban periphery is based first on class, and
only secondarily on ethnicity, and it is remarkably impermanent. Proof is that
the residents who move up the class structure typically move out of the neighborhood
– so much so the rate of geographic mobility among the households
of “sensitive neighborhoods” surpasses the national average.69
As a result these
degraded districts are culturally heterogeneous, typically harboring a mix of native
French families with immigrants from three to six dozen nationalities. And
their inhabitants suffer not from institutional duplication and enclosure but, on
65	 Pinçon-Charlot/Pinçon’s, 2007, dissection of the dense web of associations,
clubs, and councils through which the upper crust of the French bourgeoisie
bulwarks its secluded spaces (exclusive urban enclaves, parks and castles, beaches
and gardens) shows that the “ghettos of the gotha” are no ghettos. This catchy
coinage makes for good marketing copy but muddies the sociological waters.
66	 Cf. Massey/Denton, 1993
67	 Cf. Patterson, 1998.
68	 Cf. Pétonnet, 1982.
69	 Cf. Observatoire des Zones Urbaines Sensibles, 2005.
Loïc Wacquant
34
the contrary, from the lack of an ingrown organizational structure capable of
sustaining them in the absence of gainful employment and adequate public services.
Like the German Problemquartier, the Dutch “krottenwijk”, and the British
“sink estates,” France’s deteriorating banlieues are, sociologically speaking,
anti-ghettos.70
The anti-ghettos of Western Europe
and the Roma exception
If and when an urban district turns into a ghetto, it should display five mutually
reinforcing properties resulting from the reciprocal asssignation of category
and territory: (1) growing ethnic homogeneity; (2) increased encompassment of
the target population; (3) rising organizational density; (4) the production and
adoption of a collective identity; (5) and impermeable boundaries. On all five
dimensions, the formerly industrial banlieues of France harboring rising shares
of immigrants have been moving steadily away from the pattern of the ghetto.71
Over the past 30 years, these defamed districts have become more diverse
in their ethnic composition; the proportion of all foreigners living in them has
stagnated or decreased (depending on geographic location and national provenance);
and they have lost most of the dense web of organizations that they
harbored at the bloom of the age of the industrial “Red Belt.” Most strikingly,
notwithstanding political campaigns periodically denouncing “multiculturalism”
and the media obsession with “Islamicization,” these districts have
failed to spawn a collective idiom and vision that would unify their residents on
grounds of ethnicity, nationality, religion or postcolonial status.72
Lastly, families
experiencing upward mobility, whether through education, employment,
or entrepreneurship, have crossed the boundaries of these districts in droves to
move up the ladder of neighborhoods and diffuse in metropolitan space. With
national variations and regional twists, this French pattern of a multilevel drift
70	 Cf. Wacquant, 2008(1).
71	 Cf. Ibid., 2008(2).
72	 Identification based on territory, often cited as a ground for ethnogenesis among
lower-class immigrant youths, turns out to be weak: it is defensive, situational and
labile; it is closely linked to lifecycle and evaporates upon entry into the labor
market or migration out of the neighborhood, cf. Lepoutre, 1997.
A Janus-Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure
35
antithetical to ghettoization fits the trajectories of most immigrant “minorities”
throughout Western Europe.73
The French analysts who, caught in the political mood and fed by swirling
media rumor, bemoan the morphing of the declining working-class districts of
the urban periphery into fearsome “immigrant ghettos” wed conceptual confusion
and historical amnesia.74
First, they conflate territories of dereliction
(marked by increased unemployment, the deterioration of the housing stock, and
the devalorization of their public image) with ethnic segmentation, and they mistake
mere segregation, produced by the conjoint press of class and ethnonational
origin, for territorial assignation and institutional parallelism – whose absence
is then obfuscated by the hazy and sulfurous category of “communautarianism,”
or by the invocation of the loose journalistic category of “Muslim communities”
that exists only in the worried minds of outsiders. Next, they conveniently forget
that ethnically marked populations issued from the former colonies were notably
more segregated spatially and more isolated socially (in terms of social ties,
marital unions, and institutional participation) in the 1960s and 1970s than they
are today. A half-century ago, these immigrants lived separated lives tightly encased
in the peripheral sectors of the secondary labor market and in the parallel
institutions of the shanty-towns (bidonvilles) and reserved housing compounds
of the SONACOTRA, the state agency entrusted with housing workers migrating
from the Maghrib.75
Indeed, in sharp contraposition to the black American
hyperghetto, it is the growing mixing of native and immigrant populations at
the bottom of the structure of classes and places, and the correlative closing of
social distance and disparities between them in the context of the decomposition
of traditional “working-class territories” that are the source of the xenophobic
tensions and conflicts that stamp these urban zones.76
If there is one category whose experience deviates sharply from this pattern
to veer toward ghettoization, it is the Roma of Eastern Europe. This population
of 3 to 5 million, dispersed mostly across Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czekoslovakia,
and the Balkans has long been marginalized in both monoethnic
rural villages and urban districts combining the four structural components of
stigma, constraint, spatial enclosure and institutional parallelism. After the collapse
of the Soviet empire, the destruction of the safety net and the abrupt social
polarization wrought by the market economy have reactivated anti-Roma prej-
73	 Cf. Musterd/Kem pen, 2009; Peach, 2009; Hartog/Zorlu, 2009
74	 E.g. Mucchielli/Le Goaziou, 2007; Lapeyronnie, 2007.
75	 Cf. Sayad/Dupuy, 1995; Bernadot, 1999
76	 Cf. Wacquant, 2008(1).
Loïc Wacquant
36
udice (as a “criminal race”), animosity, and discrimination and territorial fixation
has flared anew as Gypsies sank into unemployment and destitution.77
But
there are also counter-tendencies: many Romas have passed undetected among
the non-Gypsy population while others have experienced upward class mobility
against the backdrop of a fuzzy ethnic hierarchy enforced with variable stringency
in the different nations. Overall, class and country prove to be stronger
determinants of the trajectory of Gypsies than race and space.78
Nonetheless, the
controversial policy of the Berlusconi government to reinstitute state-run camps
to corral Gypsies on the outskirts of Italian cities and the heinous campaign
of destruction of “illegal Rom encampments” launched by President Nicolas
Sarkozy in France in the summer of 2010 to curry favor with electors of the far
right are there to remind us that the Roma remain prime candidates for the (re)
activation of sociospatial enclosure even in western Europe.79
3. Ghettos and ethnic neighborhoods sport divergent structures and serve opposite
functions: Moving beyond a gradational perspective to scrutinize the peculiar
patterning of social relations within the ghetto as well as between it and
the surrounding city throws into sharp relief the differences between the ghetto
and the ethnic clusters or immigrant neighborhoods such as newcomers to the
metropolis have formed in countless countries. The foreign “colonies” of interwar
Chicago that Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and Louis Wirth – and after them
the liberal tradition of assimilationist sociology and historiography80
– mistook
for so many white “ghettos” were scattered and mobile constellations born of
cultural affinity and occupational concentration, more so than prejudice and discrimination.
Segregation in them was partial and porous, a product of immigrant
solidarity and ethnic attraction instead of being rigidly imposed by sustained
outgroup hostility. Consequently residential separation was neither uniformly
nor rigidly visited upon these groups: in 1930, when the all-black Bronzeville
harbored 92 % of the city’s African-American population, Chicago’s Little Ire-
77	 Cf. Gheorge, 1991.
78	 Cf. Ladányi/Szelényi, 2006.
79	 The prototype Rom “village” of Castel Romano outside of Rome, home to some
800 Gypsies, with its prefabricated huts laid out in a grid and surrounded by a high
metal fence patrolled round the clock by a special police force, and the subjection
of its residents to a special census and fingerprinting are strongly redolent of the
early modern Italian ghetto. Cf. Clough Marinaro, 2009; Calam e, 2010: http://
places.designobserver.com, 07.05.2013.
80	 Cf. Miller, 1992.
A Janus-Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure
37
land was “an ethnic hodge-podge” of 25 nationalities composed of only onethird
Irish persons and containing a paltry 3  % of the city’s denizens of Irish
ancestry. The eleven dispersed districts making up Little Italy were 46 % Italian
and contained just under one-half of Chicagoans of Italian origin. Thus both of
these clusters were ethnically plural and monolithically white, and both contained
a minority of the population supposedly ghettoized in them.81
This pattern was not unique to Chicago but repeated itself in every major
industrial center of the Midwest and Northeast of the United States. For instance,
the typical Italian immigrant to Philadelphia in 1930 resided amongst
“14 percent other Italian immigrants, 38 percent Italian stock, 23 percent all
foreign born persons and 57 percent all foreign stock”82
. Except for marginal
and local peculiarities, there were no white “ethnic” neighborhoods in theAmerican
metropolis wherein members of one European community were thoroughly
isolated from native whites and monopolized space and local institutions to the
exclusion of urbanites of other national origins.83
What is more, the distinctive
institutions of European immigrant enclaves were turned outward: they operated
to facilitate adjustment to the novel environment of the US metropolis. They
neither replicated the organizations of the country of origin nor perpetuated social
isolation and cultural distinctiveness. And so they typically waned within
two generations as their users gained access to their American counterparts and
climbed up the class order and the corresponding ladder of places.84
All of which
is in sharp contrast with the immutable racial exclusivity and enduring institutional
alterity of the Black Belt. This Chicago illustration dramatizes the fact
that the immigrant neighborhood and the ghetto serve diametrically opposed
functions: the one is a springboard for assimilation via cultural learning and
social-cum-spatial mobility, the other a material and symbolic isolation ward
geared toward dissimilation. The former is best figured by a bridge, the latter
by a wall.85
81	 Cf. Philpot, 1978, p. 141-145.
82	 Herschberg et al., 1981, p. 200.
83	 Cf. Warner/Burke, 1969.
84	 Cf. Nelli, 1970.
85	 Cf. for full documentation of the sharp divergence between the black ghetto and
the ‘colonies’ formed by European immigrant (Jews from Eastern countries, Poles,
Italians, and the Irish) in the first half of the twentieth century in the United States
Lieberson, 1980; Bodnar et al., 1982; Zunz, 1986, and Gerstle, 2001, esp. chap.
5. Workers of Belgian, Italian, Polish, and Iberian provenance underwent a very
similar process of spatial diffusion via class incorporation in the French industrial
Loïc Wacquant
38
From shield to sword
It is fruitful, then, to think of ghetto and ethnic cluster as two ideal-typical
configurations situated at opposite ends of the homological continua of constraint
and choice, entrapment and self-protection, exclusivity and heterogeneity,
encompassment and dispersal, inward and outward orientations, rigidity and
fluidity, along which various populations (themselves differently marked) can
be pegged or travel over time depending on the intensity with which the forces
of stigma, constraint, spatial confinement, and institutional parallelism impinge
upon them and coalesce with one another. We can then shift the analysis from
the ghetto as a topographic object, a static state, to ghettoization as a sociospatial
dynamic, a multilevel process liable to empirical specification and measurement.
A population that formed mobile clusters out of cultural affinity and inconsistent
hostility can find itself subjected to stringent ostracization and territorial fixation
such that it evolves permanent sites for comprehensive seclusion: such was the
experience of Jews in early modern Europe and of African Americans in the
northern metropolis of the United States at the dawn of the Fordist era as they
shifted from segregation to ghettoization.
Conversely, ghettoization can be attenuated to the point where, through
gradual erosion of, and disjunction between, its spatial, social, and mental
boundaries, the ghetto devolves into an elective ethnic concentration operating
as a springboard for structural integration and/or cultural assimilation into the
broader social formation. This describes well the trajectory of the Chinatowns of
the United States from the early to the late twentieth century86
and the status of
the Cuban immigrant enclave of Miami which fostered integration through biculturalism
after the Mariel exodus of 1980.87
It also characterizes the “Kimchee
Towns” in which Koreans converged in the metropolitan areas of Japan, which
sport a blend of features making them a hybrid of ghetto and ethnic cluster:88
they are places of infamy that first arose through enmity and constraint, but over
city of the first half of the twentieth century in spite of being subjected to virulent
xenophobia and widespread collective violence during phases of economic turmoil,
cf. Noiriel, 1988. Over the past quarter-century, postcolonial migrants have been
following a germane trajectory in cities throughout Europe, characterized by
low to moderate segregation from nationals and stagnant to decreasing spatial
concentration, cf. Musterd, 2005.
86	 Cf. Zhou, 1994.
87	 Cf. Portes/Stepick, 1993.
88	 Cf. DeVos/Chung, 1981.
A Janus-Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure
39
the years their population has become ethnically mixed; residential mingling has
in turn enabled Koreans to socialize and intermarry with Japanese neighbors as
well as obtain Japanese citizenship through naturalization.
This analytic schema allows one to assess the degree to which a given urban
configuration approximates one or the other pure type and on what dimension(s).
Thus the so-called gay ghetto is more aptly characterized as a “quasi-ethnic
community,” since “most gay persons can ‘pass’ and need not be confined to
interacting with their ‘own kind’”89
and none are forced to reside in the areas
of visible concentration of gay institutions based on their sexual orientation.
Indeed, the vast majority of gays do not live in, or even patronize, these districts,
which are local clusters of commercial establishments and public spaces
catering to the preferences of gays in matters of consumption and sociability.
Their degree of closure, mutual orientation, and collective organization are
highly variable and often contested, both without and within the gay district, as
illustrated by the case of Le Marais in Paris.90
The double-sidedness of the ghetto as sword (for the dominant) and shield
(for the subordinate) implies that, to the degree that its institutional completeness
and autonomy are abridged, its protective role is diminished and risks being
swamped by its exclusionary modality. In situations where its residents cease
to be of economic value to the controlling group, extraction evaporates and no
longer balances out ostracization. Ethnoracial encapsulation can then escalate
to the point where the ghetto morphs into an apparatus merely to warehouse the
spoiled and supernumerary population, as a staging ground for its expulsion, or
as a springboard for the ultimate form of ostracization, namely, physical anni-
hilation.
The first scenario fits the evolution of America’s “Black Metropolis” after
the peaking of the Civil Rights movement in the mid-1960s. Having lost its
role as a reservoir of unskilled labor power, the dark ghetto crashed and broke
down into a dual sociospatial structure composed of (i) the hyperghetto, entrapping
the marginal fractions of the black working class in the barren perimeter
of the historic ghetto; (ii) and the black middle-class satellites that burgeoned
at the latter’s periphery, in the areas left vacant by white outmigration, where
the growing African-American bourgeoisie achieved spatial and social distance
from its lower-class brethren.91
The hyperghetto is a novel sociospatial configuration,
doubly segregated by race and class, devoid of economic function, and
89	 Murray, 1979, p. 169.
90	 Cf. Sibalis, 2004.
91	 Cf. Wacquant, 2008(1), p. 11, 51f., 117f.
Loïc Wacquant
40
thus stripped of the communal institutions that used to provide succor to its inhabitants.
These institutions have been replaced by the social control institutions
of the state (increasingly staffed by the black middle class), and in particular by
the booming prison and its disciplinary tentacles. As the authorities turned from
the social welfare to the penal regulation of racialized marginality in the city,
the hyperghetto became deeply penetrated by and symbiotically linked to the
hypertrophied carceral system of the United States by a triple relationship of
structural homology, functional surrogacy, and cultural fusion.92
The second and
third scenarios, wherein the ghetto devolves into a means of radical ostracization,
were those implemented by Nazi Germany when it revived the Judenghetto
between 1939 and 1944, first, to impoverish and concentrate Jews with a view
toward relocation and later, after mass deportation turned out to be impractical,
to funnel them toward extermination camps as part of the “final solution”.93
The unchecked intensification of its exclusionary thrust attendant upon the
loss of its shielding capacity suggests that the ghetto might be most profitably
studied not by analogy with urban slums, lower-class districts, and immigrant
enclaves but alongside the reservation, the camp, and the prison, as belonging
to a broader genus of institutions for the forced confinement of dispossessed and
dishonored groups.94
It is not by happenstance that the Bridewell of London
(1555), the Zuchthaus of Amsterdam (1654), and the Hospital général of Paris
(1656), designed to instill the discipline of wage work in vagrants, beggars, and
criminals via incarceration, were invented around the same time as the Jewish
ghetto. It is not by coincidence that today’s sprawling refugee camps in Sierra
Leone, Sri Lanka, and the occupied territories of Palestine and the Gaza Strip
look ever more like a cross between the ghettos of early modern Europe and
gigantic gulags.95
And that retention camps for unlawful immigrants have mushroomed
throughout Europe as the European Union moved to treating transnational
peregrination from the global South as a matter of material security and
ethnonational status.96
92	 Cf. Wacquant, 2001.
93	 Cf. Friedm an, 1980; Browning, 1986.
94	 Wacquant, 2010, sketches an analytic framework that brings together into a single
model forms of sociospatial seclusion at the top (gated communities, upper-class
districts) and at the bottom (slum, ethnic cluster, ghetto, prison), as well as urban
and rural forms (among which figure preserves, reservations, and camps).
95	 Cf. Agier, 2008; Rozelier, 2007.
96	 Cf. Le CourGrandm aison et al., 2007.
A Janus-Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure
41
A robust analytic concept of the ghetto as an organizational device for the
spatial enclosure and control of a stigmatized group offers a way out of the semantic
morass and empirical confusion created by the unreflective adoption of
the shifting folk notions of the same among political and intellectual elites. It allows
us, not only to describe, differentiate, and explain the diverse urban forms
developed by tainted populations as they come into the city without falling into
the many traps set by the metaphorical and rhetorical usages of “the ghetto.”
By spotlighting the tangled nexus of space, power and dishonor, it also gives
us the means to grasp the structural and functional kinship between the ghetto,
the prison, and the camp just as the state managers of the advanced societies are
increasingly resorting to borders, walls, and bounded districts as the means to
define, confine, and control problem categories.
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47
The Subalterns Speak Out
Urban Plebeian Society in
Late Imperial Russia
Ilya V. Gerasim ov
Urban slum areas of today, just as a hundred years ago, house the kind of people
who largely evade regular documentation of their lives, and very rarely produce
written accounts of their feelings, desires, and concerns. This should present a
major difficulty for historians who write about the slum inhabitants of the past,
and who, unlike contemporary sociologists or anthropologists, cannot produce
their own data by conducting surveys and interviews. Historians have to rely
on existing sources, which are authored mostly by the educated middle classes
whose values and rationality these sources reflected (as well as biases and misconceptions).
This fundamental deficiency of ‘authentic’ or at least first-hand
evidence should pose a major problem for attempts to write histories of the lower
classes, which makes it all the more surprising that such histories are not only
numerous but also often written without any concern for the epistemological and
methodological impasse presented by the task.
This unshattered optimism can be explained by the origins of social history
in the research of premodern epochs. Historians have long been accustomed to
studying social groups and entire societies who were illiterate or had an insignificant
number of literate members. The revolutionizing effect produced by Medieval
Studies in the mid-twentieth century (associated mostly with the Annales
School), which laid the ground for new social history and the anthropological
turn in history writing, was based in good part on new approaches to the study of
the popular masses that had left only scarce written evidence of their lives. ‘The
silent majority’ and ‘the people without history’ have become legitimate topics
of study, no less respectable than traditionally celebrated kings, aristocrats, and
Ilya V. Gerasimov
48
literati.1
The study of muted groups within the medieval communal-based society
was continued by historians of the lower (and equally ‘speechless’) classes
during the industrial age.2
Today, it has become standard to write about all kinds
of disenfranchised social groups that left no elaborated self-descriptive narratives
that reconstruct their distinctive cultures and even their subjectivity.
Russian history is particularly prominent for this type of scholarship – both
because of the heavy impact left on the field by Marxism (with its fixation on
the lower classes), and because of the low literacy rates of the pre-1917 population.
Many of the generalizations about prerevolutionary workers’ culture
and subjectivity have been made on the basis of a single document, which is
quite outstanding in all senses – the autobiography of one Semen Kanatchi-
kov.3
Those historians who, in their studies, have analyzed a broader number of
written sources produced by workers still dealt with the ‘conscious workers’ or
even ‘plebeian intelligentsia’, rather than with the entire social group.4
Peasant
studies do not have such an authoritative and self-conscious text, which does
not preclude scholars from making generalizations about the peasants’inner self
and collective identity on a grand scale.5
The underworld or just the ‘gray zone’
social sphere of a late imperial city can be studied on the basis of several dozen
newspaper feuilletons written by lower-middle-class journalists.6
Criticism
of these approaches from within the historical profession usually questions the
sufficiency of the analyzed evidence for reaching such broad conclusions. The
discussion is framed in terms of the ‘representativeness of sources’, which cannot
be definitively resolved in most cases: how many examples (case studies,
written testimonies) are ‘enough’ to substantiate a historian’s claim?7
The very question of whether those written accounts of mores and deeds
of the commoners, produced by educated and usually upper-class observers,
1	 Cf. White, 1967; Wolf, 1982.
2	 Cf. for classic studies of the proletariat and the peasantry Thom pson, 1968; Shanin,
1972.
3	 A RadicalWorkerin TsaristRussia, 1986.
4	 Cf. Steinberg, 1992; Id., 2002, Chapter I.
5	 Cf. for one of the most recent examples Retish, 2008. Cf. for criticism of bold
discursive generalizations and projections in peasant studies Gerasimov, 2004.
6	 For example, in Odessa: Sylvester, 2005.
7	 This problem has been particularly acute in Microhistory, which substantiates
broad generalizations by the meticulous analysis of just one or several cases. Cf.
on the problem of relations between a unique case and the general social norm in
microhistorical studies Egmond/Mason, 1997, p. 2f. et al; Ginzburg, 1993.
The Subalterns Speak Out
49
are meaningful at all as a ‘source’ is not recognized, and perhaps will not be
even understood by many historians. The basic ‘credibility check’ of a primary
source implies examining whether the author was an eyewitness or had firsthand
access to reliable information, or personal reasons to distort the picture, and
also determining the author’s purpose and circumstances of writing down the
document. The idea that those different groups of the lower social orders might
be completely misrepresented and misinterpreted even by the most sympathetic
and scrupulous observers from the ranks of the educated upper classes would
strike a historian – and particularly a historian of Russia – as groundless. Why
should testimony by an aristocrat or a cleric of the early Middle Ages be seen
as a more adequate source on the history of peasants of that epoch than an early
twentieth-century newspaper feuilleton by a university graduate on the history
of urban slums of the same period? After all, aristocrats lived in castles separated
by spatial and cultural distance from the village, while newspaper journalists
could dwell just around the corner from a flophouse.
The difference between the two examples is the nature of the social organization
and the character of the production of knowledge in the Middle Ages and
at the turn of the twentieth century. In the former case, both the ‘silent majority’
and their educated overlords shared a vision of the society as composed of
half-isolated communes characterized by a universally recognized set of rights,
obligations, cultural norms, and distinctive economic functions. By contrast,
Russian society during the late imperial period (as other European societies of
the time) was characterized by economic dislocations, intensive social mobility,
and a multiplicity of “cultures in flux.”8
Social identities in this society are multifaceted
and transitional, greatly differing in the ways they are viewed ‘from the
outside’ (by the legislator or the police) and are experienced ‘from within’. At
the same time, unlike the medieval literati, the educated elite of the turn of the
twentieth century belonged to the common public sphere sustained by the circulation
of public discourses and engaged in the production of discourses. This
is a radically new situation in comparison with the premodern world, where the
closest analogue to a modern public hegemonic discourse was theology, equally
alienated from the serf and the lord as its subjects, and almost equally embracing
both of them as its objects. The modern hegemonic discourses of nation and
culture, class and politics structure the ways in which educated members of the
public sphere perceive the social reality and navigate through it, but they are
alien and all but irrelevant for those outside the public sphere – which means for
the absolute majority of the population.
8	 Cf. Frank/Steinberg, 1994.
Ilya V. Gerasimov
50
According to the rigid criteria upheld by social historians−purists of the
Habermas model, only 2 or 3 percent of the inhabitants of Russian provincial
cities (such as Kazan in the Middle Volga region) belonged to the public sphere
at the beginning of the twentieth century.9
This figure may be viewed as too low,
and there can be alternative methods for assessing the size of the public sphere.
It is clear, however, that the majority of the urban inhabitants could not belong
to any public sphere in principle, for basic technical reasons. To begin with,
only 51 percent of the population of Kazan was literate in 1897, and the rate of
literacy was not much higher even ten years later, given the influx of mostly illiterate
migrants from the countryside.10
Furthermore, the cumulative print run of
major newspapers in Kazan reached its peak in 1913, with about 25,000 copies
at a time of about ten titles being published – for a city that had about 158,000
inhabitants over the age of ten, or 120,000 older than age twenty.11
This means
that only 16 to 20 percent of adult Kazanians would have had access to newspapers
in principle, which by itself did not make them active participants in the
public sphere, but was a sine qua non for those who wished to participate in it. It
can be added that in terms of formal social status, only 10 percent of the urban
population in Russia did not belong to nonprivileged social groups: peasants or
petty commoners (meshchane).
Thus, 2 to 20 percent of the urban population participated or could participate
in the public sphere, having access to public discourses on a regular basis
and perceiving reality in discursive categories. For them, “textuality has become
a metaphor for reality in general”12
. The rest could be exposed to discourses and
the world of ideologies and bureaucratic document-based procedures, but they
were not properly socialized into this world, and did not fully interiorize its
“geography” and “physics.” At least they did not rely on discourses and textuality
in their everyday lives. This majority cannot be identified with a particular
class, legal estate, occupation, or confession – or any other categories of modern
social discourse. They are most accurately defined in the vaguest terms as the
“lower classes” or “plebeian society.” This is exactly the structural situation that
9	 When the public sphere is effectively limited to a tiny layer of urban ‘bourgeoisie’
participating in town council elections and formally registered associations of
bicycle riders or lawn tennis clubs. Cf. Hausm ann, 2002; Häfner, 2004.
10	 Cf. Troinitskii, 1904, p. x.
11	 Cf. Am irkhanov, 1999, p. 312-320. I have projected the demographic structure of
the city population as revealed by the 1897 census on the population of Kazan in
1913. Cf. Troinitskii, 1904, p. 10f..
12	 Quoted from Eley, 2005, p. 43.
The Subalterns Speak Out
51
is central for Subaltern Studies: “The term ‘subaltern’ […] is used […] to refer
to subjects, working people, the lower classes: the demographic difference”, as
Ranajit Guha put it in the first volume of Subaltern Studies, “between the total
[…] population and all those […] described as the ‘elite’”13
.
The original “subalterns” as conceptualized within the South Asian Subaltern
Studies project were subjugated by the alien colonial rule imposed by
foreigners, who had imposed their own alien cultural norms, social divisions,
and political regime.14
Today, thirty years later, the condition of subalternity
is understood more broadly and at the same time more specifically as a state
of alienation from the modern epistemological regime imposed and sustained
through hegemonic discourses. Colonial domination has been reconsidered as
primarily a discursive hegemony, and as such has lost a formal connection to
the actual occupation or colonization of the country by foreigners. The advent
of modernity as an elite intellectual and cultural phenomenon could draw a dynamic
frontier between the elite of the moderns socialized into the nation of the
common public sphere and the subalterns still living in the nondiscursive world
of local knowledge, now being conceptualized as “traditions”. This collision
could take place in any modernizing society. Thus, back in 2008, a prominent
Ottomanist, the late Donald Quataert suggested that workers and peasants of
the Anatolian “heartland” of the empire could be productively conceptualized
as “subalterns” despite “the centrality of the Turkish state in the minds of many
scholars”15
. Recently, Nora Lafi has attempted (if only somewhat cursorily) to
reframe the urban history of the late Ottoman period in terms of Subaltern Stud-
ies.16
In the context of Russian studies, Alexander Etkind makes the metaphor of
“internal colonization” (based on a somewhat outdated reading of postcolonial
theory and subaltern studies) the central theme of the Russian history of the
post-Petrine period.17
The significance of “subalternity” well exceeds the role of yet another fashionable
way of ‘repackaging’ the same old empirical material. It is not a new
name for the urban poor – it is a recognition of the fundamental difficulty in
describing a social sphere structured by absolutely different rules and rationality,
and yet closely integrated with the discourse-based modernized part of
the community. In the words of Princeton historian Gyan Prakash, “we should
13	 Pandey, 2005, p. 411.
14	 Cf. Guha, 1982.
15	 Quataert, 2008, p. 379.
16	 Cf. Lafi, 2011.
17	 Cf. Etkind, 2011.
Ilya V. Gerasimov
52
understand subalternity as an abstraction used in order to identify the intractability
that surfaces inside the dominant system—it signifies that which the
dominant discourse cannot appropriate completely, an otherness that resists con-
tainment.”18
Inhabitants of urban slums in imperial Russia were not colonized representatives
of a different race from exotic islands: as individuals, they participated in
the social interactions and hierarchies sanctioned by imperial officialdom as the
regime of modern knowledge. They were licensed as petty craftsmen and peddlers,
employed as manual workers or shop assistants, drafted into the military
or prosecuted as criminals under the imperial penal code and according to the
standard juridical procedure. Yet they did not have a common name as a group,
nor did they have a common subjectivity or a sense of universal solidarity. Or
at least there was no way to frame and express that commonality discursively,
even if called “subaltern”: “Subalternity cannot be generalized according
to hegemonic logic.”19
Clarifying this thesis, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak further
complicates the seemingly unresolvable conundrum of the subalterns as
the “One-That-Must-Not-Be-Named” social stratum, and hence elusive to the
point of nonintelligibility: “Subalternity is a position without identity. […] No
one can say ‘I am a subaltern’ in whatever language. And subaltern studies will
not reduce itself to the historical recounting of the details of the practice of disenfranchised
groups and remain a study of the subaltern. Subalternity is where
social lines of mobility, being elsewhere, do not permit the formation of a recognisable
basis of action.”20
The very aspiration to grasp the nature of subalterns (even if by means of
invalid ‘discursive’ instruments) stems from the broadly shared conviction that
such a community is real, at least as a commonality of lived life experiences.
We cannot easily grasp this commonality of the ‘plebeian society’ conceptually,
but we do not question its reality, as we observe it personally or get a sense of
it in the past from reading between the lines of our primary sources. The most
indirect, primarily spatial characteristic of this community – ‘slums’– may work
as a fairly all-embracing catchword in some instances, particularly today, but the
concept would be of little help in the case of Russian imperial society, for example.
In every city there were neighborhoods and whole districts of shacks populated
by the most marginal social types, but they were not the exclusive ghettos:
people of low socioeconomic status resided all over the city, while certain cat-
18	 Prakash, 2000, p. 287.
19	 Spivak, 2005, p. 475.
20	 Ibid., p. 476.
The Subalterns Speak Out
53
egories of the modernized could live in the slums (for example, poor students,
teachers, or ‘conscious’ factory workers). The fundamental conflict between
the vitality of the ‘unspeakable’ collectivity and the impossibility of framing
it through generalizations was famously captured by Spivak in her essay “Can
the Subaltern Speak?” Commenting on the main idea of this text almost two decades
later, Spivak explained: “The focus of subalternity in the essay remained
the singular woman who attempted to send the reader a message, as if her body
were a ‘literary’ text.”21
This phrase revealed the disciplinary limitations of the subaltern studies
approach as influenced by methodologies developed primarily within text-centered
literary studies (which Spivak herself duly acknowledges), and implicitly
suggested a way out of the seemingly unresolvable predicament of subalternity.
Indeed, the subaltern seems impenetrable for analysis only from the ‘colonial’
perspective of an observer who cannot even conceive of any other mode of
thinking except those determined by hegemonic discourses, and cannot proceed
beyond merely registering the existence of some ‘dark matter’ within the social
universe. (Spivak herself admits the role of her social position and cultural
horizon in setting the limits of her analytical perspective.22
) There is, however,
reality beyond the public sphere structured by hegemonic discourses, and there
are methods of analysis not constrained by the availability of ‘literary texts’ as
primary sources. Moreover, the construction of one’s social persona as a representation
of certain fixed collective identities scaled down to the level of the
individual (e.g., ‘a heterosexual middle-aged sales assistant of Orthodox faith
and monarchist political leaning’) is only one possible way of presenting the interaction
of a person with the society. Why do social historians not finally make
a step from the essentialist structuralism of Newton-age physics to at least the
state of the mid-twentieth-century mode of scientific thinking that, for example,
accepts the idea of an electron performing simultaneously as a particle and a
wave, and never having fixed coordinates but only a different ‘probability of
finding an electron at a given place’?
In other words, studying people who existed in the situation preceding the
formation of modern social groups (nations, classes, subcultures) as some sort
of ‘elementary particles’should be different from studying individuals who have
been formed by and within these groups, and therefore perceive themselves as
a function of those collectives. Subalterns as members of a seemingly amor-
21	 Ibid., p. 478.
22	 ”In search of the subaltern I first turned to my own class: the Bengali middle class
[...]. From French theory that is all I could do.” Ibid., p. 481.
Ilya V. Gerasimov
54
phous plebeian society cannot be meaningfully categorized in terms of their
fixed ‘state’ (be it ethnicity or occupation), but they can be ‘stabilized’ as coherent
social elements by the study of their life trajectories and the choices they
make along the way. Subalterns rarely reveal their ‘inner self’ in writing, but
taking the idea of perceiving one’s body as a ‘literary text’ seriously opens the
way to finally hearing the subalterns speaking out. To understand this ‘body talk’
we need first to decipher a peculiar language of self-description and self-representation
composed of individual social gestures as ‘words’, interconnected
sequences of actions as ‘sentences’, and stable social practices as its grammar.
The necessary prerequisite for this task is a truly massive array of sources
documenting the lives of subalterns, even if, as Gyan Prakash warns, “what historical
records present us with are palimpsests of the subaltern, impressions of
the subversive force exerted by the ‘minor,’never the force itself”23
. This is only
natural, as there can be no narrative sources consistently depicting subaltern
society as a ‘thing’, and we are looking into actions that left traces in historical
records, not into ready interpretations of intentions, much less the subjectivities
of the subalterns. Actions too can be misinterpreted and misrepresented in the
sources, but the chances of compensating for these flaws through the simultaneous
usage of alternative sources and their analysis in a broader historical context
are incomparably higher than in the case of misinterpretations of someone’s
thoughts and intentions. And what kinds of actions of the slum inhabitants other
than vital statistics (of births and deaths) have been best registered? Only one:
instances of their breaking the law.
Thus criminality (or what was perceived as ‘criminal’ by certain social
groups, in certain epochs) offers a unique window on social practices as a particular
language of self-expression and self-representation unmediated by traditional
institutions and not concealed by dominant public discourses, including
those supported by present-day historians and custodians of ‘national purity’.
This approach may raise legitimate objections: criminality, a deviant behavior
by definition, seems to be at odds with the very idea of typicality of social practices
(unless we assume that the lower social strata are inherently criminal and
immoral).
To this, it is necessary to point out that no other types of social actions can
be regarded as ‘typical’ in the usual sense when it comes to subalternity, that is,
when a sampling of actors or actions is viewed as representative of the entire
23	 Prakash, 2000, p. 294.
The Subalterns Speak Out
55
group. As Spivak put it, “The subaltern has no ‘examples’. The exemplary subaltern
is hegemonised, even if (and not necessarily) in bad faith.”24
Of no less importance is the focus suggested in this essay on the ways people
responded to certain situations, rather than on the situations themselves as
communicating a certain preexisting ‘meaning’. It can be a fistfight, church attendance,
labor culture, or courting rituals – the question is not which of these
activities were more ‘typical’ of the subalterns-members of urban plebeian society,
but what choices they made when faced with such an opportunity. Did they
reveal any patterns of group solidarity, a coherent moral economy, or rational
choice under the circumstances?
Last but not least, the very structure of recordkeeping in the epoch and society
we are talking about made criminal behavior grossly overrepresented in
documents. The newspapers registered no other episodes of private lives with
similar breadth and intensity. The richest archival collections were formed by
the police and various courts, and all focused mostly on instances of breaching
the law. Nobody cared about documenting the everyday relationships of merchants’
employees of different ethnoconfessional background until somebody
committed a crime. The ensuing police investigation documented, inter alia,
invaluable elements of regular social practices: this makes criminality a good
occasion to discuss much broader and more typical aspects of people’s lives.
It so happened, that both the authorities and the public were attracted mostly
by conflicts; we can use this specific interest to our advantage by preserving a
broader focus and remembering that conflicts (and criminality) formed only a tip
of the iceberg of complex social interactions we are about to explore.
Without succumbing to the relativization of the ‘criminal’, my research focuses
on the responses to a misdemeanor, rather than on its inherent ‘intention’.
A closer look at social conflicts identified as criminal can shed light on the process
of ascribing meaning to personal confrontations and making sense of cultural
and social differences. What becomes ‘the exemplary’ (or ‘typical’) is not
the people and the situations they got into, but the social practices they demonstrated
in the process of engaging with each other and different situations. To
reveal and review the variety of possible responses to a wide range of situations
and encounters, a very substantial survey of registered incidents is required. We
are speaking about thousands and thousands of cases reported by the police, by
newspapers, or described in the court records, which should be analyzed qualitatively,
rather than processed quantitatively as statistical aggregations.
24	 Spivak, 2005, p. 484.
Ilya V. Gerasimov
56
I have pursued exactly this type of research for the past twelve years, which
resulted in the book titled Ethnic Crime, Imperial City: Practices of Self-Organization
and Paradoxes of Illegality in Late Imperial Russia, 1905-1917. Its
main protagonist is the elusive and ever-escaping subaltern − urban plebeian
society − whose distinctive collective profile is reconstructed indirectly through
the multiple imprints it had left interacting with the ‘textual’and discourse-based
modern segment of society.
Because the Russian empire was vast and extremely heterogeneous, any
choice of a locality for a case study raises the question of its typicality: does it
reflect the realities of Siberia (western on eastern?), the situation in the Caucasus
(Northern Caucasus or Transcaucasia?), or in the Western Borderlands (in Poland
or in Belarus?), and so on? The fundamental fragmentedness of the imperial
social sphere, unmediated by universal (and hegemonic) public discourses,
has made the problem of representativeness of examples selected for analysis
particularly acute and unresolvable in principle through accumulating any statistically
significant number of examples. It is impossible to meaningfully process
data from hundreds of loci from all over the vast Russian empire in qualitative
analysis (as quantification already implies a certain politics of grouping and
agglomeration of facts and actors). As a practical solution to this conundrum,
I explore the situation on the ground in four different locations, two pairs of
imperial cities that both resemble each other and highlight mutual differences:
Kazan (today the capital of the national Republic of Tatarstan in the Russian
Federation), Nizhny Novgorod (the most ‘ethnically Russian’ city in the Middle
Volga region), Odessa (the Black Sea port in Southern Ukraine), and Vilna (today,
Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania). This sampling is as random as it is carefully
assorted: obviously, representing only a small fraction of all of the empire’s
urban centers, these cities have much in common but also are very different.
Odessa (in Ukraine) and Vilna (today Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania) were
located in the pale of Jewish settlement in the Russian empire, the territory
where Jews were allowed to reside without special permission (at least, in urban
areas). Jews constituted over 30 percent of their inhabitants. No other ethnic
group had a bigger share in Vilna, where Poles and East Slavs (Russians, Belarusians,
Ukrainians) had approximately the same share. In Odessa, Jews were
the largest ethnic minority, while Russians and Ukrainians (often poorly differentiated
statistically) constituted a majority. Both Vilna and Odessa became
Russian imperial cities in the late 18th
century, as a result of Russia’s imperial
expansion southward and westward, but Vilna had had a long prehistory as an
important political and cultural center of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,
while Odessa was founded virtually from scratch as a colonial outpost. Poles
The Subalterns Speak Out
57
and Jews claimed Vilna as their ancestral town, and the rising Lithuanian nationalist
movement challenged them, despite a mere 2 percent of ethnic Lithuanians
among the city population. In Odessa, neither ‘Great Russians’ coming from
the empire’s internal provinces, nor Ukrainian migrants, nor Jews fleeing from
the overpopulated shtetls in the Pale, nor Moldavians coming from neighboring
Bessarabia could claim this territory as their ‘ancestral’ land; all newcomers
were compelled to adjust to the new terrain, new climate, and new socioeconomic
environment.25
Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan were two provincial centers in the Middle
Volga region, as much the imperial ‘heartland’ as could be imagined. Still, the
specificity of the Russian imperial situation was characterized by the absence
of any ethnic or cultural homogeneous ‘center’: almost 40 percent of Kazan
province’s population were Tatars. In Nizhegorod province, about 10 percent
were non-Russians, while over 6 percent of ethnic Russians belonged to various
sects of Old Believers – a very significant factor of social and cultural differentiation,
particularly in pre-1905 imperial Russia. At the beginning of the twentieth
century, Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan represented two types of Russianness.
The former was as ‘ethnically Russian’ as was possible in the Russian empire
(slightly yielding only to Moscow with its 95 percent of native Russian speakers
in 1897). The latter was a key imperial administrative and cultural center, and
in this respect was perceived as the backbone of the Russian state and society
(despite its 25 percent non-Russian and non-Christian population).26
25	 Minczeles, 2000; Staliunas, 2006; Weeks, 2006. Cf. for a general survey of
Vilnius history (with only cursory treatment of the imperial period) Briedis, 2009.
Cf. for Vilnius as a palimpsest-like agglomeration of sites of memory Schulze
Wessel et al., 2010. A classic, if somewhat outdated already history of Odessa
is Herlihy, 1986. Cf. for the early twentieth century history of Odessa from the
vantage point of radical politics Weinberg, 1993, and for a history of the “local
community” of the educated middle class Hausm ann, 1998. Since the 1990s,
scholars show much more interest not in the history of the city itself but in the
‘Odessa myth’: Sylvester, 2005; Tanny, 2011.
26	 Probably because of the restrictions barring foreigners from visiting these cities
before 1991, Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod missed the wave of writing histories
of Russian imperial urban centers in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. The studies
appearing now usually ignore the immediate pre-1917 decade, or focus on specific
aspects of urban history (e.g., the history of landscape, of religious groups, etc.).
The noticeable exception is presented by the monograph by Küntzel, 2001. Still,
even this book is structured as a collection of sketches dedicated to various strata
Ilya V. Gerasimov
58
The similarities and differences between the two pairs of towns, as well as
within these pairs, allow us to identify stable elements and important variations
within the patterns of ethnically marked conflicts and cooperation in Russian
imperial society. The comparative perspective of the study also offers a clue for
in-depth interpretations of certain social phenomena, beyond various organicist
explanations. For example, the preponderance of Jews in Vilna prostitution, the
reputation of Tatars as prone to deadly violence in Kazan, the persistence of
Russian ultranationalist (“black hundreds”) organizations – are either explained
by some ‘innate’ qualities of those ethnic groups, or most often, are ignored
by historians and national activists alike. The comparative perspective on four
urban centers relativizes the uniqueness of many ethnically marked practices,
and also offers alternative explanations by social context and specific historical
circumstances.
The very category of ethnicity, just as all other markers of difference (confession,
legal estate, occupation, regional identification, or gender) are used here
not as self-referential entities, but as concepts that must be treated differently
depending on their usage as categories of practice or categories of analysis. We
cannot do without them: just as the educated elite of the modernized society
of the past, we rely on analytically produced generalizations to make sense of
reality, but this does not imply that we have to perceive our generalizations as
normative reconstruction of the past “as it actually happened” (wie es eigentlich
gewesen). Reconstructing subalterns from the imprints left by their activities,
we become engaged in the complex work of translating subalterns’ social acand
loci of the Nizhegorod society and presented in isolation from each other: a
chapter on the monasteries, another on the Nizhegorod Fair, the next deals with the
Sormovo industries, and so on. To this day, the most comprehensive narrative of the
history of Nizhny Novgorod at the turn of the twentieth century, written in Russian,
belongs to Dmitrii Smirnov (1891-1990), see Sm irnov 2007. Cf. for a useful survey
in English DeHaan: http://www.opentextnn.ru/space/nn/?id=542, 07.05.2013.
Despite its primary focus on an earlier (pre-1905) period, the comprehensive survey
of the “Nizhegorod civilization” by Catherine Evtuhov offers useful background
information on the city of Nizhny Novgorod as well. Cf. Evtuhov, 2011. Kazan
was luckier in getting scholars’ attention, but comprehensive urban studies of
Kazan are also rare. A detailed structuralist social history of Kazan during the
late imperial period can be found in Häfner, 2004. Cf. for a pioneering attempt
at studying the history of everyday life in Kazan in the longue durée Vishlenkova
et al., 2008. Cf. for a more conventional narrative of urban history Vishlenkova
et al., 2007.
The Subalterns Speak Out
59
tions – through the categories used by the records-keepers of the past – into
an analytically construed model. This process can be called the “paleontology
of knowledge,” as we have to reconstruct from scattered evidence a species
profoundly alien to our world, forsaken and forgotten, that cannot even be theoretically
revived in its original form here (as subalternists energetically insist).
Therefore, our reconstruction cannot pretend to be a realistic replica of the original,
but rather is an approximated model demonstrating our own understanding
of how individual fragments and known parameters of the ‘prehistoric’ social
body could be meaningfully combined together.
In practical terms this metaphor means that primary sources use all kinds
of attributes in describing protagonists of various actions: self-descriptive and
formally upheld by bureaucratic procedures, scientific categories and literary
clichés. In our translation job we treat them all as categories of practice, that is,
as markers of difference that made sense only for a particular cultural context
and under specific circumstances. ‘A Tatar’ or ‘a Jew’ frequent in documents
produced in all four locations of my study, but these terms are absolutely meaningless
and hollow by themselves, outside the specific pocket of local knowledge
and the exact circumstances of every usage of the term – and every incident
that provoked its usage. For instance, when in January 1908 the police solved
the case of a recent “expropriation” attack by revolutionaries on the office of
the Kazan city forester, they prepared to arrest the leader, known by the Russian
alias “Aleksey.” Aleksey turned out to be the Tatar Aligulla Bililiatdinov, a
26 year old worker wearing “Russian” dress.27
The local nationalist newspaper
expressed less indignation about the actual “revolutionary robbery” than about
the “imposter,” whom the paper depicted in Orientalist terms as a typical Tatar
criminal: tall, dark-skinned, gloomy, Mongoloid-looking, and “of Muhammad’s
faith”28
. Curiously, before the arrest, the three attackers had been described by
five witnesses (who saw them at close range and talked to them) as “representatives
of the [Russian] intelligentsia” “judging by the color of their faces and their
speech”29
. There was no mention of the typical Mongoloid facial characteristics
of the leader, or the primitive mores of his two accomplices, who turned out to
be twenty-year-old simple Russian workers.30
This example can tell us much
about the limits of applicability of even such ‘objective’ categories of practice
as Russians and Tatars, or intelligenty and workers. The question is not whether
27	 Cf. Kazanskii Telegraf, No. 4452, 01.01.1908, p. 3.
28	 Ibid., No. 4453, 03.01.1908, p. 3.
29	 Volzhskii Listok, No. 564, 22.12.1907, p. 3.
30	 Cf. Ibid., No. 653, 17.04.1908, p. 3.
Ilya V. Gerasimov
60
the witnesses or authors of newspaper reports wrongly understood the concept
of ethnicity or class, but how they used the available repertoire of categorizing
differences to mark out situational and structural divides in a particular case.
From hundreds of similar cases we can compose a more or less detailed map
of such divides and group solidarities that may coincide or not coincide with
categories of difference employed in the sources. This is a dynamic map, like
satellite weather images: group boundaries shift in time, and local knowledge
circulates through migrations and partial access of the subalterns to the mass
media. How should we perform the next step of our ‘paleontological’ reconstruction
and translate the assembled catalogue of qualities and features into a
coherent model of the plebeian society of subalterns living inside and outside
urban slums? Unfortunately, we can rely only on the same concepts of ethnicity,
confession, occupation, and so on, only this time we should work with them as
categories of analysis: analytically elaborated, with explicitly defined connotations
and parameters of applicability. The task is to explain, how that society
worked, not what it looked like as a totality. None of the analytical categories we
use can cope with the task individually, but there is no need to invent elaborated
hybrid mega-models. Instead of “strategic essentialism” of self-fashioning by
national and other modernized groups,31
and the “realism of the group” as practiced
by nation-centered social sciences,32
the new imperial history takes as its
departure point the principle of “strategic relativism” of the imperial situation:
the impossibility of unquestionable belonging to only one particular social hierarchy
or group.33
Thus, the only accurate way to outline a social persona in this
situation of the absence of absolute hegemony of any ‘hegemonic discourses’(at
least over the plebeian society of subalterns) is to reconstruct it as a composite
and multifaceted one.
This is not exactly the hybridity so much celebrated in postcolonial studies,
which is envisioned in accordance with what Ernest Gellner called “Modigliani’s
map,” when multicolored blocks of different sizes and shapes (but with
clear boundaries and internally homogeneous) form a giant mosaic of cultural
(and social) diversity. These blocks are located on the same plane and are
grouped according to clear departments.34
In the department of “peoples,” this
diversity is represented in the case of the Russian Empire by “Jews,” “Ukrainians,”
“Tatars,” and “Russians”; in the department of “social structure,” it fea-
31	 Cf. Spivak, 1987, p. 205.
32	 Cf. Brubaker, 1994, p. 3-14.
33	 Cf. Gerasimov et al., 2009, p. 20.
34	 Cf. Gellner, 1984, p. 139f.
The Subalterns Speak Out
61
tures “nobles,” “peasants,” “petty commoners,” and so on. As it becomes increasingly
clear from modern historical and anthropological studies, “poverty,”
“Russianness,” “slums,” and “youth” do not belong to four different and separate
‘planes of diversity’ (thus forming isolated spaces of social differentiation
and hybridization), but combine to produce universal composite social identities.
These hybrid identities formed in different times from different components
with different characteristics are the main protagonists of new imperial history
as pursued in my study.
Looking from this vantage point, the task of reconstructing the composite
social sphere of the plebeian society appears to be very different from assembling
a priori assigned blocks (class/confession/gender/nationality, etc.) in a certain
way. Rather, we have to envision this society as differentiated into groups
that are distinguished only when (or every time) certain criteria of otherness
become relevant in the context of a specific situation, when these criteria are
actually used for marking groupness. In the first case, the matrix of differences
is imposed by the researcher, and is more or less sensitive to the nuances of the
past, from the outside. In the second case, differences are recognized as such
and registered only if they are actually manifested in practice, in a specific situation.
Ideally, these differences should be described in the analytical language
of contemporary social sciences and interpreted within the framework of a contemporary
theoretical model, but it is equally important to avoid anachronistic
ascriptions of today’s criteria of groupness to motivations of the actions of people
in the past.
The best illustration of the dynamic nature of sociocultural hybridity and
relativism of criteria of groupness (both as a category of analysis and a category
of practice) can be found in the strange case of a fraudulent check cashed by
a stranger in August 1906 at the Kazan Merchant Bank. Someone withdrew
the handsome sum of 8200 rubles (equivalent to three annual salaries of an
upper-middle-class civil servant or professional) from the bank account of the
wealthy Tatar merchant Akhmet Khusainov (1835-1906).35
The police failed to
crack this case, which resembles an Agatha Christie mystery: in the seemingly
patriarchal firm, every employee close to the head of the business was under
suspicion.36
Ethnicity played a prominent part in the logic of the investigation,
but proved futile in the end. The missing sum was discovered by a Jewish law-
35	 Akhmet was the eldest of the three Khusainov brothers, a successful entrepreneur
worth several million rubles by the time of his death. Cf. Shaidullina, 2010.
36	 Cf. National Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan (NART), f. 79, op. 1, vol.
2, del. 805.
Ilya V. Gerasimov
62
yer, Alexander Bat, who was auditing the firm’s finances in March 1907, after
the death of its head. Two of the late merchant’s Tatar assistants (or rather confidants),
who had vague duties, were in charge of keeping the checkbook and the
personal seal of Akhmet Khusainov, but these respected gentlemen were beyond
the suspicions of Mr. Bat. He suggested that the clerk Mukhamet-Valei Saidashev
(also a Tatar) had the opportunity to steal a check when he was summoned
to the main office: on his meager salary of 35 rubles a month, in the fall of 1906,
Saidashev made a few expensive purchases, and then moved to Semipalatinsk
(in present-day Kazakhstan).37
The director of the Kazan Merchant Bank, the ethnic Russian Boris Sapozhnikov,
defending the bank’s reputation, suggested that the check had been accepted
because it was authentic: what else could explain how for more than half
a year nobody had noticed the misappropriation of such a considerable sum?
Sapozhnikov declared that after so long a time neither he nor his employees
would recognize the person who had cashed the check but suggested that he was
dressed like a Russian, had a “French beard,” and did not look “like a Tatar”38
.
The only person fitting this description was Mukhamed Davletshin, one of the
confidants of the merchant Khusainov, looking after the checkbook. As it turned
out, on his small salary of 50 rubles a month, Davletshin had the means to pay
for his wife to live in a spa in Groznyi, and in the fall of 1906 he loaned more
than 1000 rubles to another employee. Davletshin spoke Russian without an
accent and lived with his Russian lover in Kazan in a predominantly Russian
neighborhood.39
Naturally, Davletshin denied all accusations (he claimed that he
had won the money gambling) and pointed out that while the Russian signature
on the check in question was quite typical of Khusainov’s, the second, Tatar
signature was very different and had been done by someone unable to write in
Tatar (i.e., in Arabic script). There was a Russian capable of doing the forgery –
the accountant Kliucharev, who for some reason did not request statements from
the bank for six months, which was a direct violation of his duties and resulted
in the overly late discovery of the missing money.40
The investigation reached a
dead end after interrogations of a dozen people had uncovered no decisive evidence
to put forward official charges. The very date of the crime received two
interpretations:August 11, 1906, was Friday, the Muslim holiday. Some saw this
as proof that the perpetrator belonged to the Tatar “circle” around Khusainov,
37	 Ibid., ll. 1-2.
38	 Ibid., ll. 14-16 ob.
39	 Ibid., ll. 34-37, 39.
40	 Ibid., l. 39 ob.
The Subalterns Speak Out
63
who had cunningly arranged a perfect alibi for himself.41
Others perceived it
as revealing a “Russian trail” of evidence. The real problem was the meaninglessness
of ethnic markers as self-explanatory codes of social practice: what
kinds of patriarchal relations end up in a fraudulent financial scheme? What
does someone’s “Tatarness” mean if a person has a Russian lover, gambles, and
probably steals from his brethren? How can a Russian steal if the checkbook
and the seal are kept by two Tatar confidants of the boss? It is quite possible that
the entire affair was a collective enterprise, requiring the cooperation of both
Russians and Tatars.
The “Khusainov affair” proves that analytically constructed social identities
(and even those consciously interiorized by historical actors) are fairly independent
from actions and individual choices. This disconnection between the static
social persona and dynamic behavior is characteristic of the “subaltern” and
nondiscursive plebeian society.
In the situation of composite and fluid social identities, the only stable element
appears to be not any fixed ‘proportion of hybridity’ but the general trend
of actions and life choices. Thus, scholars debate the degree of integration and
emancipation of Jews in Odessa at the beginning of the twentieth century, and
the exact meaning of Jewishness. Leaving the question of the essence or the
correct definition of Jewishness aside, I suggest focusing instead on what possible
difference the alleged Jewishness made in the actions of people, and under
what circumstances. My study of Odessa revealed the involvement of Jews in
criminal violence and murders on a massive scale, contrary to the old and recent
myths about Jews being prone to ‘peaceful’ white-collar crimes. Jewish
gangsters murdered scores of people in cold blood, but what is really important
is not the brutality of Jewish thugs, but their choice of victims. In over a thousand
cases that I have reviewed, not a single Gentile was murdered by Jews in
Odessa.42
In light of the studies on ethnic gangsters in the United States,43
this
fact can be interpreted as an indicator of important mental mapping. Despite
the outstanding record of Odessa Jews as pioneers of emancipation and integration
into the larger society,44
it appears that they did not cross one important
psychological boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’, as can be seen in the extreme
(and thus even more important) case of choosing victims ‘of our own kind’.
There was one telling exception to this rule, though: Jews who were members
41	 Ibid., l. 2.
42	 Cf. Gerasimov, 2010.
43	 Cf. Cohen, 1999; Rockaway, 1993.
44	 Cf. Zipperstein, 1985.
Ilya V. Gerasimov
64
of revolutionary anarchist gangs killed Gentiles, when attacking under the cover
of revolutionary slogans. Quitting the sphere of the subaltern isolation from
hegemonic discourses and acting on behalf of the future common revolutionary
nation, they overcame the invisible and probably unconscious barrier of their
self-alienation. However deviant and violent, these social practices allow us to
trace the dynamic intergroup boundaries and see their dependence on mental
mapping and ideological contexts.
Social practices were the universal language binding the urban plebeian
society together, substituting for the virtually unavailable discourses. Nobody
briefed a recent migrant about the rules of behavior in town: he or she picked
up this nonverbalized wisdom by literally rubbing shoulders with more experienced
peers, by getting punched for every mistake, and negotiating a new arrangement
through close physical contact, including violence. The nonverbal
and very ‘bodily’ foundation of social practices eventually created a developed
metalanguage of self-expression and self-representation of individuals and social
groups – we just need to learn how to read this language. On the basis
of thousands of documented cases I identify several key strategies, or social
practices that helped to communicate meaning within the plebeian society, and
structure it, sustaining social order in the unstable and unruly milieu of recent
migrants to the city slums.
One practice can be identified as “the middle ground” − to use the concept
elaborated by Richard White in his classic study of the intercultural communication
and conflict in the North American Great Lakes region.45
As he put it:
“The middle ground is the place in between: in between cultures, peoples,
and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages. […] People try to
persuade others who are different from themselves by appealing to what they
perceive to be the values and the practices of those others. They often misinterpret
and distort both the values and the practices of those they deal with,
but from these misunderstandings arise new meanings and through them new
practices – the shared meanings and practices of the middle ground.”46
Thus understood, the middle ground is not literally a particular “place” or a
“process” (unlike frontier), but rather a state of relationships and dialogue of actors
attempting to bridge the deep cultural gap and social divide. We can see this
practice at work in all four of the principal locations of my study and particu-
45	 Cf. White, 1991.
46	 Ibid., p. x.
The Subalterns Speak Out
65
larly in Kazan, where neither Russian, Orthodox Christian population, nor Tatar
Muslim community had means and guts to impose their own norms and values
on the other. Hence they had to negotiate and seek a compromise, creating a new
common reality of “creative misunderstanding”.
Another practice can be called “patriarchality” (in the sense of both archaism
and male domination). The social practice of patriarchality did not imply
that social relations and motivations of people employing this practice were actually
“patriarchal”: naive, archaic, irrational, and completely male-controlled.
Rather, it was a sustained attempt to keep the isolation of the subaltern society
from penetration of the modern public sphere of public discourses. This was
particularly important in Vilna, where this integration implied mobilization into
one of the competing powerful nationalist projects (Polish, Jewish, Russian, or
Lithuanian), with potentially devastating consequences for the urban community.
These consequences were fully realized in the 1930s and 1940s, with the
dismantling of pseudo-archaic patriarchality and subalternity.
The social practice of patriarchality employed in Late Imperial Russia sustained
parochialism that did not allow for generalizing and institutionalizing
the categories of belonging (to a national community) and otherness (of aliens).
It also sanctified authority defined in nonnational categories of seniority, male
domination, and formal office-holding. Up to a certain point, this practice was
capable of accommodating elements of urban modernity that equally downplayed
the importance of nationality – be it the union movement or commerce.
Balancing between these two often-overlapping cognitive modes in the social
practice of patriarchality, Russian late imperial society managed to accommodate
the challenges of modernity surprisingly well, at the cost of a relatively low
level of mobilization of intergroup confrontation.
The persistence of violence in the urban plebeian society allows us to treat it
as the third fundamental, albeit morally and legally intolerable, social practice
in its own right. As such, violence is anything but ‘senseless’, as has been shown
by the modern anthropology of violence.47
Violence served as a marker of belonging
to a common social space and, more rarely, as a stigma of otherness.
Even in the latter case, this was not about the indication of ultimate alienation,
but, so to speak, of ‘a second-choice voting’. It may sound paradoxical, but violence
can communicate even friendliness, albeit only in a most awkward way,
as the following episode shows. In September 1908, in the Bolshoi Fontan seafront
neighborhood of Odessa, a Jew, Nutovich, met his Ukrainian neighbor, the
shopkeeper Stetsenko, on the street. Because of their prehistory of heated argu-
47	 Cf. Blok, 2001.
Ilya V. Gerasimov
66
ments, this time Stetsenko picked up a stone and smashed Nutovich in the face
with it. Formally (and actually) this was a hate crime, but it was also something
more: a gentile shopkeeper used the last argument to induce his Jewish neighbor
to become his customer, not to ban him from his shop, as can be assumed from
a general outline of the incident.48
In the subaltern plebeian society, violence as a social practice was multifaceted,
playing the important common role of a communicative medium. As such,
it was excessively “expressive,” spoken in the body language of injuries, rape,
and mutilations, but it was the only alternative to the verbalized communication
based on borrowed discourses with built-in explanatory schemes. It was mostly
an extreme way to express one’s individual position, and as such is invaluable
for a study of social arrangements beyond the normative groupings into ethnicities,
confessions, legal estates, or classes. The language of violence tells the
story of intensive contacts and spontaneously emerging power fields of social
solidarity and confrontation across the conventional map of social composition.
The social practice of violence did not have the constructive potential of the
middle ground or even of patriarchality, the latter being more about sustaining
the status quo and stability of a heterogeneous social milieu. On the other hand,
rarely employed in the course of politicization of ethnicity as collective action
with a single uniform target and goals, in late imperial plebeian society, violence
did not fully unleash its destructive force capable of splitting communities
or mobilizing one group against another. This would change once the former
subaltern society became integrated into the political nation by imposing a normative
discourse, or rather an ideological canon. Then, habitual tolerance to
violence and the low threshold for its unleashing brought about truly gruesome
consequences.
The subalterns from Russian plebeian society were capable of rationally processing
information and making informed decisions, only they did it by using
different cognitive mechanisms, and different concepts of rationality. This is an
important lesson that the Russian imperial situation can teach scholars thinking
about subalternity: whenever a suspicion arises that someone in the society
“cannot speak” (in any sense of the word), it is a sure indicator that the observer
cannot listen. The vast majority of those, who did not succeed in mastering even
the basics of the elite discursive sphere (or perhaps did not want to), could be
perceived as ‘dumb’ – but only by those, who identify themselves with the elite
stratum of the educated society. Paradoxically, in the absence of any universal
public sphere, the diverse social milieu of the subaltern plebeian society was
48	 Cf. Zverskoe izbienie, 1908, p. 2f.
The Subalterns Speak Out
67
fairly coherent and predictable to migrants from different localities, representing
different ethnoconfessional groups, regions, or subcultures. What they all had in
common as the universally recognizable basic element of the ‘primary modeling
system’ was their body (both physical and social) and its functions. As a medium,
the emerging ‘secondary modeling system’ of the plebeian society used not
words, but semiotically meaningful social practices.
The Bolshevik revolution removed the entire layer of the elitist (middle-class)
‘patrician society’ with its hegemonic discourses, just as some activists
of subaltern studies would recommend as a solution against isolationism of
subalternity. This move, however, did not make the former plebeian society less
autistic or more interventionist in its dealing with public discourses (suffice it to
reread the prose of Mikhail Zoshchenko or studies of amateur correspondents
of Soviet newspapers). Thus, the Russian case defies the rigidly structuralist or
post-stucturalist reading of the subaltern: it is not a caste, and not a stigma, and
the ‘space of difference’that subalterns inhabit cannot be imagined as completely
isolated and unreadable to Others. Subalternity is rather a social condition
and epistemological stance that can be changed or exchanged for a different one.
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1 (1999), p. 312-320.
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Evtuhov, Catherine, Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society, and
Civilization in Nineteenth-Century Nizhnii Novgorod, Pittsburgh 2011.
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Gerasimov, Ilya V., On the Limitations of a Discursive Analysis of ‘Experts
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of Illegality in Late Imperial Russia, in: Imperial Victims – Empires as Victims:
44 Views, ed. by Andrzej Nowak, Krakow 2010, p. 97-129.
Ginzburg, Carlo, Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It, in:
Critical Inquiry 20 (1993), p. 10-34.
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Häfner, Lutz, Gesellschaft als lokale Veranstaltung: Die Wolgastädte Kazan’
und Saratov, 1870-1914, Köln et al. 2004.
Hausman, Guido (ed.), Universität und städtische Gesellschaft in Odessa,
1865-1917. Soziale und nationale Selbstorganisation an der Peripherie des
Zarenreiches, Stuttgart 1998.
Id., Gesellschaft als lokale Veranstaltung. Selbstverwaltung, Assoziierung und
Geselligkeit in den Städten des ausgehenden Zarenreiches, Göttingen 2002.
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russischen Provinzstadt. Die Entwicklung der Stadt von den 1890er bis zu
den 1930er Jahren, Stuttgart 2001.
Lafi, Nora, The Ottoman Urban Governance of Migrations and the Stakes of
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Shaidullina, Rimma Rifkhatevna, Torgovo-predprinimatel’skaia i blagotvoritel’naia
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71
“… not intended for the Rich”
Public Places as Points of Identification
for the Urban Poor – St. Petersburg (1850-1914)
Hans-Christian Petersen
“Very many people of Petrograd have heard that somewhere in their city there is
a place called ‘Vasia’s Village’. But do many of them know its location and its
functions?”1
This rhetorical question is put at the beginning of a series of articles
published in the “Little Gazette” (Malen’kaia Gazeta) in 1915, which dealt
with one of the biggest slums of the Russian capital St. Petersburg which was
renamed Petrograd at the beginning of World War I.2
The author of these reports
took the ignorance of the population he had noticed as an impetus to write in
great detail about the co-existence of roughly 5000 inhabitants of “Vasia’s Village”.
As is typical of ‘uncovering stories’ at that time (and even often of today)
he added to his report numerous drastic details, introduced specific characters
and, in order to verify the authenticity of his descriptions, he put words into their
mouths for the dialogues which included their slang expressions. Like in West
and Central European major cities, gruesome and obscene tales about the ‘dark’
sides of the city had become a worthwhile undertaking in Petrograd. They were
a part of slumming3
which included the ‘discovery’, marketing and presentation
of the ‘poor’ to the ‘better’ part of the population for their amusement.
1	 Iashkov, 03.01.1915, p. 3.
2	 Ibid., 03.-04., 06. and 08.01.1915.
3	 This expression was first used in Victorian England. Cf. Koven, 2006; Schwarz et
al., 2007; Lindner, 2004. Hubertus Jahn has retraced this process of ‘discovering’
the urban poor for St. Petersburg: Jahn, 2010. The following work on the still valid
relevance of slumming is now at hand: Frenzelet al., 2012.
Hans-Christian Petersen
72
In view of these circumstances it is obvious to analyse such a report first of
all as a part of a discourse and to ask in the sense of postcolonial studies what we
can learn from the text about the mental map of its author and the society. It was
part of a process which presented images of the urban poor as the ‘others’, the
‘dark’ and the ‘strange’ and where the remaining inhabitants of the city assured
themselves that they led better, ‘brighter’ lives. There is no doubt that such an
approach is important, but does it cover everything? This question will be discussed
in the following text. Is it true that we cannot gain any knowledge about
the ‘poor’from the reports about them? Is it only possible to write about poverty
in Russian history as an object of “social imagination”4
, public welfare or control,
as “beggars and the poor had no historical voices of their own until the end
of the 19th
century” and that we can only rely on “descriptions from outside”?
Or do such sources – besides their discursive aspect – also provide information
about those who, as in case of the report on “Vasia’s Village”, had unintentionally
become objects of journalistic curiosity? In other words, to which extent is
it possible for us to look behind the facade of urban poverty?
This question shall now be discussed by looking at two types of sources that
present a totally different degree of ‘authenticity’ at first glance: on one hand
we have the above-mentioned series of articles on “Vasia’s Village” as an example
of reports in connection with slumming and on the other we have several
petitions submitted by traders from Petersburg’s Haymarket, kept in the files of
the tsarist Ministry of the Interior. The key aspect will be the question whether
we will be able to gain information about the importance these locations had
for the urban poor. Can they be regarded as points of identification which were
important to them and which they regarded as their ‘own’? In addition to a discussion
on the epistemic possibilities and limitations of both types of sources it
is thus my intention to challenge the still dominating narrative that the habitats
of the urban lower class were solely places of dull backwardness characterised
by cramped quarters and a narrowness of mind. This description does not take
into account what this ‘narrow world’ meant for its inhabitants. The view from
outside ignores the perspective from the inside. The following exposition will
focus on this.
Let me first explain some terms. Places like “Vasia’s Village” or “Viazemskaia
Lavra” adjacent to Petersburg’s Haymarket will be called slums –
here defined as places of urban blight and utmost poverty. In doing so, I will follow
Loïc Wacquants’ differentiation between “slum” and “ghetto”. He defines
the “ghetto” “as a spatially based implement of ethnoracial closure” and points
4	 This and the two following quotations were taken from Jahn, 2010, p. 16.
Public Places as Points of Identification for the Urban Poor
73
out “that not all ghettos are poor and not all poor areas are (inside) ghettos.”5
Such a differentiation solves the problem defined by Ilya Gerasimov. He said
that the idea of an exclusive and socially homogeneous neighbourhood does not
comply with the reality of Russian imperial society as “people of low socioeconomic
status resided all over the city, while certain categories of the modernized
could live in the slums (for example, poor students, teachers, or ‘conscious’
factory workers).”6
This is undoubtedly true, especially in case of a city like
St. Petersburg with its low degree of sociospatial segregation in comparison
with other major cities.7
Rich and poor were found close together in the town
on the Neva River. However, you could also find more prosperous and poorer
districts as well as clearly defined areas which were already at that time called
trushchoby (impoverished areas, slums) by their contemporaries. Works such
as the voluminous writings “Petersburg Slums (Peterburgskie trushchoby) by
Vsevolod Krestovskii8
, “World of Slums” (Mir trushchobnyi) by Aleksei Svir-
skii9
or “New Petersburg Slums” (Novye Peterburgskie trushchoby) by Iurii
Angarov and M. Semenov’10
made this term popular and marketed it as well,
referring at the same time, however, to real existing places which were surely
appropriately characterized by the term trushchoba (slum).
I. 	 “Mud hole” and “anthill”?
	 “Vasia’s village”
“Vasia’s Village” was situated between lines 17 and 18 on Vasil’evskii Island at
the location of a former waste dump. Being the largest of the islands in the Neva
Delta, Vasil’evskii Island was originally chosen as the centre of the new capital
by Peter I after the foundation of St. Petersburg, before the site around theAdmiralty
was later favoured as the place for the city centre.11
Correspondingly, many
5	 Cf. the contribution by Loïc Wacquant in this book.
6	 Cf. the contribution by Ilia V. Gerasimov in this book.
7	 A comparative perspective is offered by Petersen.
8	 This work has first been published as a series since 1864 in the journal
“Otechestvennye zapiski”. At the same time it was repeatedly published as a
monograph, most recently a few years ago: Krestovskii, 2011.
9	 Svirskii, 1898.
10	 Angarovi/Sem enov’, 1909-1910
11	 Cf. Sem encov, 2007, on the building history of St. Petersburg. Kusber, 2009, can
be recommended as a recent introduction to the history of St. Petersburg
Hans-Christian Petersen
74
central buildings were erected on the East Bank of Vasil’evskii Island, among
others the Arts House, the Twelve Collegia as well as the Academy of Sciences.
The geometric design of the network of canals and streets demonstrated the ruler’s
ideas of rationalization and order.12
The side of a street was called a line so
that lines 16 and 17 as well as lines 18 and 19 made up one street each. “Vasia’s
Village” was situated in House No. 18 on line 17, only few houses away from
the main boulevard of the island, the Bol’shoi Prospect.13
Until the 20th
century,
the Bol’shoi Prospect was the border between that part of Vasil’evskii Island
where streets which started at the prestigious bank of the Neva were lined on
both sides by multi-storied stone houses and the markedly bigger part of the
island on the other side of the prospect, which had no buildings at all or was the
site of flat wooden buildings.14
Accordingly, “Vasia’s Village” consisted of several
wooden houses, but was at the same time only a stone’s throw away from
the ‘better-off’ residential areas of Vasil’evskii Island. This is a typical example
for the close proximity of rich and poor in the Russian capital. The well-known
meteorologist Mikhail Tikachev, member of the Academy of Sciences, lived in
House No. 20 for some time, directly adjacent to the slum. At the same time,
lines 17 and 18 did not only belong to “Vasia’s Village”, but were also the location
of orphanages and institutions for the poor.15
In the second half of the 19th
century, several big industrial plants were
erected on Vasil’evskii Island. This changed the social structure of the district.
Dwellings for workers were built in the vicinity of the factories. Living conditions
were similarly cramped and precarious as in other parts of the metropolis
on the Neva River.16
The island experienced a “densification process”17
. Hitherto
open areas or areas which had been used as vegetable gardens were turned into
12	 Cf. Nikitenko/Sobol’, 2008, for a recent encyclopaedic account of the history of
Vasil’evskii Island (first edition: Ibid., Vasileostrovskii raion. Enciklopediia ulic
Sankt-Peterburga, St. Petersburg 1999). Cf. Pirogov, 1996, for a survey from
Soviet times.
13	 Cf. Nikitenko/Sobol’, 2008, p. 423 and 432, as well as the map of the Vasil’evskii
Island, including the house numbers: Plany policeiskikh chastei goroda S.Peterburga
s pokazaniem domov, vkhodiascikh v sostave ulic i prisvoennykh
im nom erom , 1902.
14	 Cf. Nikitenko/Sobol’, 2008, p. 16 and 413.
15	 Cf. Ibid., p. 423; Enciklopedia blagotvoritel’nosti. Sankt-Peterburg: http://
encblago.lfond.spb.ru/search.do?objectType=2805596371, 07.05.2013.
16	 Cf. Pirogov, 1996, p. 30-32.
17	 Cf. Nikitenko/Sobol’, 2008, p. 18.
Public Places as Points of Identification for the Urban Poor
75
building sites, and it is really not at all surprising that one of the biggest slums
of the city developed in the wake of these changes. However, when looking at
respective descriptions of the history of Vasil’evskii Island, “Vasia’s Village” is
either not mentioned at all or we find just a very cursory account.18
This can be
explained on one hand by the fact that this settlement was not in the centre of Petersburg
contrary to the Haymarket and, on the other that it was largely unknown
as we have seen from the citation at the beginning of this text. To write about it
was in no way as profitable as the tales about the notorious “Viazemskaia lavra”,
the slum situated between Haymarket and Fontanka which were turned into literature
in the works of Dostoevskii and Krestovskii. On the other hand, the fact
that the image that should be conveyed for Vasil’evskii Island did not include
the existence of a slum explains why “Vasia’s Village” was largely neglected
in the stories about urban districts: Under Soviet rule the poorest of the poor,
the “lumpenproletariat” as they were derogatory termed already by Marx and
Engels, did not fit into the teleological narrative about the class of ‘conscious’
workers eager for a revolution.19
In post-Soviet Russia we see rather a concentration
of high-culture and representative aspects of history, neither of which
meshes with a closer look at a slum and its inhabitants.20
Now, what can we learn from the series of articles published on “Vasia’s Village”
in “Malen’kaia gazeta? According to the descriptions, the inhabitants were
uncouth in their speech, were extremely prone to violence, addicted to alcohol
and very good at surviving without ‘honest work’. Garbage was simply thrown
out of the windows and rows of toilettes without any doors were placed outside
so that their users were in no way protected from the looks of neighbours (vo
18	 The latter is only true for the encyclopaedia by Nikitenko/Sobol’, 2008.
19	 In addition to the work by Pirogov this narrative can also be found in: Nikitenko/
Sobol’, 1981. In spite of its proximity to the Bol’shoi prospect “Vasia’s Village” is
not mentioned.
20	 This is also shown by the popular scientific account of Buzinov, 2006. In respect
of the different narratives a comparative reading of the entries dealing with
Vasil’evskii Island in the following encyclopedias is instructive: Sankt-Peterburg
– Petrograd – Leningrad. 1992; Enciklopedia Sankt-Peterburga: http://
encspb.ru/object/2803998688?lc=ru, 07.05.2013. Vasya’s Village” is mentioned
in neither of them, just as little as in the multi-volume encyclopedia which was
published to mark the 300-anniversary of the city: Tri veka Sankt-Peterburga,
2005-2011. In contrast, for the “Viazemskaia lavra”can be found a single entry,
supplementary to the already detailed article on the Haymarket: Tereshchik,
2005, p. 667f.
Hans-Christian Petersen
76
vsei ‘nature’21
), but had the opportunity of having long conversations during that
time. By no means did the author say that all inhabitants were unwilling to work
and corrupt. In addition to people like the “soothsayer”22
, who had gained a relatively
satisfactory fortune by making obscure prophesies and who lived in three
numbers of the “village”, we read here about the “honest worker”23
, who came to
this settlement while looking for cheap living quarters or the “old single man”24
who lived on alms. They were introduced as “humiliated people”25
, as victims
just like the children who had names like “wolf” and whose fate “depended
totally on the street”26
(ulica derzhit detei v polnoi svoei vlasti). However, this
differentiation between ‘corrupt’ and ‘innocent’ inhabitants served as a typical
stylistic device for reports about the slums in order to evoke both revulsion and
compassion and to satisfy the (assumed) lust of people for the spectacular.27
The
introduction of specific literary characters was meant to help readers to identify
them again. In this respect it was above all “Krestovskiis’ “Petersburg Slums”
which exerted an influence on the style of others.28
These passages were above all of a literary nature and can hardly be used as
a historical source for the inner life of a slum. Are there – apart from this narrative
level – descriptions which tell us about the actual geography of “Vasia’s
Village”? When we return to the beginning of the report, we find - together with
the information about the location of lines 17 and 18 - markedly more details
about the history of the settlement in comparison with the little information we
find at other places. The encyclopaedia of Galina Nikitenko and Vitalii Sobol’
states that “Vasia’s Village” was founded on a large free space by a businessman
from the peasant population named Egor Vasil’ev. It was his aim to let
dwellings of this settlement named after him at low prices.29
We find the same
information in the “Malen’kaia gazeta”. However, in addition we learn that Ego
Vasil’ev came to St. Petersburg as an adolescent, made a living from collecting
garbage for many years and through this was finally able to buy a piece of land
21	 Iashkov, 04.01.1915, p. 3.
22	 This and the following quotation from Ibid., 08.01.1915, p. 3.
23	 Ibid., 06.01.1915, p. 3.
24	 Ibid., 07.01.1915, p. 3.
25	 Ibid.
26	 This and the following quotation from Ibid.
27	 Cf. for the perception of the street as a place of ‚the crowd‘ and of immorality
Steinberg, 2011 (especially chapter two).
28	 Cf. Jahn, 2010, p. 123-128.
29	 Cf. Nikitenko/Sobol’, 2008, p. 423.
Public Places as Points of Identification for the Urban Poor
77
on Vasil’evskii Island.30
Here he founded his own waste dump, and when he had
collected a sufficient number of materials he built a first house on his estate with
the assistance of some mates and the carpenter Klimentii. However, this house
fell prey to the wind. He erected a second building which remained and was
soon enlarged by further annexes. The first lodgers arrived whom Egor Vasil’ev
allowed to stay upon payment of 5 copper kopeks per day. When the series of
articles in the “Malen’kaia gazeta” was published in 1915, the settlement had
grown to 247 flats with 5,000 inhabitants.31
According to the author, their names
would fill “three books with a weight of several tons”32
, and he met people who
had already lived there for 20 years.
On one hand, this means that “Vasia’s Village” had existed at least since
the mid-1890s33
, hence since the time when the permanently notorious “housing
problem” (kvartirnyi vopros/zhilishchnyi vopros) of St. Petersburg had increased
even further.34
There is no clear indication whether there is a correlation
between the rise in prices of living space and the emergence of slums in the case
of “Vasia’s” Village as well as the other slums of St. Petersburg. Some facts in
the newspaper report let us assume, however, that there is such a connection.
Under the heading “inhabitants” (zhil’cy) we find the above-mentioned “honest
worker”35
, but also quite a number of persons who could not afford another
dwelling due to their low income, among others “the retired city clerk with 7,40
a month”36
and the “widow with many children” who earned 30 kopeks per day
for gluing cigarette packets together. According to the newspaper report they all
lived in the slum because it offered “cheap flats and rooms”.
The growth of “Vasia’s Village” to more than several thousand inhabitants
and the long stay of part of them make us wonder, however, whether there were
more motives than the material necessity that made the people stay in spite of the
undoubtedly minimal comfort the settlement offered. An answer to this cannot
be found easily in this newspaper report owing to the author’s scornful and condescending
tone when, for example, telling us about the foundation of the set-
30	 Cf. Iashkov, 03.01.1915, p. 3.
31	 Cf. Ibid., 06.01.1915, p. 3.
32	 Ibid.
33	 This corresponds roughly to the date stated in the encyclopaedia by Nikitenko and
Sobol’. It says there that Egor Vasil’ev founded the “village” at the beginning of the
20th
century. Cf. Nikitenko;Sobol’, 2008, p. 423.
34	 Cf. Petersen; Sukhorukova, 2002; Sviatlovskii, 2012.
35	 Cf. Iashkov, 08.01.1915, p. 3.
36	 This and the following two quotations from Ibid., 04.01.1915, p. 3.
Hans-Christian Petersen
78
tlement by Egor Vasil’ev that he “looked for his fortune right there where every
person born under a lucky star would look – among garbage.”37
Nevertheless, it
becomes visible to some degree ‘behind’ this complacent attitude what “Vasia’s
Village” meant for its inhabitants in addition to being their refuge. Thus, the
development of the slum can be interpreted also quite differently: As a ‘wild’
adoption of a hitherto unused area beyond the control from the government and
with structures of its own. When we read in the newspaper report: “Above all
I want to draw the attention of the reader to the lines in these buildings. What
kind of lines are they? They could only be drawn by the highly talented heel
of Egor Vasil’evs: One of the corners of a building is directed towards the onlooker,
the other to the Caucasus Mountains […]”38
– then this demonstrates
the author’s aloofness in these surroundings. In spite of his assumed ‘crossing
the lines’ and the supposed authenticity of his reports, he still remained a slum
tourist who missed the straight lines so characteristic for the rest of Vasil’evskii
Island.39
At the same time it is shown that “Vasia’s Village” lived by different,
namely its own rules as we can learn from the following passage: “To enter a
flat in ‘Vasia’s Village’ is not as easy as is usually the case when we enter other
buildings. Before you are able to enter, you have to look for the flat for roughly
half a day, as annexes, staircases and numbers of flats are legion. Each of their
inhabitants knows only his main entrance hole through which he creeps every
day; he knows only the number of his own flat to which he is driven by the darkness
of night and the cold. Even the guards in the yards of ‘Vasia’s Village’ get
lost in this impenetrable mud hole [v ėtom neprokhodimom omute]. When asked
about the flats, they only wave their hand indifferently: ‘Don’t know…, climb
the staircases, somewhere you will find it, but we have no idea […].”40
What the reporter saw as a chaotic “impenetrable mud-hole”, was for the
inhabitants of “Vasia’s Village” a place with which they could identify in so far
as they marked it as ‘their own’. The house numbers which were mentioned in
the above passages were installed by the owner Egor Vasil’ev and were not only
used for numbering purposes, but included some guidelines as follows: “Flat no.
XY. 7 cubic Sazhen air. Not more than seven lodgers. Lodging is not permitted
37	 Iashkov, 03.01.1915, p. 3.
38	 Ibid., 04.01.1915, p. 3.
39	 A brilliant description of this fear of the ‘wilderness’ of Vasil’evskii Island can be
found in the character of the Tsarist bureaucrat Apollon Apollonovich in Belyi,
2004.
40	 Iashkov, 04.01.1915, p. 3.
Public Places as Points of Identification for the Urban Poor
79
in the corridors and in the kitchen.”41
In correspondence with the tenor in the
newspaper report, these instructions had in fact lost touch with reality – people
lived in every corner of a room and in every dingy cellar in “Vasia’s Village” just
like in many other places of Petersburg. However, in addition to this they put
inscriptions above the doors at the entrances which, for example, read “Fyodka-Ovchuch,
thief”.42
Such labels are certainly no reason to romanticize people’s
relationships in retrospect (I will deal with this later on); in the sense of the
questions asked by this investigation they express the intentional overwriting of
the original spatial order of a place, irrespective of moral assessment. Here we
even find a certain amount of self-mockery.
The identification of the inhabitants with ‘their village’ was shown most
prominently on the walls of the settlement. They were covered with numerous
of their writings and drawings. One of the wall paintings showed the owner,
Egor Vasil’ev as he approached on the back “of his cropped male dog with his
fist raised and smoke coming out of his mouth while he called out: ‘Have your
dough ready, damned inhabitants of Vasia’s Village (Gotov’te gamzu, okaiannye
vasinoderevency).”43
This graffiti is in two respects proof of an ongoing process of identification
with that area, which is regarded as one’s own possession threatened by the
owner. On one hand, such marks on the wall are expressions of a process of
adopting the respective space. It corresponds with Richard Sennett’s definition
of graffiti being “a writing of the underclass” – an openly shown sign of their
presence: ‘We exist, and we are everywhere. Moreover, you others are nothing;
we write all over you.’”44
On the other hand, the fact that they called themselves “damned inhabitants
of Vasia’s Village” tells us about their relationship to this place as well as to each
other. The notion Vasinoderevency refutes the assumption stated in the newspaper
report that the inhabitants of the ‘village’ do not care for each other but
are merely interested in their own “dingy dwelling”. Instead, the people had
evidently found a joint identity just like it was reported from other places of
poverty in Petersburg.45
41	 Ibid.
42	 Ibid.
43	 Ibid. “Gamza” is an underworld slang expression and stands for “money, wallet”.
Cf. Snapskaia, 2000, p. 121; Grachev, 2003, p. 187.
44	 Sennett, 1990, p. 207.
45	 Aleksei Svirskii writes that the inhabitants of the slum called each other “slum
brothers” (truscobnye bratii) and used the ironic nickname “slum yacht club”
Hans-Christian Petersen
80
This conclusion does not imply a retrospective romanticism of life in “Vasia’s
Village. Like other places of society in general and of urban underclass
in particular, the slum on Vasil’evskii Island was penetrated by various power
structures and inequalities. The wall painting described above is evidence of one
of these confrontations – the opposition between owner and lodgers. The joint
identity of the inhabitants described as vasinoderevency originated not least
from the joint feeling of “we” against “him”. At the same time, this “we” did not
exist in the sense of an egalitarian co-existence, although the newspaper report
conveys the idea of such an idyll in some instances, e.g. when we read about
the numerous ‘characters’found in the ‘village’as follows: “Everything finds its
place in the anthill of ‘Vasia’s Village’. It accommodates everybody, nobody is
left outside.”46
The picture of an “anthill” is certainly true in so far as the slum
was a place of refuge for those on the margins of society who were rejected at
other places. However, we also find numerous examples in the newspaper report
which show how strongly gender hierarchies moulded the structure of the social
space “Vasia’s Village”. As an example may serve the omnipresent violence
practised on the streets of the ‘village’ by men and juvenile gangs which caused
women to keep away from these places in the evenings and at night.47
These
inequalities made the ‘anthill’ a contested area.
II.	 “… for poor people”:
	 The Haymarket seen from
	 the viewpoint of ‘itinerant peddlers’
A find from the archive will serve as a second source of information for a look
behind the facade of urban slum areas. It comprises three petitions submitted by
traders of the Petersburg Haymarket to the Minister of the Interior as well as to
(truscobnyi iakhtklub) for the night asylum on Izmail Field located between
Fontanka and Obvodnyi Canal, cf. Svirskii, 1898. As another example can serve
the “Viazemskaia lavra”, in which lived among others the so-called “Viazemskie’s
cadets” (Viazemskie kadety), cf. Skorodumov, 1866.
46	 Iashkov, 06.01.1915, p. 3.
47	 Ibid. A fundamental treatise of this topic is to be found in Neuberger, 1993. Cf.
also the contribution by Mark Steinberg in this book.
Public Places as Points of Identification for the Urban Poor
81
the Tsar personally in the mid-1860s. They are kept in the files of the finance
department of the Tsarist Ministry of the Interior.48
The Haymarket, strictly speaking the Hay Square (Sennaia ploshchad’), was
a place which was originally located on the outskirts of the city where farmers
from the vicinity of St. Petersburg were allowed to sell hay and firewood at
certain times.49
When the city expanded, it was no longer situated on the periphery,
but had finally moved to the centre of the capital by the 19th
century,
only a few minutes’ walk away from the grand boulevard of St. Petersburg,
the Nevskii prospect. Moreover, its functions changed from being a temporary
trading place for specific goods to becoming the permanent marketplace with a
markedly broader range of products where mainly the poor population of Petersburg
bought their basic food.
In the second half of the 19th
century the Haymarket became the epitome of
the ‘other’, unknown and dangerous St. Petersburg in the minds of the inhabitants
of the Russian capital. On one hand, this was to be attributed to increasing
marketing efforts in connection with slumming, which was already mentioned
above. Literary works even created the character of a typical lodger of the Haymarket
(Sennovskii obitatel’).50
On the other hand there was some reason for
these projections and anxieties. The Sennaia as well as its market presented
sanitation problems affecting – beyond its own boundaries – adjacent districts as
well as the entire city. Already in its first year the “sanitary commission” which
was set up by the municipal duma after the severe cholera outbreak in 1867 arranged
for an inspection of the Haymarket. It reported alarming hygienic conditions.
The ground of the place was covered by a thick layer of garbage, food leftovers
and other debris from the market.51
Moreover, there were several slums in
the vicinity of the Haymarket, among others the above-mentioned “Viazemskaia
48	 Russian State Historical Archive/Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii
arkhiv (RGIA), f. 1287, op. 29, del. 1600.
49	 A survey of the varying history of this place which is probably the most prominent
square of St. Petersburg besides the Palace Square is presented by Iurkova, 2011.
Further titles are Jahn, 1996, as well as Bauer.
50	 Cf. Tseitlin, 1998, p. 3, as well as on the development of the myth “Haymarket” as
a whole Jahn, 2010, p. 113-128.
51	 O deiatel’nosti gorodskoi sanitarnoi kom issii, 1868, p. 48f. When the medical
doctors of the sanitary commission examined the place in the middle of March this
layer was still mixed with snow and ice. Severe problems arose at the end of the
freezing season. Cf. the report of the German travel writer Kohl, Vol. 1, p. 200f.
Hans-Christian Petersen
82
lavra” now housing up to 20,000 people.52
In the eyes of the authorities the name
“Haymarket” was associated with a constant potential threat to public order –
at the latest since the time when it became the stage for the so-called “cholera
revolt” (kholernyi bunt) in 1831 in the wake of the first cholera epidemic. This
was the first people’s revolt in the history of the city.53
This combination of real and imagined threats led to various efforts of the
government to impose regulations on this ‘wild’ place. After the erection of a
central police station (Hauptwache) in 1820, it was above all the project to build
permanent market halls instead of the hitherto open place which had been on the
agenda for more than 20 years.54
There were three opposing parties: The first
was represented by the Governor or Gradonachal’nik of St. Petersburg, Count
Nikolay Levashov. He wanted the Haymarket to become a representative marketplace
appropriate for the image of the Russian capital. He promoted projects
which intended to turn the entire Haymarket into one big covered marketplace.
As such schemes were expensive and did not fit into the budget of the duma,
Levashov advocated payment by private persons who should, at the same time,
be in charge of the Haymarket. This means that it was the governor’s aim to privatize
the Haymarket which had so far been in possession of the municipality.55
Just as the Governor, the municipal duma was also in favour of a solid covered
market. Last but not least, its interest was of a concrete economic nature.
Income from the rents of market stalls amounted to up to 50,000 roubles a year.
However, unlike Levashov, the majority of delegates of the duma emphasized
the importance of the Haymarket as a market for the ‘common people’. It was
said that the nature of this location was to be preserved. That was why the
re-construction should be “as simple as possible”56
including roofing for only
half of the market, whereas the other half should be used for the traditional sales
by peasants directly from their carriages (vozy) also in the future.
52	 In addition to the above-mentioned literature cf. Charitonova, 1996. Cf. for a
contemporary report by a commission founded by the city council on the interior of
the “Viazemskaia lavra” O sanitarnykh m erakh po domu Kniaza Viazem skago,
1883, p. 872-885.
53	 Cf. the report of an officer on duty on this event Fon-der-Khoven, 1885, as well as
the account by Kohl, Vol. 1, p. 194-196.
54	 Cf. besides Iurkova, 2011, also Veksler, 2008. A detailed analysis of this reorganization
of the Haymarket is in preparation.
55	 Cf. amongst others: Ob ustroistve na Sennoi ploshchadi rynochnago zdaniia
dlia proizvodiashcheisia tam torgovlia, 1865, p. 450-464.
56	 Ob ustroistve Sennoi ploshchadi, 1866, p. 401.
Public Places as Points of Identification for the Urban Poor
83
A third opinion was held by the municipal sanitary commission and the
Chief Police Officer of Petersburg. The chairman of the sanitary commission,
Petr Zhukovskii, emphasised repeatedly that the Haymarket was above all a
source of epidemics which should be demolished altogether and reconstructed
from scratch. In addition, the nature of the market would have changed fundamentally.
Today the queues in front of the food concourse (obzhornyi riad)
would scarcely consist of workers, but instead of many “useless people”57
from
surrounding houses. This argument was supported by the Chief Police Officer in
a similar way. He felt that the continued existence of the market was dangerous
from the point of view of the police as it would attract a large number of criminals
and prostitutes in addition to the buyers. This “enormous number of dangerous
people of our society”58
would find ideal conditions at the Haymarket where
they could hide and gather in the adjacent houses. This development could only
be stopped by a “complete cleanup of the place” and the removal of the market
to the outskirts of the city.
The debate on the reconstruction of the Haymarket went on for well over 20
years before it resulted in the construction of four large metal pavilions which
opened in 1886. After this there was no room for the traditional sales of peasants
from their carriages which were originally deemed important by the duma. Trade
was now conducted at fixed and equally large stalls in the market halls.59
Hence
the transformation of the Haymarket was an example of the city’s endeavours
to organize public space in a ‘better way’, i.e. to regulate it. During this time,
numerous reconstruction projects were carried out on the markets of Petersburg
among which the Haymarket was merely the most prominent example.60
The three petitions, which shall now be looked at in detail, are part of this
controversial constellation. They were filed by traders who offered their goods
on the Haymarket and who had come into conflict with the new regulations. The
petitions belong to the very few statements we have from inhabitants and traders
of the Haymarket. As much as has been written about this place, a history of the
57	 Ob ustroistve krytago rynka na Sennoi ploshchadi, 1870, p. 142.
58	 This and the following quotation were taken from the letter of Chief Police Officer
of St. Petersburg to the Ministry of the Interior 29.06.1869, RGIA, f. 1287, op. 40,
del. 310, l. 114.
59	 Insights into the interior of the market halls can be found in Zasosov/Pyzin, 1999,
p. 110-112; Bakhtiarov, 1994, p. 138-148.
60	 A comparative treatise of this process is still missing. A first survey is presented by
Procai, 2005.
Hans-Christian Petersen
84
Haymarket ‘from below’ is still missing. We get an idea from these petitions
how these regulations of public space were perceived by the people concerned.
When we look at the epistemic value of these sources, the petitions seem to
show a markedly higher degree of ‘authenticity’than the reports published in the
“Malen’kaia gazeta”. In fact, the categorical difference is – as may be readily
concluded – that here we have the voices of the ‘common people’ themselves
and not an account by a third person wanting to sell a ‘story’. In this context
Keith Snell, the author of fundamental studies on the self-conception of the English
poor, defines letters and petitions as “alongside oral history […] the most
authentic sources for ‘history from below’ and historical questions of identity
among the poor”61
we have.
On the other hand, we have narrative conventions observed by such sources.
Russian history has known petitions since the Middle Ages which means that
they follow a certain tradition as regards contents and formal layout.62
Hence,
this leads to the conclusion that an overoptimistic interpretation of these sources
as ‘authentic’ may be questionable.63
First of all, it has to be considered who
wrote the petitions, the undersigned himself or the undersigned parties themselves
or rather a scribe? This was not unusual in view of the widely spread
illiteracy of the urban poor. In addition we have to ask how the wording of the
petitions which we see on paper was actually composed. Who took part and how
big was the contribution of a possible scribe in the final text? And, last but not
least, it has to be considered that petitions were a performative act which served
to let one’s request appear in the most favourable light in order to convince the
addressee who, as a rule, was in a much higher position. Are they really the utterances
of the poor ‘themselves’? To find an answer to this question, let us look
at the petitions of the traders and consider at the same time whether they offer
information about the Haymarket as a place of ‘their own’.
As to the formal characteristics of the petitions it can be stated that all three
were written down between February 1865 and June 1866. In February 1865 as
61	 Snell, 2012, p. 2.
62	 In this connection, I refer to the paper submitted by Hubertus Jahn on the occasion of
the conference “Poverty in Modern Europe. Micro-perspectives on the Formation
of the Welfare State in the 19th
and 20th
Centuries” at the German Historical
Institute in London in May 2012: Voices from the Lower Depths: Russian Poor
in Their Own Words, presenting an analysis of petitions for the time from the 17th
to the 20th
centuries. A publication of the contributions to this conference is under
way.
63	 Cf. on the following also King, 2008, p. 252f.
Public Places as Points of Identification for the Urban Poor
85
well as in May 1866 they were addressed to the Ministry of the Interior. On June
6, 1866 they were addressed to the Tsar himself. In each case the handwritings
do not correspond to the signatures of the applicants so that it may be assumed
that the petitions were written down by scribes. How the final wording came
about cannot be said for lack of further sources for these petitions. It is possible
that the applicant narrated the case to the scribe. In all three cases about 90 %
of the signatures were those of peasants as well as of petty commoners (meshchane)
in a few cases. While the petitions of February 1865 as well of June 1866
bore signatures of about 100 names, they numbered only 15 on the petition of
May 1866. Obviously as many signatures as possible were collected for the last
petition which was the only one addressed to the Tsar himself. It can be noticed
that some of the people who had already signed the petition of February 1865
put their signature under this document as well. It may hence be concluded that
these people knew each other or were at least in touch so that contacts could be
established quickly. Moreover, they must have had similar interests. This leads
us to the question of the contents of the petitions.
A central concern of the petition of February 1865 was the right to sell meat
at the Haymarket also during the summer, a right that was threatened from the
viewpoint of the undersigned parties. The two petitions of the following year
asked for the permission to continue the sale of goods along the edges of the
Haymarket close to public and private buildings. The origin of both requests
was very similar, which explains the existence of overlapping signatures: They
were ‘itinerant peddlers’ (torgovcy v raznos) without any permanent place who
expressed their concern and fought a treatment considered unfair in their opinion.
The composition of the signatories of the petition shows that they were for
the most part peasants who sold their goods directly from their carriages (vozy)
contrary to those stationary traders who had permanent stalls (lavka).
Correspondingly, the petitions are very similar in respect of set-up and ar-
gumentation.64
Each of them was caused by actions of the commercial police to
enforce resolutions of the municipal duma: on one hand, the prohibition of meat
sales by ‘itinerant peddlers’ at the Haymarket between April and November and
on the other a decree forbidding sales of ‘itinerant peddlers’ close to public and
private buildings. The decrees passed by the duma in connection with meat sales
were preceded by requests of stationary traders asking the commercial police
64	 In addition, the two petitions of May and June 1866 show partly identical passages.
However, this is not surprising as their concerns were the same and they were
written down within a short period of time.
Hans-Christian Petersen
86
to take steps against the competition from ‘itinerant peddlers’.65
The petitions
opposed these measures by arguing in two ways: by referring to the law and by
emphasising that the Haymarket was a traditional place of the ‘common people’.
As to the legal aspect of this dispute, it has to be said that it was the duma’s
principal right to enact trade regulations at the Haymarket as this place was
part of the municipal property. However, its resolutions could be overturned
by the Ministry of the Interior. In the case of meat sales by ‘itinerant peddlers’
during the summer months the legal position was undisputed: Since 1842 sales
of fresh meat had only been allowed at the Haymarket during the summer at
permanent stalls where it was possible to keep goods cool.66
The general ban
on trade in the vicinity of public and private buildings was more controversial
in some respects. It was not without reason that the signatories of the petition
argued that the decree passed by the duma was above all directed at sales conducted
in front of houses adjacent to the Haymarket or in their courtyards. These
houses were not part of the property of the duma, but belonged to individual
owners. Correspondingly, the signatories emphasized that such a ban would violate
the “right to private ownership”67
(prava chastnoj sobstvennosti). However,
this point was not undisputed. In the end it was a matter of political decisions.
Already at former instances the duma had passed decrees entitling it to decide
about the allocation of trading places. However, these resolutions were met by
opposition from private house-owners as well as the Ministry of the Interior. In
1842, the latter had decreed that peasants coming from the urban hinterland had
the principal right to sell their products at the city’s trading places.68
However, in
1854 the Ministry made it clear that private persons were not entitled to allocate
65	 Cf. Proshenie krest‘ian, torguiuvshchikh miasom na Sennoi ploshchadi,
09.02.1865, RGIA, f. 1287, op. 29, del. 1600, l. 21. The complaint is also mentioned
in O vosproshchenii torgovlia m iasom na Sennoi ploshchadi, a takzhe
m elochnago torga s postoiannykh m est okolo chastnykh i kazennykh
zdanii, 1867, p. 373.
66	 Cf. O vosproshchenii torgovlia m iasom na Sennoi ploshchadi, a takzhe
m elochnago torga s postoiannykh m est okolo chastnykh i kazennykh
zdanii, 1867, p. 373.
67	 Proshenie s Peterburgskikh torgovcev v raznos, 21.05.1866, RGIA, f. 1287, op. 29,
del. 1600, l. 28.
68	 The respective decree of the Ministry of the Interior of November 29, 1842 was
published in: Ob otvode m esta dlia bazarnoi vozovoi torgovli i ob izdanii
obiazatel’nago postanovleniia o poriadke torgovli z vozov v S.-Peterburge,
1885, p. 315. This included fish and meat, however, only as frozen goods.
Public Places as Points of Identification for the Urban Poor
87
trading places by passing a new resolution. This would impair municipal financ-
es.69
Because of this rather unclear legal situation the sales by peddlers without a
permanent stall were ultimately tolerated around public and private houses, until
the commercial police tried to stop them in 1864. Last but not least it was the
decree of 1842, which the signatories used as a reference when applying directly
to the Ministry of the Interior.
However, the passages of the petitions referring to the nature of the Haymarket
as a place of the ‘common people’are of a greater relevance to the context in
this essay than the legal aspects of the dispute. One of the arguments pointed out
by the undersigned parties was that the “wellbeing of the people”70
(narodnoe
blagosostoianie) would be jeopardized if extensive restrictions were imposed
on ‘itinerant trade’. So far “a large proportion of the capital’s poor population
who shopped at the Haymarket” had bought fresh meat from them which was
of equal quality as that offered at the stalls, but their prices were much lower. If
their sales were stopped, permanent traders could fix prices “arbitrarily”71
. This
would lead to the establishment of a “monopoly”72
which would above all affect
the poor population of Petersburg.
At the same time the undersigned parties argued that there existed a kind
of customary right. They pointed out that they would conduct their sales in the
same way as had been practised already “for a long time”73
. They would ask
for nothing more but the right to return to their customary places at which they
had conducted their sales “up to today”74
(ponyne). Consequently they rejected
the allegation of the duma that they had usurped these places “unauthorized”75
69	 Cf. O vosproshchenii torgovlia m iasom na Sennoi ploshchadi, a takzhe
m elochnago torga s postoiannykh m est okolo chastnykh i kazennykh
zdanii, 1867, p. 373. A possible economic damage refers to the fact that itinerant
peddlers had to buy a tin token from the municipal authorities at 2 roubles and 86
kopeks.
70	 This and the following quotation: Proshenie krest‘ian, torguiuvshchikh miasom na
Sennoi ploshchadi, 09.02.1865, RGIA, f. 1287, op. 29, del. 1600, l. 22.
71	 Ibid., l. 21 ob.
72	 Ibid., l. 22.
73	 Proshenie s Peterburgskikh torgovcev v raznos, 21.05.1866, RGIA, f. 1287, op. 29,
del. 1600, l. 27.
74	 Proshenie, 06.06.1866, RGIA, f. 1287, op. 29, del. 1600, l. 32.
75	 O vosproshchenii torgovlia m iasom na Sennoi ploshchadi, a takzhe
m elochnago torga s postoiannykh m est okolo chastnykh i kazennykh
zdanii, 1867, p. 374.
Hans-Christian Petersen
88
(samovol’no): “We cannot accept the seizure of our places by the duma as it does
not own them and therefore has no right to allocate them.”76
Instead, they would
have obtained the places “in accordance with an agreement with the house-owners
in the same way as practised by the duma”. If, however, the house-owners
would not have the right to do so “we will accept the trading places also from
the duma and […] and pay the customary fee.” In any case, stop the “unsubstantiated
prosecution” by the police that “has driven so many of us into poverty”.
The background for these arguments was the traditional sale of goods by
peasants who came to town.77
This situation could still be seen at the Haymarket
at the time of the formulation of the petitions in so far as the place had been
divided into two halves since the beginning of the 19th
century: on one side,
the open “green” area where products were sold directly from the carriages of
incoming traders (during the wintertime timber and hay, in the summer agricultural
produce such as vegetables, cabbage and milk)78
, on the other half the sale
of mainly meat, fish, fruit and vegetables at permanent stalls. The undersigned
parties of the petitions quoted as a precedent that they had sold their meat products
directly in the “green area” until the interference of the commercial police.
The permanent traders at this place would have taken no offence up to then.
Whether these arguments were sound, was disputed in the duma. Supporters
of a general “clean-up” of the total Haymarket, such as the above-mentioned
Petr Zhukovskii or the delegate Ivan Glazunow, denied the existence of such a
customary law. They pointed out that the majority of traders had stopped being
farmers long ago and that they acted as intermediaries. Through this the market
had fundamentally changed its nature and no longer followed the tradition of the
former trading place on the outskirts of the city.79
They considered open sales
76	 This and the following quotations up to the end of the paragraph Proshenie,
06.06.1866, RGIA, f. 1287, op. 29, del. 1600, l. 31 ob-32 ob.
77	 Cf. the comprehensive account by Bauer. During the winter, the sale was carried
out from sledges, cf. Kohl, Vol. 1, p. 198.
78	 Cf. on the range of products offered the report of the commission for public
interests and necessities of January 28, 1868, in: Izvestiia Sankt-Peterburgskoi
Gorodskoi Obshchei Dumy, 1868, No. 2, p. 75; Istoricheskie trudy Aleksandra
Tom ilina, 1854, p. 66-69; Kohl, Vol. 1, p. 196f.
79	 An example of this argument can be found in the contribution by Glazunov in
the debate in the duma of February 15, 1868, in: Izvestiia Sankt-Peterburgskoi
Gorodskoi Obshchei Dumy, 1868, No. 5, p. 226-243.
Public Places as Points of Identification for the Urban Poor
89
as well as the adjacent food concourse a “disgrace”80
(bezobrazie) which had to
be abolished. This was vigorously denied by other delegates. Aleksandr Iakovlev
emphasized that besides the repeatedly appearing images of the Haymarket
there were also traders who were no criminals. Moreover, the constant demonization
of intermediaries who were said to have destroied the ‘original’ bazaar
would not at all be convincing in view of the growth of the Haymarket as well
as the entire city: “The answer could be that indeed every merchant could be regarded
as an intermediary. He buys goods first hand and sells them immediately
afterwards. I cannot see that this is condemnable or unethical.”81
He went on
saying that the social function of the Haymarket and its ‘itinerant peddlers” had
to be taken into consideration as well and that the Haymarket is the only “market
of the people”82
(narodnyi rynok) in St. Petersburg. He continued: What would it
mean to close down such an institution as the ‘food concourse’which was called
“kitchen of the nobility” (dvorianskaia kuchnia) by the man in the street: “It is
said that among others you will find people eating there who do not deserve any
attention according to an expression used by the sanitary commission: among
others homeless people, thieves, fraudsters, illegal persons without any documents
[bezpasportnye]; this may be true, but they still have to eat. They will not
go to the permanent food stalls for fear that their passports be checked.”83
Eventually the majority of the delegates of the duma adopted Iakovlev’s
point of view and voted in favour of continuing open sales as well as keeping the
‘food concourse’.84
As regards the three petitions, it had already been decided
beforehand that the sale of meat in tents would be allowed for a year under the
same sanitary conditions as those applying to permanent sale stalls.85
As regards
trading in front of private and public buildings the duma made it clear that the
right of the house-owner would end at the facade of the house and that everybody
offering his goods could only do so by asking permission of the duma and
80	 Amongst others the expression used by the governor-general in a letter to the head
office for traffic infrastructure and public buildings of August 16, 1855: RGIA, f.
218, op. 3, del. 1288, l. 3.
81	 Izvestiia Sankt-Peterburgskoi Gorodskoi Obshchei Dumy, 1868, No. 5, p. 233.
82	 Ibid., p. 235.
83	 Ibid., p. 240.
84	 Cf. Ibid., p. 241-243.
85	 Cf. the protocol of the debate in the duma of July 7, 1867, in: Izvestiia SanktPeterburgskoi
Gorodskoi Obshchei Dumy, 1867, No. 16, p. 856.
Hans-Christian Petersen
90
by paying a corresponding fee. Basically, it was endeavoured to keep trading to
locations of the city which were intended for this purpose.86
Thereby a preliminary arrangement was found for the Haymarket before the
inauguration of the four market halls stopped any open trading whatsoever on
the market – at least officially. However, the matter of ‘itinerant peddlers’ was
still a topic. This is not only true for the vicinity of the Haymarket where peddlers
moved to other places such as the Obuchovskii Square on the Fontanka. 87
Also at other places the municipal authorities did not manage to stop this type
of trading. In the same year when the halls at the Haymarket were inaugurated,
the gradonachal’nik of Petersburg felt impelled to issue a regulation in which he
complained that open trading was still conducted at “certain places”88
. He continued
his appeal to observe the respective decrees of the duma, but this did not
bring about any significant changes. Even at the beginning of the 20th
century
the ‘itinerant peddlers’ were still the object of controversial discussions about
the farmer’s market (Sytnyi rynok)89
located at the Petersburg side as well as in
connection with the project to establish a central market at the Vyborg side.90
This shows that the petitions discussed in this paper do not represent isolated
cases. The topic concerned the entire the city. At the core of the matter
we find the question as to who had the right to organize day-to-day activities at
places like the Haymarket. Or to be more precise: Who owned the markets of
the city?91
Irrespective of the conclusive answer to this question, the above-mentioned
passages make it clear that the ‘common people’ regarded places such as
the Haymarket as places of their own where they had conducted trading for a
long time. Of course, reverting to the argument of the “wellbeing of the people”
was also part of their discursive strategy, which intended to present the problem
as a matter of general interest. As stated by Steven King, petitions were in fact
“multi-functional documents, combining reportage, fact, posturing, rhetoric and
circumstance”.92
But, King goes on, the narrative and strategic formation of such
86	 Ibid.
87	 Cf. Zasosov/Pyzin, 1999, p. 112.
88	 Decree of the gradonachal’nik as well as of the police of August 1886, in: Izvestiia
Sankt-Peterburgskoi Gorodskoi Obshchei Dumy, 1886, No. 35, p. 663.
89	 Cf. the report of the municipality of May 23, 1904, in: Izvestiia SanktPeterburgskoi
Gorodskoi Obshchei Dumy, 1904, No. 13, p. 1205-1214. Just like
30 years ago the basis for this was again the complaint of the stationary traders.
90	 Cf. RGIA, f. 1293, op. 137, del. 91.
91	 Cf. for the concept of a “Right to the City” Lefèbvre, 1968.
92	 King, 2008, p. 253.
Public Places as Points of Identification for the Urban Poor
91
sources does not mean that we cannot see them as part of an agency that tried to
exert an influence on real existing processes.93
This is also true for the examples
analysed in this paper. By submitting a petition, the signatories articulated their
claim to the Haymarket and tried at the same time to make their position public.
The fact that they themselves did not write them does not mean that they do not
reflect the interests of the subjects. The reference to the Haymarket as a place of
the poor did not only fulfil a rhetorical function but was also part of their self-positioning
in contrast to the places of the rich. This is demonstrated by another
petition mentioned in the book by Zoia Iurkova which also dealt with retail trading:
“It is a well-known fact […] that the duma harasses the poor people (bednyi
narod) and keeps on supporting the rich, but the Haymarket was not intended
for the rich, but for rural, for poor people and today they are not even provided
with a slice of bread.”94
The self-positioning of the poor people was attached to
certain locations in the city – in this case to Petersburg’s Haymarket.
III. 	Summary
Let us revert to the question asked at the beginning of this article. In how far
is it possible to look behind the facade of urban poverty? An interpretation of
both types of sources which were discussed as examples is faced with many difficulties
when we try to answer this question. This is also true for the allegedly
‘more authentic’ petitions which are indeed also “multi-functional documents”.
On other hand, however, differences should not be completely equalized. Both
for the acting persons of that time as well as for our interpretation of today it was
and is certainly not irrelevant whether you could support a petition by signing it
yourself or whether you were able to refrain from putting your name under this
paper. The inhabitants of “Vasia’s Village” did not have such an opportunity of
authorising a text which we find as a source in the archives today.
As difficult as newspaper reports such as those published in the “Malen’kaia
gazeta” may be, they are frequently and also in this case nearly the only reports
on the inner life of a slum like “Vasia’s Village”. The method suggested by this
article was an approach to the world of the urban poor by looking at concrete
places. Beyond stylistic devices, both types of sources provide us with information
about places which were important to their inhabitants and which they
regarded as ‘their own’. In this way, it may be possible to confine an investiga-
93	 Ibid., p. 271. In respect of petitions, this view is also shared by Jahn (cf. note 62).
94	 Iurkova, 2011, p. 89.
Hans-Christian Petersen
92
tion not just to an analysis from the outside, but to outline perspectives from the
inside as well and to demonstrate the importance attached to such places by their
inhabitants in spite of their social marginalization.
At the same time such an approach by means of places makes it possible to
show internal heterogeneities and inequalities. The analysis has revealed the
existence of inner power structures between owner and inhabitants, men and
women as well as between ‘itinerant’ and stationary traders. Not only does this
fact prevent a subsequent well-meaning romanticization of the everyday life of
the urban poor but above all it allows us to have an amplified and differentiated
look at the ‘Russian poor” which were in fact more than the “black people”
(chernyi narod) as they are usually called in Russian. In contrast to such generalising
opinions the examples outlined in this investigation present the poor
inhabitants of the city as people who were actively engaged in dealing with the
precarious conditions they faced.
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97
Blood in the Air
Everyday Violence in the Experience
of the Petersburg Poor, 1905-1917
Mark D. Steinberg
The object of force is to impose a certain
social order in which the minority governs,
while violence tends to the destruction of
that order.
(Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence,
1908)
In 1913, a popular newspaper columnist in the Russian capital observed with
dismay that “newspapers are printed on white paper, but, really, in our times its
pages seem covered with blood”1
. Many commentators shared this view, often
emphasizing the point with dramatic metaphors. Both typical and often repeated
was a phrase that the physician and public health activist Dmitrii Zhbankov
often used in talks, reports, and newspaper columns: a “traumatic epidemic of
blood and violence” was raging in everyday city life, especially in the capital
city St. Petersburg.2
For newspapers, it was “everyday” violence that was the
main concern. Certainly, there was a great deal of political violence in the years
between 1905 and 1914 – ranging from government repression to revolutionary
terrorism, not to mention the wars and revolutions that bookend these years.3
But this story has a different focus, at least ostensibly: more local, more ubiquitous,
and more troubling in both its everydayness and its seeming absence of
1	 Skitalets, 1913(2), p. 3.
2	 He used this phrase in many of his writings, for example, Zhbankov, 1910(1), p. 2.
3	 Cf., for example, Holquist, 2003, p. 627–652.
Mark D. Steinberg
98
purpose. Such everyday violence included bloody “epidemics” of street knifings,
robberies with weapons, rape, bar-room fights ending in bloodshed, and
suicide.4
These stories unfolded mainly in the neighborhoods and lives of the
city’s poor.
Like all stories, these were told as embodying larger meaning. Perhaps precisely
because they were so disturbing, they became powerful signs to interpret
and to interpret with, especially about the “spirit of the age” and the meaning
of “these times” (both frequent phrases in these discussions). These were city
stories – present throughout the empire but most widespread, and worrisome,
in the imperial capital, St. Petersburg. Cities are often viewed as symbols in
European cultures, not least because they are the biggest and most enduring
creations of human society. St. Petersburg has been a symbol, from the time of
its foundation on newly conquered land, of Russia’s forceful turn away from its
past and toward the modernity of the West. Stories of ubiquitous and growing
city violence ran counter to the civilizing march of modern progress. So, too, did
other ubiquitous stories of urban degeneration and moral disorder, to which the
epidemic of violence was often linked, especially the sexual “bacchanalia” (a
metaphor of debauchery used, in turn, to speak of a “bacchanalia”5
of violence)
and suicide. Together, these stories were interpreted as signs of a “monstrously
ugly” “spirit of evil”6
in the air, the presence of “something fatal”7
in contemporary
life, some deep and ubiquitous “sickness”8
. And the interpreting did not
stop there. Numerous commentators read this evidence, especially the stories
that “covered” the newspapers with so much “blood,” as defining the experience
of modernity as heavily marked by “tragedy,” “catastrophe,” and “trauma,” producing
dark feelings ranging from “melancholy” to “despondency”.9
The question is, can we do more to understand urban violence in Russia
than describe how these stories were narrated and interpreted by contemporaries?
Can we understand the actual experience of violence, especially from the
perspective of the perpetrators themselves? We know the difficulties. That it is
impossible to disentangle the experiences and meanings of the most excluded
from the narrating language of those with the power to most shape public dis-
4	 Cf. among the few historians who have emphasized this everyday violence,
especially Morrissey, 2006; Steinberg, 2011; McReynolds, 2012.
5	 For example, Skitalets, 1913(2), p. 3.
6	 Vadim , 1913, p. 3.
7	 Podpischik zhurnala Zhizn’ dlia vsekh, 1913, p. 1289f.
8	 Az., 1908, p. 4.
9	 Cf. Steinberg, 2011.
Blood in the Air
99
course and thus the very vocabulary of available interpretation. That we have
little access to unmediated experience in the past, for the only evidence of experience
we have is so imbricated with language and culture and desire that it is (as
the historian Joan Scott famously argued) “always already an interpretation”10
.
In other words, to adapt a famous question, “can the knife-wielding subaltern
speak” outside the construction of their voice by others?
One solution is suggested by the recent “descriptive turn” among literary
scholars who have warned against overriding and overwriting past texts with
our own voices, whether through critical readings shaped by the “arrogance” of
heavy theory or forcing everything into the box of “context”: what is needed,
they argue, is more “intimacy” with texts, readings that are more “susceptible”
and “attentive,” reading more “with the grain” than “against” it.11
For historians,
this is a welcome methodological critique: we love to revel in the archive, to
wander through past texts listening for past lives. And a particularly good text
for this is the daily press. I will travel a way down this path myself, with newspapers
as my main source. But I also find this path to be too seductive. To understand
the past, we also need to escape its interpreting grip and view the past
from outside its own perspectives. Attentively, yes, with receptivity to possibilities.
But also with critical questions and suspicions. In other words, through the
voices of theory – in this case, theories of violence and theories of emotion – not
constrained by the mediation of interpreting contemporaries.
In thinking about newspapers and other periodicals as evidence of “experience,”
I find suggestive Walter Benjamin’s remark in 1939, in his attempt to explain
his own effort to make sense of city stories in the Arcades Project, that “to
seize the essence of history, it suffices to compare Herodotus and the morning
newspaper”12
. One way to understand this is to view the newspaper as Erlebnis-history,
using the distinction, explored by Benjamin among others, between
the two German words for “experience,” Erlebnis and Erfahrung. The newspaper
points toward the immediate, particular, personal, and discontinuous – in
other words, it is grounded in “life” (Leben), it is “lived experience.” This stands
in apparent contrast to a history that is narratively integrated, whole, continuous,
shared, and directional – the “journey” at the etymological heart of Erfahrung.13
The problem, and necessity, is how to bring into dialogue the daily news and
10	 Scott, 1991, p. 797. Cf. also Jay, 2005.
11	 Cf. Felski, 2011, p. 573-91; Best and Marcus, 2009, p. 1-21; Love, 2010, p.
371-391.
12	 Benjam in (1939), 1999, p. 14.
13	 Cf. especially Jay, 2005.
Mark D. Steinberg
100
the long narration, the discontinuous present of experience and the coherent
experience of living in meaningful time. This requires a perspective from both
inside and outside the local and the particular. This shifting dialogue between
perspectives – between the rawness of described violence, interpretations by
contemporaries, and a critical reading of both – is my aim in this paper, hoping
to open up the possibility of deeper interpretation.
Describing violence
We begin with these stories in their first narrating drafts – echoing the popular
self-description of American journalists as writing “the first draft of history.”
A great many stories of urban public life in Russia between 1905 and 1917 did
indeed cover the pages of newspapers with “blood.” News reports of accidents,
ranging from fires to workplace deaths (both of which earned the headline of
“epidemics”) were an almost daily accompaniment of urban life and a reminder
of its precarity. Especially disturbing were accidental deaths of unsupervised
children (mostly working-class children, of course), which, according to a reporter
for the mass-circulation paper Peterburgskii listok (Petersburg Sheet) in
1913, had “in recent years become an epidemic phenomenon in the capital.” On
a single day in May of that year, for example, he counted unsupervised children
drowning in a canal, toppling off an apartment balcony, falling under the wheels
of a cart, being run over by an automobile, and being crushed by a tram.14
But by far the greatest dangers to life came from the deliberate actions of
other people, often strangers. Most common were stabbings in the course of
a robbery, mostly on the street and especially in rougher neighborhoods. The
narratives were simple and similar: a perpetrator, individually or with a group,
approached a victim and demanded money, becoming violent when rebuffed.
Much of this violence, though, lacked the purposefulness of robbery. Newspapers
reported numerous stories like that of the man at a café who quarreled for
no clear reason with other customers and then stabbed several;15
or the brawl in a
bar that started with an argument among strangers after a professional wrestling
match and ended in a knife fight;16
or the man who chased down and repeatedly
stabbed a woman who ignored his “degrading suggestions”17
as she walked
14	 Cf. Peterburgskii listok, 27.05.1913, p. 4.
15	 Troinoe ubiistvo, in: Peterburgskij listok, 14.01.1913, p. 3.
16	 Cf. Peterburgskii listok, 20.04.1909, p. 4; 09.05.1910, p. 5; 27.05.1913, p. 4.
17	 Ibid., 13.01.1910, p. 5.
Blood in the Air
101
along a street. As a rule, both perpetrators and victims were young males. Lower-class
men were more likely to carry knifes and to rob and quarrel violently.
Women, we shall see, were more likely to kill themselves – or be victims of
male violence, including sexual violence. Hans-Christian Petersen, in his chapter
in this volume, identifies a subculture of male violence in the city’s poorer
neighborhoods. Indeed, these stories implied a violent masculinity that was a
troubling story about both gender and class.
Beside violent attacks by strangers, public violence among friends seemed
also to have become epidemic, often erupting at the slightest provocation, especially
when alcohol loosened self-restraint (heavy drinking, of course, was
viewed as a characteristically male). When weapons were at hand, and they
often were, these fights could be lethal. Many men, it seems, carried concealed
knives when out in public (although one could beat a man to death with fists
and boots as well). The papers were full of accounts of degenerating arguments,
often in bars or on the street, frequently over “trifles,” often presumed insults,
ending in spilled blood and sometimes death.18
To give one example out of hundreds,
a couple of working-class friends were sitting around drinking vodka
when one decided he needed to go home to get some sleep before work the next
morning; angry, his drinking buddy shouted “I will show you how to treat a
friend”19
and stabbed him in the side. Not all violence was so public, of course.
But even the most private violence, notably domestic violence, was regularly
turned into a public spectacle by the newspapers.20
Sexual violence was yet another “epidemic.” The papers regularly reported
women and girls raped (and then sometimes killed) by men, usually strangers, in
dark streets or squares in the poorer parts of town.21
This “bacchanalia” of sexual
violence was said to have never before reached “such a colossal extent”22
, nor
taken such exceedingly “disgusting and beastly forms.”23
Today, we recognize
18	 Cf. Gazeta-kopeika, 02.07.1908, p. 3; Peterburgskii listok, 09.04.1909, p. 6;
04.02.1910, p. 5; 10.02.1910, p. 5; 08.08.1910, p. 7; Skitalets, 1913(1), p. 3.
19	 Gazeta-kopeika, 26.06.1908, p. 2.
20	 Cf. for example, Zhestokoe istiazanie rebenka, 1910, p. 6; Novoe vrem ia,
06.07.1909, p. 2.
21	 Gazeta-kopeika, 22.07.1908, p. 2; 07.03.1909, p. 3; 09.08.1908, p. 2f.; 28.09.1908, p.
2; 24.03.1909, p. 5; 27.06.1910, p. 4; 21.08.1911, p. 4; 31.07.1913, p. 3; Peterburgskii
listok, 09.08.1910, p. 3; 04.01.1913, p. 4; 25.01.1913, p. 4; Skitalets, 1910, p. 3. Cf.
also Oberländer, 2011.
22	 D., 1909, p. 3.
23	 Zhbankov, 1910(2), p. 69.
Mark D. Steinberg
102
that all rape is violence. But at the time it seemed a sign of something new that,
as Dr. Zhbankov wrote, “normal rape,” which he believed reflected unrestrained
sexual desire, was being replaced by “pathological” rape, which was nothing but
“cold”24
violence.
In reporting these “epidemics,” the newspapers made a point of describing
the precise location of incidents: mapping violence into a social and moral map
of the city that distinguished certain urban spaces as dangerous and sick. The
map of “bloody Petersburg,” as it was called, covered most of the industrial
outskirts (in Russian, okrainy, a term also used for the borderlands of the empire).
Neighborhoods like Okhta, on the right bank of the Neva to the east of the
city center, or the industrial district known as “Beyond the Nevskii Gate” (za
Nevskoi zastavoi), along the left bank of the Neva below the Obvodnyi canal
(the gate was already long gone, but its memory recalled that this district was
outside the entrance to the city proper), or parts of the “Petersburg Side” across
the Neva to the north of the city center were described as so rough as to seem
to be located in a different time and place morally and culturally. Typically (not
only in Russia, of course), class otherness was translated into moral and even
racial otherness. Okhta, for example, was described as a “Petersburg Mexico
or Peru,” where the primary occupation for young people is “fist-fighting and
bloodletting”25
. A report on Donskoi Street, a particularly rough alley on Vasilevskii
Island, observed that “mores there are such that you don’t know whether
you are in Petersburg or Babylon or among some North African savages”26
.
The map of “bloody Petersburg” also included social spaces closer to the
center and less visibly marked as “other” by the physical boundaries of river
or canal – especially the district known as “Ligovka” surrounding Ligovskaia
Street, which ran from the main Nikolaevskii railroad station at Nevskii Prospect
across the Obvodnyi canal (generally considered the boundary of the central
city) into the southern margins of the city. This notoriously rough neighborhood,
especially Ligovskaia Street itself, was the subject of regular and frequent press
reports about both grizzly crimes and colorful characters (though often of a debauched
and criminal sort). Even at high noon, one reporter observed, the people
in this district, both men and women, seem to have stepped right out of the
stories of Maxim Gorky, for this was a sort of “Petersburg lower depths” filled
with down-and-out “former people” (both phrases Gorky made famous).27
The
24	 Ibid., p. 88f.
25	 Okhtenskie ‘rebiata’, 1908, p. 5.
26	 Zerkalo stolitsy, 1914, p. 3.
27	 Cf. V. T., 1909, p. 3.
Blood in the Air
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lowest depth of Ligovka was the neighborhood known by its old name Iamskaia
sloboda (Coachmen’s settlement), around the intersection of Ligovskaia Street
and Chubarov Alley (close to the railroad tracks and the canal), a district known
for its heavy concentration of brothels and criminal “dens”28
. At night and well
into the morning, journalists reported, it was impossible to walk on Ligovskaia
Street near the Obvodnyi canal without risk of robbery and violence.29
Children were said to have been dehumanized by everyday life in poor districts
– a life described in an editorial in Peterburgskii listok in 1910 as “chaotic
disorder and ruin, abnormal family and social relationships, rising destitution,
alcoholism, and degeneration [vyrozhdenie – a common term]”30
. Because children
in such neighborhoods, it was said, “grew up on the street,” they were
deformed by the street. “The street” was a keyword laden with as many interpretations
as “the city.” As a material and social space of public interaction,
and as definably urban, the street was often a metaphor and symbol of the most
worrisome aspects of human society and personality, including desire, spontaneity,
disorder, danger, and violence.31
It also often denoted spaces closest to the
lives of the poor. Children and the street were viewed as a lethal combination.32
Typical was the 1909 report about a twelve-year-old boy who fatally stabbed his
mother with a kitchen knife when she refused to let him go play in the streets.
“Who is to blame?” the reporter asked. He answered his own question: “the
street” itself to which the boy was so passionately attracted and which had ruined
him.33
The “hooligan” had a special place in these stories of the street and violence,
for hooligans seemed to embody the sense that life among the urban poor was
more and more a story of pathological excess. Joan Neuberger, in her important
study of hooliganism in St. Petersburg, showed how this term was applied
widely to all sorts of aggressive and transgressive behaviors in public spaces,
ranging from stabbings in back streets to mocking harassment of respectable
citizens in the center of the city (such as unscrewing park benches and laughing
28	 Sledopyt, 1914, p. 4.
29	 Cf. Massovye buiistva khuliganov, 1905, p. 4.
30	 Detskii sud, 1910, p, 1. Cf. also Liubosh, 1910, p. 2; Kholm skii, 1914, p. 4;
From m et, 1914, p. 696-700.
31	 Cf. for example Benjam in, 1928 and Çelik, et al., 1994.
32	 Cf. for example, Novikov, 1914, p. 526-532.
33	 Cf. Gazeta-kopeika, 02.01.1909, p. 3.
Mark D. Steinberg
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when someone fell, or pulling ribbons from women’s hair).34
Most hooligan
acts, though, were violent.
As a form of violence, hooliganism was defined by the excess of its transgression:
not just violating the bodies of others (with a knife, for example),
but transgressing the presumed boundaries of reason itself. The press was full
of stories like that of the young “hooligan” who demanded money for a beer
from a nineteen-year-old man he came across and then stabbed the youth four
times in the stomach when he refused,35
or the story of a man stabbed in the
neck and chest when he refused a demand for fourteen kopecks to buy vodka.36
Worst of all were the hooligan knifers who, it was reported, skipped the preliminary
demands and just attacked.37
As an editorial in 1910 in the mass-circulation
newspaper Gazeta-kopeika (Kopeck-gazette) concluded, “the hooligan knife
[…] slashes and cuts without any reasons at all”38
. And even when attacks had
an ostensible purpose, especially money or sex, these goals seemed secondary.
Reports emphasized the connection of hooliganism to the neighborhoods
and lives of the poor. The typical hooligan was described as young man from
the slums. The newspapers linked hooliganism to the “dark Petersburg” of the
urban underclass,39
the lumpenproletariat of the homeless and unemployed,40
“tramps [bosiaki], residents of flophouses, prostitutes [known often to associate
with hooligans, who sometimes acted as pimps], and others of the Maxim Gorky
type”41
. The police agreed, organizing huge raids (800 people were rounded up
in a raid in 1910, for example) on the places such types were believed to hole up:
cheap teahouses and taverns, public parks on the city outskirts, and river barges,
which housed a special lower-class subculture of its own.42
No less important,
hooligans were seen to embody the presumed connection between poverty and
moral degeneracy. As an editorial in Peterburgskii listok in 1910 put it, poor
34	 Cf. Neuberger, 1993.
35	 Cf. Peterburgskii listok, 10.05.1913, p. 4. Cf. also Peterburgskii listok,
03.04.1909, p. 1.
36	 Cf. Zhizn’ za 14 kopeek, 1912, p. 3.
37	 Cf. for example, Omut zhizni: khuligany, 1908, p. 3; Podvigi ulichnykh
grabitelei, 1910, p. 3.
38	 Gazeta-kopeika, 06.10.1910, p. 1.
39	 Cf. Peterburgskii listok, 12.05.1910, p. 4.
40	 Cf. Ibid., 05.05.1907, p. 4.
41	 Ulichnaia sektantskaia m issiia, 1908, p. 2.
42	 Cf. Grandioznaia oblava na khuliganov i bezdom nikov, 1910, p. 2.
Blood in the Air
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children were driven toward hooliganism by “destitution, alcoholism, and degeneration
[vyrozhdenie]”43
.
Violence against self was treated as part of the same story. The press recorded
the almost daily toll of suicides – many of which occurred in public places,
especially cafes, taverns, and streets – during the suicide “epidemic” in Petersburg
between 1906 and the war.44
Official statistics on the reasons for suicide
placed poverty at or near the top; if it yielded pride of place, it was to drunkenness,
also linked to lower-class life.45
Newspaper reports were often headlined
“Due to Hunger”46
. So common were these histories that the popular columnist
Skitalets (”the wanderer”), writing in Gazeta-kopeika, observed that stories of
“despairing” unemployed men committing suicide were so “ordinary” that they
were often ignored by newspapers and readers looking for something more interesting
and dramatic.47
The essayist Vasilii Rozanov similarly concluded that
the public found little of interest in suicides from poverty – or perhaps, we may
elaborate, had grown morally numb to its traumatic ubiquity – for “of poor people
there are always so many”48
.
Of particular interest to readers was the “epidemic” of suicide among pros-
titutes,49
where stories of desperate poverty (the reason most often given for
why women “fell” into prostitution) combined with experiences of subordination,
humiliation, and physical abuse.50
The archetypal report described prostitutes
committing suicide together, perhaps in “some stifling and stagnant tavern
amidst rowdiness and drunken intoxication,” toasting their escape from life with
glasses of poisonous vinegar essence.51
That women were more likely to kill
themselves, or be victims, than to assault others, reminds us of the intertwining
of narratives of gender along with class in these histories of everyday violence.
43	 Detskii sud, 1910, p. 1.
44	 Cf. for other discussions of suicide in Russia in these years, Morrissey, 1995, p.
201-217; Ibid., 2006, chaps. 10-11; Paperno, 1997, p. 94-104, 109f., 121f., 158f.;
Pinnow, 2010, p. 25-42.
45	 Cf. Predvaritel’nyi svod statisticheskikh dannykh po g. S-Peterburgu za
1909 god, p. 39.
46	 For example, Iz-za goloda, 1909, p. 4; cf. also Zhbankov, 1910(1), p. 29.
47	 Gazeta-kopeika, 18.08.1910, p. 3.
48	 Rozanov, 1911, p. 50f.
49	 Cf. Obyvatel’, 1909, p. 2; Zhbankov, 1910(2), p. 63; Gordon, 1910, p. 1f.
50	 Cf. Ne vynesli pozora, 1909, p. 4. Cf. also V. T., 1909, p. 3; Peterburgskii listok,
17.01.1913, p. 14; Omutzhizni, 1908, p. 3.
51	 Nem irovich-Danchenko, 1910, p. 581-583. Cf. also Bernstein, 1995, p. 78.
Mark D. Steinberg
106
Interpreting violence
There is a naked reality to these stories: government statistics documented exceptionally
high rates of violence and suicide in the Russian capital in these
years.52
However, as can already be seen, the factual reporting of such “incidents”
was never far removed from interpreting them, starting with the view
that they were part of a common phenomenon. A key interpreting theme was
“excess.” There was quantitative excess, emphasized by the metaphors used to
frame and unite these different stories into one: a “bountiful harvest of death”53
,
a “bacchanalia”54
of death, an “atmosphere of death”55
, an environment where
“pools of blood are on the floor, [and] the walls ooze pus”56
. Most troubling,
though, was the qualitative excess. The stabbing of a stranger “for 14 kopecks”
was emblematic. And this was not only a view of such people as definable
“others” threatening the norms of “civilized” public life from without (as Joan
Neuberger argued about hooligans, who exemplified these behaviors57
) but also
something worse: a symptom of an ailing social body, of a sick self.58
“Sickness” was a master metaphor for contemporaries. One of its worst
symptoms was said to be the loss of value of life itself. Newspapers regularly
headlined reports of violence with phrases like “life today is cheap,” “life
has lost value!”59
people today are “valued cheaper than trash”60
. The hooligan
seemed to embody this spirit to dark perfection. The hooligan philosophy of life
was “everything existing on this earth is rot [tlia] and people are shits [gnidy—
literally, lice eggs]”61
. The debased value for life, a Gazeta-kopeika columnist
concluded, was the dark heart of “our terrible times”62
, and made killing (and
self-killing) easy.
52	 Cf. N., 1909, p. 544-547.
53	 N. V., 1908, p. 1.
54	 Skitalets, 1913(2), p. 3.
55	 Arnova, 1911, p. 476.
56	 Engel’gardt, 1908, p. 1.
57	 Cf. Neuberger, 1993.
58	 Cf. Steinberg, 2011.
59	 Dukh Banko [The Ghost of Banquo], 1907, p. 1; Gazeta-kopeika, 19.10.1909, p. 3;
Nem irovich-Danchenko, 1910, p. 581-590; Filenkin, 1911, p. 3.
60	 Skitalets, 1911, p. 5.
61	 Svirskii, 1914, p. 253, 258-269. On Svirskii, cf. McReynolds, 1991, p. 151f.
62	 Podol’skii, 1909, p. 3.
Blood in the Air
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But why? Some writers blamed the government for nurturing this atmosphere:
the aftershocks of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 and especially of
widespread repression, including a great number of executions, following the
1905 revolution. “Days without a death sentence and execution have been the
exception” over the past year, a journalist noted at the end of 1909, and so “human
life has lost value”63
. Other writers blamed the revolutionary movement,
especially terrorist attacks on officials, which proliferated in these post-revolutionary
years. In the wake of the execution of Prime Minister Petr Stolypin in
September 1911, a liberal journalist offered a characteristic lament: “We are to
blame, all of us, even the air we breathe and the thoughts and feelings we experience.
For six years already we have been sowing seeds of violence, betrayal,
and murder, and have been killing with knife, bullet, and bomb, and with soaped
noose.”64
But most writers, when looking for reasons and causes, blamed the modern
city. If “these times” were sick, most journalists seemed to feel, the city was, as
it were, the “epidemiological pump.” Statistics were available to confirm this:
as a chronicler of Petersburg crime summarized the numbers, “the more urban,
the more crime […] including the most terrible bloody acts”65
. Explanations
varied. Conservatives blamed modern secular individualism for eroding traditional
values, especially respect for others and love of the good.66
Liberals and
socialists blamed the harsh conditions of social life (and, though they could not
say this too loudly, the lack of political and civil rights and freedoms, which aggravated
social hardships). But almost everyone agreed, in one way or another,
that modern city life – indeed, modern progress itself, for which the city stood
both socially and symbolically – had a paradoxical effect, especially on the lives
of the poor: it made people into “savages,” “beasts,” and “animals” capable
of the most “cruel” and “brutal” crimes – terms often used in newspaper crime
reports.67
Commentators wrote again and again of the harmful “atmosphere” of
modern social life, especially in big cities and especially for those whose social
lives were the most precarious.68
To quote typical phrases from the press: the
63	 Blank, 1909, p. 1f.
64	 Tan, 1911, p. 60f.
65	 Aborigen, 1914, p. 43.
66	 Cf. Bronzov, 1912, p. 4-9.
67	 Cf. Trofimov, 1909, p. 3; Zverskoe ubiistvo, 1909, p. 3; Posse, 1909, p. 83-
85; Novitskii, 1909, p. 1; Liudi-zvery, 1909, p. 3; Dikie nravy, 1908, p. 3;
Engel’gardt, 1910, p. 3.
68	 Cf. Arnova, 1911, p. 482.
Mark D. Steinberg
108
modern big city was a murderous “trap”69
, a devouring “stone monster”70
, a fatal
“mirage”71
. The fact that so many new arrivals to the capital – from small towns
or the countryside – took their own lives was a symbol easy to interpret with.72
So, to recall Walter Benjamin’s remark, we can see the work of “Herodotus”
already in the “morning newspaper,” if “Herodotus” means a constructed
narrative history of experience that explains and gives coherent meaning to the
fragmentary and contradictory evidence of lived experience. These interpreting
stories suggested solutions as well: for some, a revival of morality or religion;
for others, social and political reform, perhaps revolution. Many worried, however,
that there might be “no exit” (another frequent phrase in the press) from
what one journalist gloomily called “the long, black, stinking corridor” of the
present, its atmosphere “saturated with the exhalations of putrefying corpses”73
.
Theorizing violence
Can we do more to interpret this evidence? Can we see beyond a “susceptible”
and “attentive” reading “with the grain,” beyond contemporaries’ own
interpretations of their own lives? Most difficult, can we know anything of the
experiences and motives, the subjectivities, of the subjects who enacted this violence?
We have often been warned, especially by postcolonial theorists, of the
danger of assuming transparency in voices from the past, of failing to recognize
the inaccessibility and untranslatability of the discourses of others, of trusting
our own constructions of (and desires for) the subaltern voice, of nostalgically
recovering what seems lost – the danger of the “intellectual masquerading as
the absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak for they themselves,” as
Gayatri Spivak wrote when suggesting that our knowledge that the “subaltern
cannot speak” can serve as both a critical warning against epistemic violence
and a path toward some understanding of social realities and experiences.74
This
warning must extend to local knowledge: contemporary interpreters, such as
69	 Gridina, 1913, p. 3.
70	 Shchigaleev, 1912, p, 5.
71	 Gridina, 1910, p. 3. Cf. also Ibid., 1911, p. 3.
72	 Cf., for example, Zhertva obshchestvennogo ravnodushiia, 1908, p. 4; Iz-za
goloda, 1909, p. 4; V. T., 1909, p. 3.
73	 Engel’gardt, 1908, p. 1.
74	 Cf. Spivak, 1988, though I am using her insights and arguments somewhat
differently than she intended.
Blood in the Air
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we find in the press, are not necessarily closer to social realities and experiences
than our own interpretations from afar.
A point of entry into this problem is the place that seemed to contemporaries
most resistant to interpretation: irrational violence for violence’s sake, with no
other end or purpose.75
When contemporary interpreters did find meaning in
this, we have seen, it was to see symptoms of moral and spiritual illness. Perhaps
less parochial voices can help us see further than they could, or were willing to,
and open up a field of alternative interpretation.
Consider, for example, the perspective of the psychiatrist and radical philosopher
Frantz Fanon in his 1961 book Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched
of the Earth). His arguments were not merely theoretical, of course. They grew
from his work among colonized North Africans, whose violence, he concluded,
was a response to the material conditions and psychological effects of colonialism.
Fanon described the world of colonialism – in terms, I think, that have
uncanny suitability to the world of entrenched but fearful Russian autocracy and
rapidly developing capitalism – as a “hostile, oppressive and aggressive world,”
a world of “daily humiliations” and periodic repressive violence, that was simultaneously
a “hell” from which the colonized dreamed of escape and a “paradise
within arm’s reach guarded by ferocious watchdogs”76
. In such an environment,
“the muscles of the colonized are always tensed” and “the colonized’s affectivity
is kept on edge, like a running sore flinching from a caustic agent.” This
produced what Fanon called “atmospheric violence”: a violence “rippling under
the skin,” a tense “rage” ready to burst out in “periodic eruptions” of “bloody
fighting” among themselves, including “the most brutal aggressiveness” and the
most “impulsive violence.” “It is not uncommon,” Fanon wrote, “to see the colonized
subject draw his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive look from another
colonized subject.”77
Other theorists of violence, examining other settings,
have offered a similar perspective. Walter Benjamin, for example, in the wake
of the terrible losses and brutalities of the Great War, described an “everyday”
violence, where “man is impelled by anger” to the “outbursts of a violence that
are not related as a means to a preconceived end” but are an expression of the
conditions of “existence”78
, indeed, of experience.
Key to understanding this everyday, existential, atmospheric violence is
what may be termed “blocked agency.” Hannah Arendt, for example, though
75	 Cf., for example, Ivanov, 1914, p. 48.
76	 Fanon (1961), 2004, p. 16, 219.
77	 Ibid., p. 16-19, 31.
78	 Benjam in, 1921, p. 248.
Mark D. Steinberg
110
hostile to Fanon’s justification of the violence of resistance (and especially JeanPaul
Sartre’s advocacy of Fanon’s arguments), nonetheless recognized that such
violence emerges from conditions of modern “progress” that suppress freedom
and creativity. As she wrote in her 1969 essay “On Violence,” “the present glorification
of violence is caused by severe frustration of the faculty of action in the
modern world,” such that “riots in the ghettos” make “people feel they are acting
together in a way they rarely can”79
. More recently, James Scott similarly described
a “latent sense of violence” produced when systems of domination block
action and agency, when the “routine harvest of insults and injury to human dignity”
cannot be answered with “reciprocal aggression,” for these systems have
the power to frustrate and deny the “natural impulse to rage, insult, anger, and
the violence that such feelings prompt”80
.
It is important to emphasize the notion of self that is seen to drive the human
desire for agency and become frustrated by its obstruction: a particular conception
of human personhood as possessing natural human dignity and thus innate
sensitivity to insult and humiliation and to constrictions of will. In Russia as in
Europe, this notion has had a long and persistent history. An early and influential
view of this is G. W. F. Hegel’s notion of “recognition” (Anerkennung). Hegel
defined “recognition” of “self,” of “personhood,” of “being,” of “will,” of one’s
“existence” as an individual, as essential human needs. Failure to be “recognized,”
“negation” of one’s “self-expressive will,” produces crime and violence,
which can be understood to be an effort to “reinstate” one’s “will to power,”
“to count for something, to be recognized”81
. In Russia, arguments about harm
to the natural “human personality” (the Russian keyword is lichnost’) caused
by social conditions that degrade and injure the self were strongly developed
among the nineteenth-century intelligentsia and became ubiquitous in public
discourse, including in the daily press, by the start of the twentieth century.82
The idea that frustrated human agency can fuel violent rage has recently
been developed by Slavoj Žižek (also a psychoanalyst and radical philosopher)
in his 2008 book Violence. More than his predecessors, though, Žižek confronts
head-on the epistemological and hermeneutic resistance of much violence to
79	 Arendt, 1969, p. 83 (the final quotation is Arendt quoting an essay by Herbert
Gans on “ghetto rebellions”).
80	 Scott, 1992, p. 37-39.
81	 Hegel, 1805-1806, part II (”actual spirit”), section A (”recognition”), esp. section
iii (”crime and punishment”).
82	 Cf. discussion and sources in Steinberg, 2002, chap. 2; and Steinberg, 2011, p.
151-153.
Blood in the Air
111
our desire and effort to read a meaningful message. He gives the example of the
2005 riots in the poor and immigrant banlieues of Paris: “what is most difficult
to accept is precisely the riots’ meaninglessness,” that they are less “a form of
protest” than “an impulsive movement into action which can’t be translated into
speech or thought.” This meaninglessness, he argues, “bears witness” both to the
“impotence of the perpetrators” and to their “inability to locate the experience
of their situation within a meaningful whole.” Such violence resists translation
into familiar narratives, whether the backwardness of class and racial others or
the heroic resistance of the oppressed. And yet, Žižek does see interpretable
signs and even a type of politics in these acts. He sees violence as an effort to acquire
denied “presence,” to make oneself “visible,” “to create a problem” – even
while “neither offering a solution nor constituting a movement for providing a
solution.” In other words, these acts are a “sign” not a “meaning,” a “means” not
an “end”83
. Or, as Arendt put it, drawing on Benjamin, violence is an “interruption”
of processes in human history that otherwise seem “automatic,” predictable,
and unyielding.84
Recent work by theorists of affect and emotions reinforce such arguments.
To be sure, most attention in recent scholarship on the relationship between violence
and emotions has focused on collective and explicitly political violence,
such as the role of emotions in stimulating nationalist and ethnic violence, or,
closer to our case, the ways collective experiences of loss, moral hurt, resentment,
and anger have fueled moral claims that produce defiant and retributional
violence.85
Some studies, however, notably the work of Sara Ahmed and Sianne
Ngai, suggest an everyday and individual politics of emotion, especially in how
people deal with social “pain,” “injury,” and “wounds.” Key here is what Ngai
calls a “state of obstructed agency,” which means not only social and political
oppression restricting collective action, but a deep incommensurability between
the hurt and any available solution: what practical action, for example, is strong
enough to undo the injuries of class subordination, poverty, or racism (the effects
of symbolic violence, in Pierre Bourdieu’s important term)? These conditions
can stimulate vehement emotions, often embodied in violence, which become a
“sign,” a way to “speak out.” Such violence tends toward excess and attachment
to what Ngai calls “ugly feelings,” such as envy, anxiety, paranoia, irritation,
and disgust. But these vehement and sometimes violent emotions also contain
“critical potential.” Not as simple or adequate resistance, much less mechanisms
83	 Žižek, 2008, esp. p. 76f., 179, 185, 200-202.
84	 Cf. Arendt, 1969, p. 30.
85	 Cf. Steinberg/Sobol, 2011.
Mark D. Steinberg
112
of change, nor even as adequate catharsis, but as strong signs of disenchantment,
disaffection, and refusal.86
Returning to the evidence of the Russian press, these arguments resonate
with the epidemics of excessive, “irrational,” “meaningless” violence without
“end” or “reason” beyond the act itself, exemplified by what one journalist described
as the “hooligan” stance of being “the enemy of each and everyone”87
.
As this suggests, some contemporaries saw the hints of the political in this. The
hooligan, a persona that had come to embody irrational and excessive violence
among the poor, wanted to “outrage/offend/defile society” (nadrugat’sia nad obshchestvom),
and if material damage could be added to this “moral harm,” all the
better. The hooligan acted “as if to avenge himself on society for something”88
.
More radical writers elaborated on this “as if” and “for something.” In 1913, the
worker writer Aleksei Gastev argued that “today in Russia people label as ‘hooligans’
anyone who does not perform ‘cultured,’ which is to say lackey, duties
for the large and small parasite masters”89
. Violence against the self could also
be read as a sign of refusal, as a way to bear witness with one’s own life to (and
literally interrupt) the tragic conflict in modern life between heightened desires
and “empty” “reality,” as the regular Gazeta-kopeika columnist, Ol’ga Gridina,
wrote in an essay titled “Death Answers”90
. Some went further and described the
suicide epidemic as “a mass bloody protest against life as it is”91
.
To translate this history through interpreting languages of other times, situations,
and perspectives, we can argue that the “epidemic” of everyday violence
among the urban poor in Russia – and here we can agree with contemporary
commentators who treated robberies at knife point, barroom brawls, suicide,
and domestic violence as a single phenomenon – reflected a psychological “affectivity”
and “muscular tension” always on “edge,” a vague “rage” and “latent”
violence that could “erupt” at the slightest provocation. At its heart were “pain,”
“wounds,” and “injuries” that denied dignity and recognition, made more painful
by structures of domination that blocked action and agency. This violence
contained “critical potential” by “bearing witness” to political “impotence,”
making oneself “visible” and “present” in the face of exclusion and marginaliza-
86	 Cf. Ahm ed, 2004, esp. p. 33-34, 169, 193-194; Ngai, 2005, esp. p. 1-29, 161, 188.
87	 Ivanov, 1914, p. 47-50.
88	 Ibid.
89	 Zorin, 1913, p. 1457.
90	 Gridina, 1910, p. 3. Cf. also Nem irovich-Danchenko, 1910, p. 584.
91	 Abramovich, 1911, p. 113. Cf. also Zhertva obshchestvennogo ravnodushiia,
1908, p. 4.
Blood in the Air
113
tion, “speaking out,” “interrupting,” and “creating a problem.” True, it “served
no means” or end. So perhaps it is too strong to speak of resistance. But we can
speak of “vehement” “disaffection” and “rage” as a political “sign,” as a form
of refusal, even a form of “revenge” for so much wreckage. Differentiating between
rational and irrational in these acts, as contemporaries did, helps little to
understand them.
But how far should we go in viewing these acts as political? Can we find
here the possibility, in Fanon’s terms, of translating atmospheric violence into
revolutionary “violence in motion,” a violence that “cleanses,” changes, and
liberates?92
Or, what Georges Sorel, writing at the same time as this Russian story,
described as a violence that resists civilization’s barbarity and authoritative
force, that is ultimately a violence of life, will, creativity, and virtue?93
Or what
Benjamin called the “divine violence” that can destroy the violence of power
and “deliver justice” “for the sake of the living”94
? Or what Jean-Paul Sartre, in
his preface to Fanon’s book, called the “violence, like Achilles’ spear, [that] can
heal the wounds it has inflicted?”95
We may desire such transfiguration, for there is hope and the appealing
promise of redemption in it. But this optimism, and the encouraging voices of
authoritative theorists, may be more seductive than real. Fanon himself recognized
how “melancholy” and “suicidal” everyday violence among the oppressed
tended to be: that the regular “release” of tension and rage by drawing one’s
knife against another colonized person at the slightest vexation was ultimately
“collective self-destruction […] a death wish in the face of danger, a suicidal
conduct that enforces the colonist’s existence and domination, and reassures him
that such men are not rational”96
. Perhaps Russian journalists were right to see
melancholy, hopelessness, and the “loss of taste for life.”
If we look ahead to 1917, we see an explicit translation of everyday social
violence into directed political violence. But the affinity between what Fanon
called self-destructive atmospheric violence and transgressive “violence in motion”
means that the boundaries between them are porous and unstable. Perhaps
because the wounds went so deep, the purposefulness of revolution could
not remove the undirected rage that helped fuel this upheaval. “Excess,” again,
was a telling sign. Witnesses to the February Revolution (which was relatively
92	 Cf. Fanon, 1961 (2004), e.g. p. 51.
93	 Cf. Sorel, 1908 (1950).
94	 Benjam in, 1921, p. 248-250.
95	 Sartre, Jean-Paul, preface to Fanon, 1961 (2004), p. lxii.
96	 Fanon, 1961 (2004), p. 17f.
Mark D. Steinberg
114
bloodless compared to the October Revolution and the Civil War that followed)
described with dismay the epidemic of street violence that continually crossed
the boundaries of reason: people in the streets shooting obsessively into the air
or into the windows of apartment buildings, smashing store windows, looting
(especially wine stores – a crime not without some instrumental purpose), and,
at the extreme, stomping on the lifeless bodies of murdered policemen and officers.
The Petrograd Soviet characteristically condemned all this as “hooliganism.”
Echoing the same older tradition of interpretation, Maxim Gorky (then
editor and columnist of a new independent left-wing newspaper in the capital)
insisted that this was not revolutionary violence at all, but “Asiatic savagery”97
.
In the months following, organized revolutionaries would repeatedly say the
same about the epidemic of crowd violence against perceived enemies of the
revolution: as one soldier-socialist declared after witnessing the brutal murder
in the street of a dozen officers who had been arrested after the Kornilov mutiny,
“this is a disgrace and a shame” and “no one will achieve anything doing it
this way”98
. In other words, violence “under the skin” did not always change its
nature when put in political motion. This was a “wound” that “would not heal”
(borrowing the classic metaphor of decadence), a violence that could not bring
change or redemption, or even consolation, a violence that was no more than a
symbolic reminder of injury and rage.
Still, there was politics in this, though an “ugly” politics of ugly feelings and
ugly actions. The same may be said of the “traumatic epidemic” of everyday
“blood and violence” that the Petersburg press so fulsomely documented in the
prerevolutionary years – a politics, yes, but ugly, unable to console, bringing no
redemption. At best, this was a politics of disruption and interruption, of being a
problem, of presence, of speaking out with physical signs. From a perspective of
explicit and conventional politics, this was all terribly inadequate – inadequate
for resisting injury and harm, inadequate for producing change. In a way, this
violence was too symbolic. Nor did it help that it was shaped by a distorting
culture of violent masculinity. Perhaps tragically, these emotions, vocabularies,
and actions introduced an ugly politics into the revolution, a time when
political and social change actually did become possible. One could argue, and
contemporaries certainly did, that this was proof of the trauma and sickness of
prerevolutionary society. But one could also argue that even the ugliest popular
violence during and especially after 1917 was still political: a dark agency for
the unorganized people of Russia’s “lower depths,” a way of being present in the
97	 Cited in Steinberg, 2001, p. 63f.
98	 Delo naroda, No. 147, 06.09.1917, p. 2.
Blood in the Air
115
face new postrevolutionary obstructions to plebeian agency, a way of baring and
witnessing wounds being inflicted this time by “Soviet” and “socialist” forms of
political domination and modernizing “progress.”
Acknowledgements: For helping me to clarify my arguments, I am especially
grateful to Hans-Christian Petersen, Ilya Gerasimov, Jane Hedges, Rebecca
Mitchell, faculty and students at the Havighurst Center at Miami University
in Ohio, the workshop on intellectual history at the University of California at
Berkeley, and participants in the panel on interpreting and theorizing violence
at the 2012 meeting of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian
Studies.
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121
Outcast Vienna 1900
The Politics of Transgression
Wolfgang Maderthaner
I
The Vienna of 1900 has been mythologized in recent decades. It has become a
historical signet, a highly successful trademark recognized around the world. Its
posthumous success has been promoted by masterpieces of historiography such
as Carl E. Schorske’s Fin de Siècle Vienna1
as well as by a series of spectacular
exhibitions at the Vienna Künstlerhaus, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris,
and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Nikolaus Sombart, in one example
among many, has attributed to the Vienna of 1900 paradigmatic significance
for the twentieth century as a whole.2
According to Sombart, central problems
of modernity were articulated here more precisely and radically than elsewhere;
they were perceived and conceptualized in a more intelligent and original way
as they took on the form and the attitude of cultural innovations such as Arnold
Schönberg’s anti-music, Karl Kraus’s linguistic criticism, Arthur Schnitzler’s
fictional psychology, Wittgenstein’s dismantling of metaphysics, Ernst Mach’s
empirical criticism, and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis.
Vienna 1900 was indeed a peculiar and somehow solitary conglomerate of
some of the most divergent yet mutually dependent social, political, and cultural
developments of the time. While a liberal bourgeoisie was favoring the
monarchy, democratic movements were afflicted with a traditional bureaucracy,
populism was associated with Catholicism, and the Late Enlightenment was occupied
with the conditions of the human soul and the basic psychological conditions
of the individual. In the heart of the city, the Hofburg, the aging emperor
1	 Cf. Schorske, 1981.
2	 Cf. Sombart, 1987, p. 52-54.
Wolfgang Maderthaner
122
Franz Joseph sought desperately to uphold his autocratic regime as well as the
myth of the old German Reich. On the gorgeous newly constructed Ringstraße
Boulevard an economically powerful bourgeoisie showcased the success of a
late-coming capitalism in the form of magnificent, historicist architecture. In
the lower-middle-class districts, a petite bourgeoisie suspicious of modernity
mourned the loss of the “Old Vienna” that had epitomized pre-modern contentment
and clarity. In the industrial suburbs which encompassed the inner districts
like an iron ring of workers’ quarters, serious housing misery, social squalor,
mass immigration, and potential political upheavals gathered.
Vienna’s symbolic body was distorted in many ways. It was socially segregated
and yet contradictorily homogenized by the aesthetic standards and facades
of the Ringstraße that dominated the outer appearance of the tenement
blocks even in the proletarian outskirts. While the nobility had long passed the
zenith of their political power, its cultural heritage dominated the fantasies and
longings of a bourgeoisie still striving for social recognition. The liberal and
predominantly Jewish bourgeoisie, which only recently had acquired political
power, was almost immediately challenged (and finally defeated) by an anti-Semitic,
lower-middle-class populism that proved able to combine cultural
reaction and municipal modernity. At the same time, an egalitarian utopianism,
promoted by progressive Jewish upper-class intellectuals, was unfolding among
the masses of suburban proletarians as a reaction to the unfulfilled humanitarian
promises of liberalism. In the city’s coffeehouses and salons, writers, artists,
and scientists searched for a common denominator to all these contradictions
and seemed to detect it in psychoanalysis, psychophysics, expressionism, and
an aesthetically sophisticated nervousness.3
The Vienna of 1900 was at once a laboratory of theApocalypse and the birthplace
of epoch-making modern trends and achievements. It was the place of the
last of the Habsburgs as well as that of the young Adolf Hitler, and of Theodor
Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. It was the place of the patriarchal major
Karl Lueger, who shaped modern anti-Semitism into a political mass movement,
and it was the place of one of the founding fathers of democratic socialism, the
Jewish poor man’s doctor, psychologist and social reformer Victor Adler. It was
the first metropolis in which organized anti-Semitism was able to seize power
and it was to become, after the municipal franchise had been democratized, the
first city with over one million inhabitants under a social-democratic administration.
In Robert Musil’s words, Vienna 1900 resembled a boiling blister of
3	 Cf. Maderthaner/Musner, 1999(2).
Outcast Vienna 1900
123
initiations and emergences, one gigantic beat and the eternal dissonance and
determent of all rhythms against each other:
“No one knew exactly what was in the making; nobody could have said
whether it was to be a new art, a new humanity, a new morality, or perhaps
a reshuffling of society. [...] There were those who loved the overman and
those who loved the underman; there were health cults and sun cults and the
cults of consumptive maidens; there was enthusiasm for the hero worshipers
and for the believers in the Common Man; people were devout and skeptical,
naturalistic and mannered, robust and morbid; they dreamed of old tree-lined
avenues in palace parks, autumnal gardens, glassy ponds, gems, hashish,
disease, and demonism, but also of prairies, immense horizons, forges and
rolling mills, naked wrestlers, slave uprisings, early man, and the smashing of
society. These were certainly opposing and widely varying cries, but uttered
in the same breath.”4
II
Since the 1980s, a specific practice of cultural analysis and discourse on the
Vienna Modern has been established. This practice was exclusively concerned
with the culture of the elites, and was dominated by a discussion of the artistic
and intellectual avant-gardes – projecting an embellished image of Vienna 1900
as an icon of an innovative multiculturalism. The extreme disparities between
the social classes and the spatial and cultural segregation that resulted, as well
as the nascent anti-Semitism and populist mass politics, are mentioned, if at all,
only marginally. This romanticized picture, by focusing on singularities instead
of processes, thus obscures an understanding of that long-term logic that led
from fin-de-siècle Vienna with the posthumously admired creativity of its assimilated
Jewish community to the brutal persecution of Jews during the Nazi
dictatorship.
Instead of making Carl Schorske’s perspective ever more dynamic, fin de
siècle was ontologically conceptualized as the sum of its intellectual and artistic
achievements, and was thus stylized into a kind of precious treasury of high
culture. The life-worldly cultures of the suburbs, the worlds of the immigrants,
proletarians, and urban pariahs, were persistently ignored in high modern Viennese
literature. If the suburbs were mentioned at all they came to be, according
4	 Musil, 1995, p. 53.
Wolfgang Maderthaner
124
to respective ideological dispositions, either places of divergence and disorder,
misery, and immorality, or a terrain of utopian prospect, the forthcoming social
basis of interwar Red Vienna.5
On the other hand, the suburbs and outskirts had always been present as a
central trope of a popular discourse about the essence of Viennese nature. They
had been present in traditional popular songs (Wienerlied) and above all in an
oral canon of legends and myths. There were rumors about extensive and violent
hunger revolts, about a dissipated, lustful joie de vivre even under the most
miserable living conditions, about frightening and simultaneously idolized juvenile
gangs, about grand gangsters or small-time crooks posing as social rebels,
supported without reservation by their local neighborhoods. There are numerous
reports of the legendary lower class soirees of the washer-girls, the so-called
ʻfreakers’ ballsʼ (Lumpenbälle), notorious orgiastic feasts at run-down pubs and
low dives. And we are told about self-contained territories of insubordination,
which were not to be disciplined by any political and social regime whatsoever.
To decipher and decode these popular myths or, to be more precise, to decipher
their marginalization by contemporary as well as retrospective elitist cultural
discourses, turns out to be an intriguing perspective. This becomes even
more fascinating if we take into account one specific feature of Vienna’s urban
form; poverty and social squalor is, and always has been, hidden behind a facade
of impressive beauty that suggests a homogenous urban body inspired by the
classical architectural standards of the Ringstraße. Judged by their outer appearance,
the proletarian tenement blocks of the suburbs were (and are) indeed
magnificent buildings, in some cases hardly second to the famous palaces along
the Ringstraße. Thus they did not constitute an obvious contrast to the center,
but rather obscured a characteristic double-folded social and spatial segregation.
The Vienna topography unfolded along a concentric pattern by which inner and
outer suburbs were clustered around the center according to their respective
social status. The actual demarcations were not defined as clearly by architectural
or aesthetic differences, but by the social signification of urban territories.
Cultural practices, as much as material urban forms, served to locate different
social classes and determine the divergent perceptions and appropriations of
the urban terrain as well as the extent of communication or separation between
these classes.
Against this background it seems promising to focus on the outskirts of Vienna
1900. The ‘Other’ of suburban culture manifests itself in the popular land-
5	 Cf. Maderthaner/Musner, 1999(1); Horak et al., 2000; Horak et al. 2001;
Maderthaner/Musner, 2008.
Outcast Vienna 1900
125
scapes of pleasure (such as the Prater or the Neulerchenfeld), in beer gardens,
saloons, and other sites of indulgence. It becomes manifest in the urban noman’s-land
of small crime, gangs, and prostitution – a no-man’s-land that does
not only signify social and cultural deviance, but is indeed part of a more comprehensive
life-worldly spectrum of suburbia. This spectrum combines miserable
living conditions with strategies of material and ideal survival, industrial and
disciplined work with punctual, short-lived dropouts, and rebelliously veiled
criminality with politically articulated insubordination. The tensions inscribed
in the town body between high and popular culture, hegemony and social difference,
mass identity prescribed, and the disobedience of these very masses,
are key for developing an understanding for the modern metropolis. To decipher
these concepts means attempting to read the metropolis as a social text.
III
In approaching the literary artifacts of high Viennese modernism as a starting
point for such a reading, it soon becomes clear that the misery and scantiness
of proletarian, suburban life is neither noticed nor reflected upon, very much in
contrast to the literary production in comparable modern metropolises. In this
respect Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle can be taken as a paradigm. The protagonist
undertakes a nightly, mysterious trip to a noble villa situated on the outskirts
of the city, where members of the nobility meet in masks for erotic trysts.6
The track of his coach leads along the Alserstrasse next to the center and heads
for an elegant villa at the edge of the forest. Between these lies a terra incognita:
the proletarian quarter of Ottakring. Schnitzler comments on Ottakring with
only one laconic sentence: “They drove along the Alserstrasse, then underneath
a viaduct towards the suburbs and on through badly-lit small side-lanes.”7
We can detect from Schnitzler’s fictions of the urban – and this is the case
with an overwhelming majority of his contemporary writers – an urban segregation
of territories intimate and territories forbidden. The mental maps underlying
those fictions seem to have constituted an imaginaire of the urban that was
not only characteristic for the authors but for middle-class patterns of perception
as a whole. The other Vienna of the poor and downgraded proletarians, day
laborers, servants, and outcasts was obviously beyond that perception and re-
6	 Stanley Kubrik, by the way, transferred this framework into the New York of the
late twentieth century for his last movie Eyes Wide Shut.
7	 Schnitzler, 1992, p. 39.
Wolfgang Maderthaner
126
moved from the world it created. Notions oriented along the standards of courtly
and bourgeois culture definitively excluded the suburbs from city life, construing
them merely as places best avoided: places of crime, indecency, deviance,
and unpredictability. It was left to the new genre of urban reportage by figures
such as Emil Kläger8
or Max Winter9
to take the minutes of outcast Vienna, thus
introducing it to public awareness.
In those records, or in the literary artifacts of writers for whom the outskirts
formed the background of a personal experience as a migrant or social outsider,
the magnificent Middle-European metropolis is portrayed as a broken and
distorted urban space. Ivan Cankar, nowadays generally deemed the founder
of modern Slovenian literature, lived in Ottakring during the first decade of the
twentieth century. This bohemian and boozer without means found accommodation
at the flat of a seamstress, and made his suburban everyday experience
the substance of his novels and short stories. We could not conceive of a greater
contrast than that of Cankar’s world to the splendor and shine of the inner city.
Cankar’s suburbia is a world of darkness and dirt, a dungeon that cannot be escaped
from, as depicted in his 1900 short story Mimi:
“The heavenly sun never shines here. There is smoke from the industrial
plants around the roofs and if you stroll along the lanes, soot will fall into
your face. The tenement blocks are high and boring; the people you meet are
badly dressed, with hollow cheeks, their glances expressing discontent. This
dreary suburb is extending over a huge area, no end to the east, no end to the
west. I knew a man with a gray beard and a crooked back that had not once
in his life reached the end of that seemingly endless street that leads into a
world more lucid. The suburbs are a gigantic penitentiary; not one single free
man does live there. Every now and then I was reflecting on what crimes
these prisoners had committed. One morning I was crossing that street and
watched them coming up in long rows, with heavy, tired steps and sleepy
eyes; I thought I could hear iron chains jangling under their clothes. They
got lost in large, gray buildings without windows, and the doors were heavily
closing behind them...”10
Cankar’s emphatic and personally affected view is paralleled very specifically
by the social text inscribed onto suburbia by the medical, distanced, objectified
8	 Cf. Kläger, 1908.
9	 Cf. Winter, 1925; Ibid., 1905(1); Ibid., 1905(2).
10	 Cankar, 1995, p. 7-8.
Outcast Vienna 1900
127
diagnosis of the municipal government. Thus given expression, the instrumentality
of the Modern takes minutes of a total archeology of desperate housing
and living conditions, social deviance, and pathology. Victor Adler first directed,
in a very spectacular way, attention to those conditions. In December 1888Adler
published the results of hidden inquiries he had undertaken at the grounds of the
Wienerberger brickworks.11
The series of articles under the title The Situation of
the Brick Layers in his weekly “Equality” (Gleichheit) came as a sensation and a
scandal. It disclosed a genuine glance into a hitherto inconceivable social abyss
and revealed a counter-world: the hidden, filthy, other side of the fin de siècle
coin, the ousted, repressed, forgotten ‘Other’ of a widely praised metropolis, a
world of exploitation, estrangement, and dulling apathy.
Adler reported on the “poorest slaves the sun has ever shed its light upon”.
Tied to a complex system of hierarchies and dependencies, bricklayers were totally
subject to the Company and a carefully conceived truck system. Their salaries,
scandalously low to begin with, were not paid in ‘normal money’ but given
out in the form of metal coupons. These coupons were accepted as a means of
payment exclusively by the canteen keepers of the Company. The quality of
the goods offered was poor, the prices excessively high, and each worker was
assigned to one of the canteen keepers as an object of exploitation. “Well aware
of his power”, Adler wrote, “such a keeper responded to a complaining worker:
‘Even if I was going to shit into your dishes you ought to eat it up.’And the guy
is right, they would have to.”
While the workers were forbidden to purchase anything outside the works
premises, they were nonetheless allowed to beg. Adler writes about hordes of
people who would set upon the nearby Inzersdorfer cannery every evening,
scrounging for waste products. Whoever could arrange it undertook a one-anda-half
hour walk to get hold of one of the eighty portions of vegetable soup the
hangman of Vienna distributed daily: “There is more mercy with the hangman
than with the Company and its paid slave-drivers.”
As if this weren’t enough, the bricklayers were forced to live on the premises.
Up to ten families lived in every single room of the workers’ houses, “men,
women, children wildly mixed up”. There were so-called sleeping halls for others,
where fifty to seventy persons would be herded together on old straw, body
next to body. In one of these halls a woman gave birth to her child “in the presence
of fifty half-naked, dirty men. We should not talk about modesty, however,
11	 Parteivorstand der Sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterpartei Deutschösterreichs,
vol. 4, 1925, p. 11-35. The citations following are taken from the first article
published in Gleichheit 49 (1888).
Wolfgang Maderthaner
128
as this is a luxury reserved for property owners only. The life of a mother is actually
threatened under those circumstances. But who cares about a poor broad.”
The main factory grounds at the Laerberg were even more distinguished in that
respect. Whole bunches of mainly single workers had to sleep on top of the huge
industrial brick ovens, partly exposed to the night freeze, partly almost burnt
from below, and covered only meagerly by filthy rags. The prisoners in Siberia,
Adler summed up, were better off than these poor sods whose only crime was to
work for the profits of the Company.
Adler’s sensational revelations led to an epilogue in Parliament without any
consequences, while his journal Gleichheit was confiscated and Adler himself
was fined for non-licensed distribution of a periodical. Yet he was to produce
further sensational pieces of investigative journalism. For his most important
one, an April 1889 article on the living and working conditions of the tramway
drivers, he was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment.12
IV
In spite of these revealing indicators it would be misleading to regard the urban
periphery and the suburbs only as zones of enduring misery or as mere function
of the new and rigid industrial paradigm of production. Such a view would
ignore essential dimensions of the social and cultural configurations of these
areas. The following two scenarios elaborate suburban life-worlds and contexts
as emblematic examples of social contradiction and cultural antagonism.
On September 17, 1911 a hunger revolt took place in the proletarian district
of Ottakring. Entire quarters and most houses, windows, and streetlamps
were damaged. A state of emergency was proclaimed, barricades were erected,
streetcars were burned, and street fights with rapidly deployed army units
took place. Young men and women, central agents of this revolt, seized and
devastated school buildings and set fire to books and papers. For the first time
since the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 army units fired on the civilian population,
killing four, and the sub-proletariat looted shops and pubs. The young
Austro-Marxist librarian of Parliament, to later become chancellor and president
of the Austrian Republic, Karl Renner, stated that the most desperate, alienated,
and seedy people had left their homes to demonstrate and thereby to protest the
conditions held in place by the social order.13
12	 Cf. Braunthal, 1965, p. 59-64.
13	 Cf. Renner, 1911, p.1-4.
Outcast Vienna 1900
129
The Vienna Police Department stated in its report that the police units were
unable to stop devastation and pillage since the looters and plunderers were
anywhere and nowhere and disappeared quickly when confronted by force. According
to the department it would have taken all army units stationed in Vienna
in order to secure public order and to control the undisciplined crowds in the
streets. It took many hours to restore order due to the fact that the revolting
crowds were supported and egged on by large segments of the civilian population.
From windows and houses stones, glasses, iron pieces and the like were
thrown at police and army units.14
On the side of the young mob, women and
mothers, whose objective according to the “Workers’ Daily” (Arbeiterzeitung)
should have been to think clearly and rigorously, took part in street fighting and
provided the young mob with stones.15
This short day of anarchy stood for more than the harsh political economy of
suburban life and more than a battle about power and the hegemony over public
space. The “grotesque” character of the hunger revolt, frequently diagnosed by
police and media reports, refers to a cultural articulation of difference and antagonism.
Those crowds were not only composed of the old urban underclass but
also of the many new migrants who brought with them their desire for a better
life in the city – something not to be fulfilled in the contemporary urban context
of devastating work and poor consumption.
These migrants had left their oral, pre-modern, and rural cultures of origin
in order to find a new perspective and better life chances in the metropolis. Still
mentally attached to an imaginary village of the past, they searched for a home
in a different urban geography that was increasingly linearly and fragmentarily
configured by technology, science, and rational conduct. Pushed towards the
social margins, they were unable to find a new habitat but ended up in poverty
and collective alienation. The seemingly irrational and grotesque character of
the hunger revolt and the anarchic strength of its violence, however, reveal an
obscure, ambivalent logic and rationality of its own: A largely hopeless venture
to call into question the new symbolic order of modernity, modernization, and
the metropolis.16
One-and-a-half years after the hunger revolt the same crowd showed up in
the same Ottakring location but expressed itself in a different way: disciplined
and with dignity. But before examining this outstanding event yet to come, a
14	 Cf. Austrian State Archives/Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Ministerium
des Inneren, Präsidium, 9798, 19.09.1911.
15	 Cf. Arbeiter-Zeitung, 19.09.1911, p. 2.
16	 Cf. Maderthaner/Musner, 1999(1), p. 34-37.
Wolfgang Maderthaner
130
short excursion into the urban development of this proletarian district might
be useful. During the so-called Gründerzeit in the 1860s and its capitalist restructuring,
the preindustrial villages of Ottakring were turned into industrial
suburbs, and a ‘hard texture’ of factories and tenement blocks, of traffic and
communication lines was imposed, thereby rationalizing and disciplining everyday
life. In parallel, the suburb became a projection screen of power in which
economic interests blended with fantasies about the alien ‘Other’. The speculative
building boom as well as a massive influx of migrants condensed the suburbs
into zones of extreme social and spatial density. While the facades of the
hastily built tenements imitated the neo-baroque architecture of the center, their
interior was characterized by pure capitalist rationality of minimal space sheltering
a maximum of tenants. In his 1894 investigation of housing conditions in the
Viennese suburbs, the famous Austrian social reformer Eugen von Philippovich
concluded that tenants live under spatial circumstances which do not even meet
the basic standards of army barracks.17
A prototypical example of the capitalist mode of suburban urban development
was the so-called Schmelz, a former army training ground. In one of the
most spectacular undertakings in Vienna’s architectural history, the northern
part of it was turned into a drawing-board structure of ‘Americanized’ urban
housing characterized by standardized tenement blocks. In spite of the fact that
this urban no-man’s-land appeared like a final disposal site of the low classes,
it became the location of the largest mass demonstration ever held in Vienna.
This happened on the occasion of Franz Schuhmeier’s funeral on February 16,
1913. Schuhmeier, a popular leader of the workers’ movement, had been assassinated
shortly before. The social-democratic workers’ party had mobilized its
already significant organizational apparatus, which covered all the suburbs, but
the turnout surpassed all expectations and was to prove almost uncontrollable.
Nearly half-a-million people came, literally every fourth inhabitant of Vienna.
The funeral service assembled high-ranking representatives of the political, bureaucratic,
military, and diplomatic elite. A large choir, composed of court opera
and workers’ singers, intoned Franz von Suppe’s Ruhe, Müder Wanderer when
the coffin was closed, and the end of the service was marked by Richard Wagner’s
pilgrim chorus of Tannhäuser. A horse-drawn carriage and horsemen in
old Spanish costume brought the corpse to its final place of rest, where tens of
thousands of mourners covered the grave with a sea of red carnations.
This grandiose funeral was no accident since Franz Schuhmeier was not only
the most popular social democrat in Vienna at the turn of the century, but also a
17	 Cf. Feldbauer, 1977.
Outcast Vienna 1900
131
mass politician of the new style, an agitator as talented as he was populist and
a stirring speaker; a man of the people who had risen from the poorest background
into the highest levels of politics. Unlike any before him, Schuhmeier
had managed to lead the politically and socially deprived of the suburbs out of
their isolation to form an organized, politically aware, and thus identity-shaping
mass movement. With this funeral it was not only a hero of the people who was
paid homage according to tradition, the people in their new social organization
and political expression turned into a public force. The funeral thus became the
exposition of a political counterculture, which opposed the dominance of the
petty-bourgeois radicalism that the Christian-Social mayor Karl Lueger had two
decades before formed into the dominant local political force and brought to
municipal power.18
Lueger’s great political achievement at the time was the creation of an anti-liberal
middle-class bloc which reunited the groups that had been split following
the Revolution of 1848, the petty bourgeois on one hand and the wealthy
middle classes on the other, into a clerical, antisocialist and anti-Semitic citizens’
group.19
Lueger was to prove to be a master of rewriting political history.
He created the idea of the true, authentic Viennese as a new phenomenon in
political life and thus gave the city its own new tradition. He cast the ostensibly
true and real Vienna of the lower middle class as opposite to the experience of
alienation and the working-world shock of modernity. Lueger created a patriarchal
image of Vienna as a Vaterstadt, an imagined community of the petite
bourgeoisie. Therein he forged an image of the capital city as the paragon of a
pre-industrial, middle class, familial, and ‘evangelized’ city based on authority,
paternalism, patrimony, and Christian-Catholic values. Lueger recognized in
Schuhmeier a worthy opponent, his congenial popular counterpart. Their clashes
in the municipal council were legendary. With both, repartee, wit, sarcasm,
and scorn could suddenly turn into profound enmity. But their shouting matches
and invectives just as often ended in theatrical gestures of reconciliation, and in
such cases Lueger especially would always allude to the Vienna-ness so innately
a part of the both of them.
Franz Schuhmeier and Karl Lueger, both literally “children of the suburbs”,
were prototypical exponents, actors and at the same time directors of a period of
transition that followed the end of the liberal era in Vienna and of the reformation
of political power relations. The period between 1890 and 1910 initiated the
politics of the masses, reacting to the unfulfilled social promises of liberalism
18	 Cf. Maderthaner/Musner, 1999(1), p. 176 - 208.
19	 Cf. Schorske, 1981, p. 116.
Wolfgang Maderthaner
132
and at the same time signaling its end. Though social democracy, by creating
a modern mass party, successfully managed to take up the unfulfilled political
agenda of liberalism, it was largely excluded, on account of a municipal electoral
law in force until 1919, from any real political influence in the city. Lueger
and his party of Christian Socials, however, destroyed the political power of the
liberals, primarily via their “municipalization” (Verstadtlichung) projects and by
building up a loyal power-base among the municipal civil servants, while leaving
the social and political structures intact. Lueger enthroned the lower-middle-class
citizen as the new political ruler on a local level; in place of liberal
ideology, his own ideas became the basis for a policy agenda.20
Social democracy as a mass movement, by contrast, was restricted to proclaiming
the city as the site of a different future politics, a different society, and
a different culture. In this way it developed the idea of a utopia of equality, one
that was to take on concrete form after World War I in Red Vienna. Lueger, by
contrast, relied on a policy of xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Instead of addressing
the welfare of the city as a whole, he reinforced social tensions and
divisions. His policy was one of ‘evangelizing’ the poor and excluding those
who had recently migrated to the city. If Franz Schuhmeier also played on an
anti-Semitic resentment that was already deeply embedded in the attitudes of all
the various social groups comprising Viennese society at the turn of the century,
this remained fundamentally distinct from Lueger’s outright hatred of Jews.21
Lueger’s marginalization and defamation of Jews as a group was aimed at
covering up the problems inherited from liberalism and making the social tensions
it had left behind the basis for a xenophobic populism. In this way, his
anti-Semitism became not only an instrument of mass mobilization but also an
integral component of a new kind of political culture, one that incited the masses
against the old elites, and the integrated against the outsiders. Schuhmeier and
the social democrats, by contrast, made the social tensions and contradictions
their point of departure; overcoming them became the basis of their political
agenda. Lueger used the ‘Others’, Jews and foreigners as outsiders, to satisfy
symbolically the disparate interests of his clientele and thus to remain in power.
The social democrats aimed at integration in order to come to power and to create,
via an alliance of the working class and the assimilated intellectual Jewish
community, a social order in which both would be citizens instead of outsiders,
in the center instead of on the periphery. Yet, however different these new forms
20	 Cf. Boyer, 1995, p. 236, 154.
21	 Cf. Pulzer, 1988; Pollak, 1997.
Outcast Vienna 1900
133
of mass politics were articulated, in their collective dimension they reflected
Robert Musil’s common breath.
Literature
Arbeiter-Zeitung, 19.09.1911.
Boyer, John W., Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna. Christian socialism in
power 1897-1918, Chicago 1995.
Braunthal, Julius, Victor und Friedrich Adler. Zwei Generationen Arbeiterbewegung,
Vienna 1965.
Canker, Ivan, Pavliceks Krone. Literarische Skizzen aus Wien, Klagenfurt 1995.
Feldbauer, Peter, Stadtwachstum und Wohnungsnot. Determinanten unzureichender
Wohnungsversorgung in Wien 1848 bis 1914, Vienna 1977.
Horak, Roman et al. (eds.), Metropole Wien. Texturen der Moderne, 2 vols.,
Vienna 2000.
Id. et al. (eds.), Stadt. Masse. Raum. Wiener Studien zur Archäologie des Popularen,
Vienna 2001.
Kläger, Emil, Durch die Quartiere der Not und des Verbrechens. Wien und die
Jahrhundertwende, Vienna 1908.
Maderthaner, Wolfgang/Musner, Lutz, Die Anarchie der Vorstadt. Das andere
Wien um 1900, Frankfurt/Main/New York 1999(1);
Id., “Aufstand der Massen”, in: Damals. Das aktuelle Magazin für Geschichte
und Kultur 3 (1999)(2), p. 12-19.
Id., Unruly Masses. The other side of Fin de Siècle Vienna, New York/Oxford
2008.
Musil, Robert, The Man without Qualities, translated from German by Sophie
Wilkins, New York 1995.
Parteivorstand der Sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterpartei Deutschösterreichs
(ed.), Victor Adlers Aufsätze, Reden und Briefe. 11 vols., Vienna 1922-1929,
here vol. 4, Vienna 1925.
Pulzer, Peter, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria,
Cambridge, Mass. 1988.
Pollak, Michael, Wien 1900. Eine verletzte Identität, Konstanz 1997.
Renner, Karl, Soziale Demonstrationen, in: Der Kampf 1 (1911), p. 1-4.
Schnitzler, Arthur, Traumnovelle, Frankfurt am Main 1992.
Schorske, Carl E., Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Politics and culture, New York 1981.
Sombart, Nikolaus, Nachdenken über Deutschland. Vom Historismus zur Psychoanalyse,
München/Zürich 1987.
Wolfgang Maderthaner
134
Winter, Max, Das goldene Wienerherz, Berlin 1905(1).
Id., Im unterirdischen Wien, Leipzig/Berlin 1905(2).
Id., Im dunkelsten Wien. Wiener Schilderungen aus der Luegerzeit, Vienna,
1925.
Austrian State Archives/Österreichisches Staatsarchiv:
- Ministerium des Inneren, Präsidium, 9798, 19.09.1911.
135
Revisiting Campbell Bunk
Jerry White
Campbell Bunk – more properly Campbell Road in the North London borough
of Islington – was an unlikely slum.1
It was, when laid out from the 1850s, a suburban
street of 100-or so quite substantial houses on three floors, designed for
respectable clerks and not the poor. Even in the 1920s and 1930s, the interwar
years of which I made a detailed study, Campbell Bunk was an atypical slum in
spacial terms. The worst run-down housing in London being cleared as slums
in those years were mainly two- or even one-storey dwellings built in courts or
alleys and tucked behind the main streets of old London, in the ancient districts
of Holborn, Finsbury, Stepney and Southwark, all close to the original City of
London. They were narrow, congested, largely hidden from view. But Campbell
Bunk was a long wide street that opened off one of London’s main cross-routes
and close to the busy suburban transport interchange of Finsbury Park railway
and tube station. On either side and all around were respectable working-class
streets which in general were not poor. Yet here it was, the most notorious street
in this densely-populated segment of north London and wide open to the public
gaze. But slum it was by any definition. It was one of just eighteen or so streets
in the whole metropolis coloured entirely black – its population cast as ‘semicriminal
and degraded’ – in the poverty maps drawn up by the London School
of Economics around 1930. It had also been coloured entirely black in Charles
Booth’s poverty maps of forty years earlier.
It was, then, an unlikely slum. And it had become one by an accident of history,
or rather a conjunction of accidents. Its development had been stunted from
birth. Not all its building plots were sold in the initial speculation of 1857-8; the
1	 Cf. White, 2003. This was first published as The Worst Street in North London:
Campbell Bunk, Islington, Between the Wars, London, 1986. All page references
here are to the 2003 edition.
Jerry White
136
local market for new houses was glutted, so building did not begin until 1865;
six years on and the road was still unmade and only half-built on; not all the
empty spaces would be filled with houses until the early 1880s, some eighteen
years or so after building began. Mud and filth on the ground caused rents to fall
and the clerks to leave. Their place was taken by chimney sweeps, general dealers,
street sellers, porters and building labourers. The neighbourhood’ s rough
boys and men gambled in the empty spaces. And in 1880 came the fatal tipping
point. A large house on the street’s middle junction, intended to become a public
house, couldn’t get a magistrates’ licence and was instead converted to a common
lodging house for ninety men. The shiftless homeless poor of London had
been introduced to Campbell Bunk. Other houses soon followed suit. Within a
decade there were more common lodging house beds in Campbell Road than
any other street in Islington.
So Campbell Bunk’s reputation was established by the 1890s. This is how
Charles Booth, who uniquely accorded the street three pages in Life and Labour
of the People in London, described it at that time:
“A street fairly broad, with houses of three storeys, not ill-built, many being
occupied as common lodging-houses; broken windows, dirty curtains, doors
open, a litter of paper, old meat tins, heads of fish and stalks of vegetables.
It is a street where thieves and prostitutes congregate. The thieves live in the
common lodging-houses, paying fourpence a night, and the prostitutes, generally
two together, in a single furnished room, which they rent at four or five
shillings a week. They are the lowest class of back-street prostitute, and an
hour or two after midnight they may be seen returning home.”2
A few years later and a local sanitary inspector vented his feelings about the
street in a report to Islington Council:
“This road is the king of all roads. I have been in practically all the slums
in London; Notting Hill, Chelsea, Battersea, Fulham, Nine Elms, and also
the East End, but there is nothing so lively as this road. Thieves, Prostitutes,
cripples, Blind People, Hawkers of all sorts of wares from boot laces to
watches and chains are to be found in this road, Pugilists, Card Sharpers,
Counter Jumpers, Purse Snatchers, street singers, and Gamblers of all kinds,
and things they call men who live on the earnings of women, some of whom
I saw outside the Town Hall with the unemployed last week. I could say a lot
2	 Cited in White, 2003, p. 23f.
Revisiting Campbell Bunk
137
more about this road, but I think I have said enough to prove to you the class
of people who inhabit it. Of course, there are a few who perhaps get an honest
living, but they want a lot of picking-out.”3
That was written in 1909, and I was myself a sanitary inspector for Islington
Council some sixty years after my predecessor wrote these words. My job title
had changed by 1970 to public health inspector, but the work was pretty much
the same. And although Campbell Bunk had been demolished fifteen years before,
its reputation was hardly less vivid than it had been. Indeed, I kept on hearing
stories about it and by the end of the 1970s I had determined to investigate its
story further by talking to people who had lived there. By this time I had got into
the press my first book, an oral history of a Jewish East End tenement block4
– a
different sort of ghetto we might call that – so I was experienced enough with a
tape recorder and reasonably adept at finding people to talk to. I wrote an article
in “History Workshop Journal” on what I called this ‘lumpen community’ and
thought I’d disposed of the Bunk.5
In fact I hadn’t. The place continued to haunt
me. And despite not wanting to write another book about another tiny sliver of
London, I spent in all some eight years trying to tease out the many contradictions
of this extraordinary place. Central among them, to my mind, was this:
Campbell Bunk was a close community where people would steal from one
another, and was in numerous other ways at war with itself, as well as at war
with the world beyond it.
The book was published twenty-six years ago, and was finished a year or
more before that. Since then, of course, our terminology and explanatory frameworks
have shifted. I don’t recall that ‘social exclusion’was much used, if at all,
at the time. Had it been, then I believe “Campbell Bunk” would have provided
insights into the contradictory mechanisms involved in the social exclusion process,
and I’ll come back to this point in a moment. The ‘underclass’ was written
about at the time, but it’s an unsatisfactory term, I think, and I didn’t use it: it
seems to describe a social formation too inert, too removed from possibilities
of change, too far isolated from the shifting dynamics of economic opportunity
and class relations, to be a useful descriptor of social reality. Marxism was a far
more popular theoretical tool for social historians then than now, and I myself
began from a ‘base and superstructure’ model of change in Campbell Bunk. In
the event I found it incomplete and unsatisfying when trying to comprehend a
3	 Cited in Ibid., p. 25.
4	 Ibid., 1980.
5	 Ibid., 1979.
Jerry White
138
‘whole society’or ‘total way of life’, and I needed the introduction of gender fully
to explain the street’s history. The cultural or linguistic turn, I confess, passed
me by at the time – and so have the re-turns and about-turns since then. I remain
an unrepentantly old-fashioned social historian.
So looking back, revisiting Campbell Bunk as it were after twenty-six years
away, what do I find?
First, it has to be said that in many ways, of course, this really was a socially
excluded space and culture. But the picture of social exclusion we find there is
complex and contingent, as perhaps all historical reality proves to be.
Certainly, though, Campbell Bunk actively set itself apart from – turned its
back on - contemporary London in a number of ways.
It was, for instance, distinctively in-bred, with longterm traditions of settlement
that were quite unusual. Many families in the street in the 1930s could
trace their residence there back to the 1890s and before. Kinship patterns were
frequently extensive – one man I spoke to could count more than forty relatives
in a street of a hundred or so houses (about a thousand people). It was more frequent
for young men and women to marry fellow-Bunkites than was the case in
neighbouring streets. And longterm settlements and kinship were reinforced by
the street’s traditional connection with gypsies, which seems to have developed
by the 1880s. This was an element in Bunk culture that strengthened a tendency
to economic independence outside wage labour that I found to be a culturally
distinctive, almost a defining, component of the Bunk’s separateness. I wrote
that
There is no documentary evidence for a gypsy connection with Campbell
Road, but the oral tradition is overwhelming (although not shared by the street
as a whole). A gypsy – or ‘pikie’ in cockney slang – pedigree was claimed by
Harry James and for a number of other families. There were the Brothertons,
who moved into the street some time in the 1920s; Dolly Mills and his family
put up in Campbell Road whenever they were in the neighbourhood; Gypsy
Jack Hobbs sold manure from a horse and cart and later married a girl from the
street; Liza Harmer and Mrs Knowles, the street sellers, both had ‘Romaner’ or
‘pikie’ backgrounds.
The James family was headed by George, known as Dido. He was a tinker,
repairing cane chairs and mats and sharpening scissors, knives, lawnmowers
and so on from a richly-decorated barrow which he pushed over the streets of
North London. He once fought Ernie Barnes, another knife grinder with a similar
heritage, for the title of Campbell Road’s ‘King of the Pikies’. He went to
Barnet Fair every September, a gathering place for gypsies, and he was said to
have some sort of title to land there. He taught his son words which were not
Revisiting Campbell Bunk
139
even in the varied London underworld cant of the 1930s – words like ‘jas’ for
go, ‘yog’for fire, ‘chokkors’for boots. And at least two of his boys never took to
work, becoming professional thieves until after the Second World War.6
If this independent economic element was defining, there were numerous
other cultural components that separated Campbell Bunk from its neighbours.
Its pleasures, for instance, had a rough component about them that had gone out
of fashion in working-class London even before the First World War. It retained
a culture of heavy drinking and drunkenness among men and older women, in
part no doubt an antidote to the foul, crowded and verminous living conditions
there. Its collective male pleasures were dominated by illegal street gambling
with dice and coins. There was a passion for fighting. Some men were terrors,
to their neighbours and to others, but most men seem to have resorted to fists or
worse on the slightest provocation. This rubbed off on many Bunk women and
girls, some urged by their parents to settle their differences with violence. Violence,
illegal pastimes and the way in which many people from the road made
their living in the streets as costermongers, hawkers, scrap-metal dealers and so
on, brought many Bunk dwellers into a sharp and brutal collective antagonism
with the police. And that again was distinctively different from most workingclass
streets in Islington.
But apart from setting itself apart, it was also cast out, excluded by contemporary
London. Take poverty. Not everyone in Campbell Bunk was poor, for
its thieves, prostitutes, dealers and rent collectors could make a good return, if
only for short and irregular periods; and there were always wage-earners in the
local economy who kept well above the poverty line. But the depth of poverty
in Campbell Bunk in the 1920s, at least, was sometimes at pre-war, almost Victorian
levels. It became a reservoir, perhaps a sanctuary, for the very poorest in
interwar North London. Here are some instances.
John Morley, 11 years old, was arrested for begging in November 1919. He
had chronic conjunctivitis, ‘fassy’ eye or sticky eye, common enough in Campbell
Road. “He was in a filthy condition. It was a cold, wet day and he has no
shirt. When food was offered to him he ate it ravenously.” Daisy Booth, 19 years
old in 1925, and prosecuted for theft, had a baby to keep: “They were practically
starving and without money […]. ‘I had no milk and no fire at home, and not a
penny coming in.’” When a Campbell Road painter was convicted of stealing
milk from a doorstep in February 1932, the Court Missionary “said there was
no doubt [his] child was hungry.” A police report in May 1933 on a 31-year-old
labourer found he “had no food in the house beyond a little bread.” “See, we
6	 Cf. Ibid., 2003, p. 55f.
Jerry White
140
was like animals, we was like animals at home, all of us hungry […]. I used to
sit eating cabbage stalks cos I was that hungry,” recalled Ronnie and Marjie
Drover from number 25. And Mavis Knight’s mother suffered from psoriasis,
rheumatoid arthritis and chronic under-feeding: “She has to wear dark glasses
cos her eyes was so affected by the malnutrition.”7
“I’ve been to school many times with women’s shoes on, and women’s stockings
tied up in a knot there [for socks],” and so did other boys from Campbell
Road. “No kids went to school in long trousers in them days,” recalled Walter
Spencer. “But they did from the Bunk because they were men’s trousers cut
down with your arse hanging down.”8
Walter and his two brothers slept on a
wooden platform with a flock overlay as a mattress, built into the tiny attic at 86
Campbell Road. The makeshift bed was covered with war-surplus blankets and
their Uncle Charlie’s army greatcoat. There was a paraffin lamp on the wall, and
the room was just big enough for the bed and little else:
“And I remember up there Christmas time. One particular Christmas […] we
used to hang our stockings over for Christmas […]. I remember this particular
year – my brother remembers it, never forgot it. We woke up – I felt mine.
‘Oh’, I said, ‘we’re alright […] we got some ink ‘ere!’ Cos it felt […] hard, like.
We used to have orange a penny, and a few nuts and that. I thought ‘Oh it’s all
right, we got something,’ cos the old man had had a bad year, that Christmas.
Oh, when we got up, you know, it was light in the morning, never looked at it
until the morning, never forget: it was cinders out the grate and hard bread.
And my brother ate that bloody bread! He really ate it – he was crunching it.”9
The very reputation of the Bunk conspired to keep its residents poor and conspired
to exclude them from contemporary London, to some degree at least.
Labelling or stigmatization of the street and its residents in the local press, in
the police courts and by word of mouth – the myths and exaggerations that
persisted long enough after the street’s demise to make me interested in it in the
first place – directly affected the life-chances of the people living there. They
could, indeed, be excluded from the labour market by employers for whom a
Campbell-Road address was sufficient to mark out a boy as a thief and a girl as
something worse. Perhaps the fear of discrimination was more pervasive than
discrimination itself. For example it was said that the Ever Ready battery factory
7	 Ibid., p. 71.
8	 Ibid., p. 71f.
9	 Ibid.
Revisiting Campbell Bunk
141
in Fonthill Road would not take girls from Campbell Road, but it sometimes
did. Yet there was no doubt that discrimination was felt to be real, and that it
was experienced as a direct and personal rejection by the labour market. “I have
written for hundreds of jobs,” complained ‘A British Legionite (an ex-serviceman)
to the local newspaper in 1922, “and when I mention Campbell Road it is
all up, simply because the street has been given a bad name.” Another wrote “I
lived there five years [and] I could never obtain a berth from there. People said
to me, you will never get anything while you live there […]. It is like dynamite
to mention the road. Why don’t you alter the name? I wish, from the bottom of
my heart, I had never known of its existence.”10
The street’s name was indeed changed from Campbell Road in 1938, to
Whadcoat Street. There were, though, ways of avoiding the stigma: one youth
from number 52 – on the Paddington Street corner – always gave his address
as 52 Paddington Street. And in 1924, a charwoman convicted of theft from
an employer was said by the police to have “lived in Campbell Road but gave
another address.”11
These then were the traditional ‘ghetto’ elements, as we might call them,
which distinctively isolated – socially excluded - Campbell Bunk from all
around it. Yet, and this cannot be stressed too highly, these ghetto walls were
porous. The outside influences on the street were numerous, especially in the
lives of its young people – school, of course, but also the various clubs for boys
and girls run by the missions and working-men’s clubs that had Campbell Bunk
as their primary focus. Though the street’s housing market attracted only the
poor, there were many newcomers to the street, residents who came and went
and sometimes settled for lengthy periods; they brought connections with other
parts of London and no doubt spoke of different ways of doing things.
Even more important, these connections with London, even with a wider
world, were strengthened by the expanding cultural life of the metropolis in the
1920s and ‘30s, and by a growing culture of working-class consumerism. We
might mention, for instance, the influence of the cinema. Cinema penetrated
everywhere, even to Campbell Bunk. From this new cultural element of talking
pictures, with all its baneful influences according to contemporary puritans, and
all its richness of new associations and thrills for the young people of Campbell
Bunk, some could weave a fantasy world that the old London music-halls had
never offered. It was noted in 1934 how, in Islington’s ‘most notorious café’,
the conversation was mostly in American accents. Nearly every girl there was
10	 Ibid., p. 51.
11	 Ibid.
Jerry White
142
acting a “hard-boiled Kate” role. Nearly every youth, with a very long overcoat
and a round black hat on the rear of his head, was to himself a “Chicago nut”.’12
The connections with contemporary London, and the road out of a socially
excluded Campbell Bunk, was strengthened most of all by changes in the labour
market. Despite the Great Depression and the Crash of 1929, and despite the
economic distress common to many parts of industrial Britain, demand for consumer
durables in London was fuelled by the suburban growth of the 1920s and
the building boom of the decade to come. London prospered, and the demand
for factory labour seemed inexhaustible. The demand was strongest for girl labour.
Even the girls of Campbell Bunk were invited to find work at the factory
bench. And never had there been so many things to spend their earnings on.
It was this dynamic world opening up for young women in Campbell Bunk
that sowed the seeds of the street’s dissolution during the interwar period, a generation
before the bulldozers moved in. It was not an easy process. For the new
world opening up for young women in Campbell Bunk was frequently viewed
with anger and jealousy by their mothers. Something like an inter-generational
struggle took place between mothers left behind in the slum and their daughters
trying to make their way out. In true Campbell Bunk fashion it could be accompanied
by threats, bullying, theft and violence. We have room for only a couple
of instances to stand in for many.
The twenty-year old May Purslowe worked at a North London sweet factory
in the early 1920s. Her mother was a hard-drinking charwoman or casual
domestic servant, and the family lived in two rooms in Campbell Road, where
three girls shared one bed and May’s mother and young brother shared another.
Rows soon began over how much May should pay her mother for her ‘keep’.
May and her mother had always been at loggerheads. May, accoding to Mrs
Purslowe, “had got too much of what the cat licked its arse with.”13
May became
particularly vocal over how she should be clothed. Mrs Purslowe had taken it on
herself to clothe May out of the money the girl handed over. But her mother’s
choice of courier was restricted to totters’ barrows in Campbell Road and the
Fonthill Road rag shop. Clothes became, for mother and daughter, a fiercely
contested symbol of independence:
“And this one particular day I said to her, ‘I’m not giving you all my money,
I’m gonna buy my own clothes.’ And I went to Chapel Street, Islington market,
and I bought a velvet skirt and a blouse. And when I came home, washed
12	 Cited in Ibid., p. 166.
13	 Ibid., p. 202.
Revisiting Campbell Bunk
143
meself, dressed to go out, she says to me, ‘And where do you think you’re
going?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m going out.’ So she says, ‘Oh are you?’ And she did
no more, she tore all these clothes off me. And of course I cried and went
into me aunt’s which was next door but one, number 31 […] and I said to her,
‘Mum’s tore all my clothes.’ So she said, ‘Oh, you’d better stay in here then.’
And I had to go indoors back again to get me old clothes to put on.”14
May chose a route out of Campbell Road that many other girls took – they found
a husband as quickly as they could: the mean age of marriage of girls in England
and Wales in the 1930s was 25 years; in Campbell Road it was 21.2; in the street
next door, fewer than one in eleven girls (under 9 %) were twenty years old or
younger when they married; in Campbell Road it was nearly one in three. But
May found that her mother did not react well to the prospect:
“First night he took me home I said to him, ‘You don’t want to come down to
my door,’ I said, ‘because if me mother comes home drunk you’ll be sorry.’
So he said, ‘Well, that’s all right,’ he said. So of course, home they come from
the Duke public house all merry and bright and singing. And when she went
to come indoors, there was my boyfriend, Bob, standing there with me and
she says to him, ‘What the effin’ hell are you doing here?’ So he said, ‘Well,
I’ve brought your daughter home.’ So she said, ‘Well you can effin’ well sling
yer ‘ook again.’ So that was that. So I said to him, ‘Come on, stand up on the
corner.’ She said, ‘And you don’t want to stop up there all night else I’ll have a
bucket of piss poured over yer!’ So that was the wonderful reception he got.”15
May had to creep indoors after she had been out with Bob once in case her
mother caught her staying out late. And one, when dressed in her finest clothes
to go with him to the Wood Green Empire, her mother threw a bucket of slops
over her because May hadn’t done the washing up. But eventually all ended
happily. In 1922, May and Bob were married at Tottenham, and chose a house
in respectable Wood Green.
Nancy Tiverton, my second example, had similar experiences a few years
later, working at a local brush factory. The job itself she found because of her
dissatisfactions with her appearance, especially how she was clothed. She sensibly
decided to keep any new paid job secret from her mother and keep paying
her the same amount from her previous worse-paid employment:
14	 Ibid.
15	 Ibid., p. 203.
Jerry White
144
“I thought to meself, I don’t know what to do, you know, as I am now I’ll
never get a rag on me back. I was a disgrace, I was, honest. And it wasn’t my
fault. So I thought to myself, I know what I’ll do. I won’t tell mum. I’ll go
after the Christmas holiday, go down the Star Brush, see if I can get on […].
So I didn’t say a word to her. I come out as though I was coming to work, and
down the Star Brush [factory] I went, and got on.”16
Every penny she had went on clothes. Her mother kept a watchful eye on her
purchases:
“‘How much you pay for that costume?’ So I said, ‘Four guineas.’ So she said,
‘Oh. How much them boots?’ ‘Twelve and six.’ So she said, ‘Oh.’ They was
down the pawn shop Monday. She asked that so she knew what to ask for, see?
Down there Monday.”17
This was not the only one of Mrs Tiverton’s tricks. Nancy’s sister Marjie, four
years her elder, was courting a print worker from Walthamstow, well-off indeed
in Campbell Road’s terms. Each time he visited Marjie he’d give young Nancy
half a crown. But Mrs Tiverton spotted this the first time it happened and claimed
the money as her own thereafter. She cadged, too, from a Campbell Road
boy who asked her permission to take Nancy to Finsbury Park Empire:
“So you know what? Before he could take me out my mum say, ‘Lend us half
a crown, Freddie?’ Nancy had to hide her money in a makeshift money belt
tied with string round her waist under her clothes; ‘I kept that secret. If I’d
told her she would have had it she would.’”18
Marjie left home over her mother’s depredations. Mrs Tiverton had pawned one
of the rings given her by the Walthamstow fiancé. And Nancy, too, fell unwittingly
into a similar trap. Mrs Tiverton provoked a row and told Nancy to go.
She gave Nancy a parcel of her clothes – “‘Take that with you, you haven’t got
to come back no more here for that.’”19
But the treasured costume and boots
were not in the parcel, and Nancy had to go back to her mother for the pawn
ticket. It cost her some 15s to redeem her own clothes from the pawnbroker.
16	 Ibid., p. 205.
17	 Ibid., p. 206.
18	 Ibid.
19	 Ibid.
Revisiting Campbell Bunk
145
Both these young women turned their backs on Campbell Bunk, and so did
their sisters, by the end of the 1920s.
If we sum up the picture of social exclusion we find in Campbell Bunk in the
two decades after the First World War we might characterise it thus. Social exclusion
was a traditional element in the street’s make-up and had been for forty
or fifty years before. It worked both ways, the street’s culture rejecting the local
economy and the local economy rejecting the people of Campbell Bunk. But
this was never watertight, and there have been many economic and cultural connections
with a wider London that got stronger from the 1920s. The key element
in weakening social exclusion in Campbell Bunk was, I think, first and foremost
a combination of economic opportunity and expanding desires affecting young
girls and drawing them bodily into a more inclusive working-class and metropolitan
world. This helped undermine slum culture from the inside, dissolving as
it were the cement that held the street together; traditional life two decades and
more before the bulldozers eventually moved in. Finally, if I may, a word on
the book’s reception. I wrote it very much for myself, to try to understand this
most extraordinary place as best I could. For a wider audience I had in mind the
intelligent general reader, even though I’d included a lot of what we might call
academic baggage. But although I gave a copy to each of the main people I’d
interviewed I didn’t really think they’d like what I’d done. So I was surprised
and delighted when old Bunkites told me they’d read it from cover to cover. One
told me that it had helped him come to terms with his parents’behaviour that had
troubled him all his life. And I know that some others treasured the book and felt
proud that they’d had a hand in it. Even the man – not from the Bunk but well
known in it and a famous local bookmaker – who told me on publication that he
would sue me for every penny I had if his reputation were tarnished in any way
did not need to trouble his solicitors.
There were other surprises. A reunion of Bunkites was arranged at a working
men’s club in Finsbury Park, and some who hadn’t seen each other for years
were brought together again. Two plays were made out of material in the book
and staged in Finsbury Park and Nottingham. And, astonishingly, another book
with the Bunk as a major theme appeared in 1986. Tom McCarthy, who had
been born in Campbell Road in 1925 and left in 1986, wrote an autobiography
called Boysie, brought out by a small publishing firm in Devon.20
Mr McCarthy
had lived in Newcastle and he and I knew nothing of each other. Our approach
was very different and it was fascinating to see how this microscope part of
20	 McCarthy, 1986.
Jerry White
146
London could sustain two entirely contrasted narratives. If I remember right,
episodes from Mr McCarthy’s life found their way into the plays, too.
Nearly thirty years on, it would not be possible any longer to recover through
oral history this sort of dense study of neighbourhood life in the 1920s and
1930s. Memories die out so quickly. It is one of the enduring satisfactions of a
book like this that it creates its own archive of tapes and transcripts, for others
to listen to and use. And that these recollections were captured before memories
of life in Campbell Bunk, a representative rough London slum of the first half of
the twentieth century, had died out forever.
Literature
McCarthy, Tom, Boysie, Braunton (Devon) 1986.
White, Jerry, Campbell Bunk, a Lumpen Community in London between the
Wars, in: History Workshop Journal 8 (1979), p. 1-49.
Id., Rothschild Buildings. Life in an East End tenement block, 1887-1920, London,
Boston 1980.
Id., Campbell Bunk. The worst street in North London between the wars, London
2003.
147
Creating the City of Delhi
Stories of Strong Women and Weak Walls
Sonja Wengoborski/Jaspal Naveel Singh
1. Introduction
Situated in the Gangetic plain of northern India, Delhi has been of major economic,
military and cultural importance since at least three millennia. In popular
portrayal Delhi’s history is conceived of as a successive layering of seven, or
more, cities. In India’s great epic, the Mahābhārata, we find reference to the
possible first city, Indraprastha, the mythical capital of the PāṇḊhavaḥ kingdom,
popularly believed to be situated between India Gate and New Delhi Zoo.
Painted Grey Ware pottery was excavated between 1954 and 1971 at this site,
suggesting the existence of human settlements at around 1000 BCE; yet the
factual existence of Indraprastha remains debatable.1
It becomes apparent from
the Mahābhārata description that the city was imagined to have witnessed in-migration
from different social milieus – this is not rendered as being necessarily a
problematic or chaotic thing:
“When the city was built, there came, O king, numerous Brahmanas wellacquainted
with all the Vedas and conversant with every language, wishing
to dwell there. And there came also unto that town numerous merchants from
every direction, in the hope of earning wealth. There also came numerous
persons well-skilled in all the arts, wishing to take up their abode there.”2
Although this passage suggests a clearly defined social hierarchy or classification,
the diversity of social milieus is presented as a vital, or at least a normal,
1	 Cf. Singh, 2009, p. 19.
2	 Ganguli, 1970, Mahābhārata Book I, Section CCIX, ital. i.o.
Sonja Wengoborski/Jaspal Naveel Singh
148
feature of a functional city. Similarly, Danu Roy, in his stimulating essay City
makers and city breakers, makes the somewhat obvious, but oft-forgotten, observation
that cities and built environments are always the collective oeuvre of
diverse social groups:
“The visible structure of the city is always imposed upon its social foundations.
For instance, when even a casual visitor looks up at the imposing walls
of the forts built by the Tughlaqs and the Mughals, it could occur to him that
these walls could not have been ‘built’ by the kings. There must have been
masons and stonecutters, water carriers and sand loaders, mixers and helpers,
woodcutters and carpenters, ironsmithsand potters, labouring men and women
and donkeys by the thousands who did the actual work. So where, in the
pages of history, did they all disappear?”3
Roy’s observation surely alleviates a one-dimensional perception of Delhi’s history
as a subsequent accomplishment of great kings, emperors, city planners and
politicians and calls to put the actual workers, the city makers, into the focus.
However, the near absence of these city makers in historical sources and the
overrepresentation of the ‘grand’figures like rulers and famous architects leaves
us with the difficult task to reconstruct from available sources the astonishing
life-stories of the more ‘mundane’ individuals of history. The status of sources
has surely improved in modern times, but still the overwhelming majority of
scholarly work (except for perhaps literary studies and ethnographies) makes
use of official documents, colonial sources and documented historical caesuras
(like wars, or political decisions) and other accounts of those who are and have
been powerful. In the first part of this article, exactly such an approach will be
presented: we are drawing on official documents of city planning and academic/
journalistic writings about the city’s management of urban poverty. In the second
part, this viewpoint will then be contrasted with insights of modern Hindi
literature, which will foreground the lived experiences of the individual social
actors in the financially poorer milieus of Delhi.
2. Pre-independence Delhi and the creation of ‘slums’
Over the three millennia after Indraprastha, several cities were constructed in
the area of contemporary Delhi, first several bastions of indigenous kings, later
3	 Roy, 2010, p. 144.
Creating the City of Delhi
149
fortified cities of Muslim rulers, who were invading the region from central
Asia. The most recent of those fortified Muslim cities is Shāhjahānābād, which
was founded by the Moghul emperor Shāh Jahān in 1648. After Moghul power
began to wane in the late 18th
century, the British took possession of the walled
city of Shāhjahānābād in 1803, and the control of the Moghul emperors was
confined to the palace, the so-called Red Fort.
Figure 1: Schematic map of Delhi (adapted from descriptions/map in
Kacker, 2005, p. 70, and map in Chadha, 2005, p. 94).
The Indian Mutiny of 1857, an unsuccessful but yet traumatic military upheaval
against British rule (the Raj), was a consequential event for Shāhjahānābād.
Batra and Mehra regard the Mutiny as something like the founding myth of
slums in Delhi. During the skirmishes, the British increasingly regarded the city’s
small lanes and narrow back alleys, the mohullas, as dangerous, unruly
and potentially threatening. After the Mutiny, these experienced anxieties were
ideologically linked to notions of dirt:4
4	 Hosagrahar, 2005, p. 87, notes: “The events of 1857 had seriously influenced
colonial perceptions of disease, dirt, and disloyalty. During the period immediately
Sonja Wengoborski/Jaspal Naveel Singh
150
“‘Native’ culture was now admonished for its inferiority, its propensity for
dirt, filth, dampness and congestion, and an effort was made to introduce
contemporary European ideas of city order and planning to ameliorate the
poor condition of the city and its inhabitants.”5
The British began to demolish almost one third6
of the seemingly impenetrable
housing structures to ensure better surveillance and control (see also Ghalib’s
accounts in section 4.1). Attempts were even made to raze the entire city of
Shāhjahānābād to the ground, but luckily not enough explosive was accessible
at the time.7
Instead, the British removed themselves from the native population
and created their own quarter, Civil Lines, north of the walled city of
Shāhjahānābād. After the massive clearances following the Mutiny, the area outside
the western city walls became increasingly urbanized (Sabzī Mandī, Sadār
Bāzār and Pahāṛ Ganj). This created a major concern for colonial city planners
in the second half of the 19th
century, who endeavoured to plan the western extension
in an orderly way.8
In 1911, at the height of their imperial power in India, the British decided
to transfer the capital of their Indian Empire from Kolkata (spelled ‘Calcutta’
at the time) to Delhi. A vast area south of Shāhjahānābād was selected to build
the imperial city New Delhi, which was completed in 1931. The imperial vision
of the British architects Sir Edward Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker created an
imposing assemblage of octagonal axes and broad avenues, inspired by Versailles
and Washington, D.C., and monumental buildings in the architectural
traditions of classicism and historicism, while maintaining an ‘oriental’ flavour
by incorporating decorative ornaments of Mughal and Hindu architecture; this
stylistic pluralism was meant to symbolize British superiority and rationality,
and staged New Delhi as the apex of Indian civilization, and perhaps of civilization
in general.
New Delhi starkly differs in appearance from Shāhjahānābād, or Old Delhi,
as it is now often called. What is more, in spite of its allusions to rationality and
orderliness, the creation of New Delhi was itself a cause for further congestion
and ‘slummifying’ of other – now neglected and further enclosed – parts of the
following the rebellion, the inhabitants’ houses, streets, and ways of living appeared
to be even more unclean and diseased than before it.”
5	 Batra/Mehra, 2008, p. 393.
6	 Cf. Hosagrahar, 2005, p. 85.
7	 Cf. Roy, 2010, p. 145.
8	 Cf. Hosagrahar, 2005, p. 115-142.
Creating the City of Delhi
151
city. Hosagrahar comments: “In less than a century after they had taken over, colonial
officials declared Delhi, the home of Emperors and princes, the mystical
and exotic city of the Orient, an uncivilized ‘slum.’”9
In 1936, the entire walled
city of Old Delhi was catalogued as ‘slum’ in the city’s planning codes10
and in
more recent documents of city planning, Old Delhi and its adjoining neighbourhoods
to the west were dubbed ‘Special Area’.11
3.	 A historical outline of city planning
	 of post-independence Delhi
The colonial dichotomies of order – disorder, (western) rationality – (oriental)
irregularity and slum – non-slum were taken up in the independent Indian Republic.
Chandigarh, the newly created joint capital of the Indian states of Panjāb
and Haryāṇa, is one drastic example: a hyper-order of square blocks and straight
axes, create functionally separated sectors (e.g. a sector for shopping, a sector
for restaurants, residence sectors etc.). However, the architectural mastermind
behind Chandigarh was not an Indian, but the Swiss-French modernist Le Corbusier.
Likewise, the heads behind Delhi’s first master plan (MPD-62) were the
American architect and city planner Albert Mayer and a committee of members
of the Ford Foundation. These international inputs helped India to overcome
colonial associations of a nostalgic ‘Orient’, while simultaneously maintaining
the colonial legacy of rationality.
The post-independence strategies of city planning in Delhi can be roughly
structured into three phases: the 1950s and 1960s saw modernist and socialist
attempts of centralized city planning and expansion. In the 1970s and 1980s,
more pragmatic and rigorous endeavours of coping with the challenges of informal
settlements and urban poverty came to the fore. From the 1990s onwards,
a globalized alignment of India integrated the corporate and capitalist worldsystem
into city planning. Thus we observe a paradigm shift from what could be
described as ‘rationalist’ to ‘cleaning-up’ to ‘neo-liberalist’. The three phases/
mindsets are not necessarily in harmony with each other, and we can actually
observe how the ‘rationalist’ phase of the 1950/60s was in effect overturned
by the ‘cleaning-up’ phase of the 1970/80s, which in turn was rearranged to
a degree by the more recent ‘neo-liberalist’ phase. This development parallels
9	 Ibid., p. 149.
10	 Cf. Batra/Mehra, 2008, p. 393.
11	 Cf. DMP-2001, p. 4; DMP-2021, p. 45.
Sonja Wengoborski/Jaspal Naveel Singh
152
India’s political, economic and societal transition from a socialist to a capitalist
system, epitomized in the liberalization of the markets in the early 1990s.
It becomes apparent, however, that processes of Delhi’s city planning of the
pre-1990 era foreshadowed India’s capitalist alignment. It is exactly this overlapping
and intertwining of the three phases/mindsets that carries a potential for
ideological justifications, for example by drawing on historical traditions of city
planning on the one hand and by projecting futuristic visions of a ‘world-class
city’ on the other.
3.1	 A city for everybody:
	 The rationalist mindset of the Nehruvian era
When New Delhi became the national capital of the Republic of India in 1947,
the city witnessed an unprecedented rate of in-migration. With a decennial
population growth rate of 90 percent, Delhi’s urban population mushroomed
from under 700,000 in 1941 to 1.4 million in 1951,12
almost doubling the density
of persons per square kilometre from 613 to 1174 persons.13
It can be assumed
that most migrants were refugees from north-west India, escaping the civil wars
during the India-Pakistan Partition in 1947/48.14
In addition, the bureaucratic
and administrative apparatus, foreign missions and other institutions attracted
many civil servants, administrators, functionaries and other professionals. Finally,
after Lahore had been included into Pakistan, the trade and wholesale
business of northern India concentrated on Delhi, and specifically on the already
congested Shāhjahānābād/Old Delhi.
In the 1950s two governmental agencies, the Ministry of Rehabilitation and
the Delhi Improvement Trust, were created to restore order and provide adequate
housing for the emergent metropolis. Together with numerous private land colonizing
companies, the government acquired vast areas in the west, the east and
in the south of the city and created housing colonies and, moreover, transformed
areas inhabited by ‘tribal communities’ into middle-class neighbourhoods. Despite
these efforts, housing for all Delhiites remained unattainable. Large portions
of the city’s population lived in unserviced illegal squatter settlements with
no prospect of betterment. What is more, in 1955, an outbreak of jaundice, due
12	 Cf. Gazetteer, 1976, p. 120. These figures represent the urban population of the
Delhi territory. The rural population of the time was ca. 220,000 in 1941 and ca.
306,000 in 1951. Cf. Figure 2 for an overview.
13	 Cf. Ibid., p. 125. Again, these figures represent Delhi’s urban population.
14	 Cf. also in the following Kacker, 2005, p. 69.
Creating the City of Delhi
153
to inadequate sanitation measures in some of the new colonies, killed approximately
700 people, mainly in the affluent areas of New Delhi and Civil Lines.15
The government was forced to react, and in 1957 the newly created Delhi Development
Authority (DDA) set out to device a Master Plan for Delhi which
came to be known as the MPD-62.
Figure 2: Population of Delhi from 1901 to 2011. Figures are for total
population of the National Capital Territory, i.e. Delhi’s rural and
urban population (adapted from Government of India, Census of India
2011).
The MPD-62 predicted that the city’s population would increase to over five
million by 1981.16
The plan estimated approximately 50,000 “dwelling units in
bustis17
scattered all over the city”18
and suggested to relocate these squatters to
“various parts of the urban area so that they are integrated into the neighborhood
community”19
which, however, should not be “too far away from major work
centres”.20
These plans seemed to acknowledge the vital function of squatters
15	 Cf. Roy, 2010, p. 149
16	 Cf. Masterplans forDelhi. MPD-62, p. i.
17	 A bustī or bastī is a north Indian term for ‘informal settlement.’ Other words that
are used in the Master plans for Delhi. MPD-62, are ‘jugghie jhonpari’ or ‘JJ
Cluster’ and ‘slum.’
18	 Masterplans forDelhi. MPD-62, p. 5.
19	 Ibid., p. ii.
20	 Ibid., p. 27.
Sonja Wengoborski/Jaspal Naveel Singh
154
and low-income groups, who constitute the majority of workforce in small-scale
industries, domestic labour and other low-wage duties.
Such plans were nurtured – on a more ideational level – by the newly established
government under Jawaharlal Nehru, which envisaged a ‘city for everybody’
and announced to subsidise housing for low-income groups.21
The idea
seemed persuasive: to eliminate private speculation and rising land prices, in
1959 the government froze on all vacant or undeveloped land around the city
limits, making the land available on reasonable prices at any given time; the
DDA would then develop this land and sell or rent 50 percent of the housing
plots on the free market, acquiring revenue, which would then be used both to
purchase new land and to subsidise the remaining 50 percent of plots for lowincome
groups.22
3.2	 Time for some action: The politics of eviction
After Nehru’s death in 1964, however, it became apparent that his vision was
unattainable: only eleven percent of the plots had reached lower-income groups,
while most plots were openly auctioned with the aim to maximize profits: “Land
was released in a staggered manner, and plots in developed areas were deliberately
withheld, to push prices up.”23
By the 1970s it became clear that the size of
the city’s population would significantly surpass the DDA’s predictions and that
attempts to provide housing for low-income groups and labouring squatters had
drastically failed. In a “frenetic burst of activity, the administrative machinery
swung into action”24
and between 1975 and 1977 around one million squatters
were forcibly relocated from the city centres to the low-lying flood plains on the
eastern bank of the Yamuna River. Each family was entitled to a 25-square-yard
plot with common water, electricity and sanitation services. The vacated spaces
in the city were used for building an infrastructure required for theAsian Games,
which Delhi was to host in 1982.
Paradoxically, to construct all the necessary roads, flyovers, hotels, offices,
apartments and stadiums, around one million migrant workers immigrated to
the city during 1979 and 1982, squatting on the construction sites or nearby,25
and making up, as it were, for the one million squatters who had been relocated
21	 Cf. Kacker, 2005, p. 73.
22	 Cf. Ibid., p. 74.
23	 Ibid.
24	 Also in the following Roy, 2010, p. 151.
25	 Cf. Batra/Mehra, 2008, p. 398.
Creating the City of Delhi
155
a few years earlier. Moreover, most of these workers stayed in the city after the
games, inflating the population of Delhi to over six million in 1981.
The radical resettlement politics of the 1970s were in fact rather attempts to
demolish informal settlements than to relocate them in an ordered or rational
manner as the MPD-62 proposed. Batra and Mehra (2008) call this the ‘Emergency
Period’26
and the authors provide some insights of how the processes of
slum demolitions work in practice:27
first, a notice is given to the local pradhāns,
the spokespersons or ‘strong men’ of an informal settlement. These then might
or might not pass on this information to the local residents. Several practices are
employed that divide the residents along various lines. For instance, a certain
cut-off date is usually announced, which is perhaps set 15 or 20 years prior to
the eviction. The residents who stayed in the settlement before this cut-off date
are either exempt from demolition or can claim for reparation or a plot in the
resettlement area. Such residents are sometimes in support of demolition, either
covertly or overtly, in hope of acquiring more plots or gaining financial benefits.
Others, often under assistance of non-governmental organizations, launch legal
cases and instigate public protests in order to prevent or delay the arrival of the
demolition squads. This short glimpse into the potential communal conflicts resulting
from the politics of eviction shows that we cannot conceive of dwellers
of informal settlements as monolithic groups, but rather we deal with actors who
have different beliefs about and interests in the settlement which are created
inter alia by individual biographies and differing socio-economic statuses. In
Section 4 of this chapter we will provide a discussion of some accounts of such
local and personal life-stories of residents in informal settlements in modern
Indian literature. First, however, we would like to outline the more recent developments
of the politics of city planning in Delhi.
3.3 	 Visions of a world-class city:
	 The neo-liberalist strategy of city planning
A second Master Plan was drafted in 1985, and notified in 1990, this plan came
to be known as the DMP-2001. In 1988, a cholera outbreak, again due to inadequate
sanitation measures contaminating the groundwater, killed ca. 1500
people, but unlike in the jaundice epidemic of 1955, the 1988 victims were all
from the 1975-77 resettlement areas across the Yamuna River and from other
26	 Ibid., p. 397.
27	 Cf. Ibid. p. 407, also in the following.
Sonja Wengoborski/Jaspal Naveel Singh
156
illegal squatter settlements.28
And unlike 1955, the cholera disaster of 1988 did
not prompt the DDA to react. Instead the DDA concentrated on constructing
spaces that were to become visible emblems of India’s modernity and that catered
predominantly for the emerging middle classes.29
Sunil Kumar provides us with an example. His ethnography in the South
Delhi medieval village Hauz-i Rāni describes how the village was suddenly
surrounded by the middle-class housing colonies Saket and Puṣp Vihār. The
village, which was first mentioned in Persian documents in 1246, is inhabited
predominantly by a traditional Muslim population, who used the hauz (a large
water reservoir), after it has been silted in the 19th
century, as a graveyard for
their community.30
When the Delhi authorities acquired the land surrounding
Hauz-i Rāni and the DDA started constructing the housing colony Saket in the
mid-1970s, half of the area of the hauz was turned into a sports complex. At
first, this sports complex was nothing more than three large fields without any
barriers, thus the area was accessible for both Hauz-i Rāni villagers and Saket
residents. Kumar observed how children from Saket played football against
their Hauz-i Rāni peers and he notes that the “very absence of a structured sports
regime allowed for an unregulated fraternising between the residents of the two
neighbourhoods.”31
In 1990, however, the DDA constructed the ‘Saket Sports
Complex’, with facilities for more up-scale sports like badminton, squash, tennis
and aerobics, and upon Kumar’s inquiry the DDA engineers were forthright
in saying that the facilities were oriented towards the middle-class neighbourhood
of Saket. Furthermore, the Muslim graveyard was seen as a disturbing,
unclean ‘problem’ which the Hindu engineers of the DDA found repulsive. The
Hauz-i Rāni villagers perceived this exclusion and denial of access as accentuating
the distance and mistrust between the communities. In turn they began to
build buffalo and goat pens on their half of the hauz, to emphasize their stake
and they barricaded all paths to their area with thorn and bistle bushes; they also
put up placards that underlined the historicity of the village and the graveyard
and constructed the inhabitants as Sayyads (descendents of the Prophet Mohammed),
again emphasizing their right to occupy the space.
This example shows how city development can produce communal conflict
and alienation. In the post-1990 era, India’s rural and poorer population has
been drastically othered and made redundant in the country’s scramble for mo-
28	 Cf. Roy, 2010, p. 153.
29	 Cf. Kacker, 2005, p. 76f.
30	 Cf. also in the following Kum ar, 1999, p. 160-169.	
31	 Ibid., p. 168.
Creating the City of Delhi
157
dernity. A globalized and capitalist vision has created – and still creates – spaces
for consumption, business, service, ‘high’-culture and recreation, which can be
showcased to national and international visitors and construct the nation’s capital
as an epitome of the new India. In 2004, for instance, the Yamuna resettlement
area mentioned above has been ‘cleared’ in order to ‘develop’ the area.32
Some of the large-scale restructurings completed until now are: the Delhi Metro
Rail Corporation headquarters, the colossal Akṣardhām Temple, the Yamuna
bio-diversity park and the games village for athletes and officials who were
participating in the 2010 Commonwealth Games, for which the city, mirroring
the developments before the 1982 Asian Games, delved into a massive urban
renewal programme.33
Although the liberalization of the Indian markets in the early 1990s has allowed
for wide-ranging investments of the (multinational) private sector, the vision
of a world-class city is not only a market-driven process, it is also pressed
forward by both grassroots organizations and state institutions. Under the banner
of democratic rights, environmentalism, urban development and beautification,
middle-class lobbying associations increasingly petition for urban renewal,
all too often with drastic consequences for inhabitants of informal settlements.
These petitioners take advantage of new procedures introduced to legal redressal
in India. In the so-called ‘Public Interest Litigations’ basically anyone, from
powerful trade or industrial interest groups to residents’ associations to ‘concerned’
individual citizens, can use the legal apparatus to put forward claims about
urban ‘problems’. The Public Interest Litigation is not a regular legal case, in
which two parties have equal voice; rather it is a proactive investigation, in
which courts constitute committees of specialists to present evidence which,
however, is never assessed in cross-examination.34
This process “brings together
city officials, court commissions and amicus curiae on a democratically nonaccountable
platform to administratively and logistically work out solutions to
the urban ‘problems’”.35
The voices of the affected parties, those who will lose
their dwellings, their belongings and their right to centrality, are lost in the legal
apparatus.
Although the Public Interest Litigations clearly mark a paradigm shift in the
practices of Indian state institutions, the courts surprisingly use the MPD-62 as
32	 Cf. Masterplans forDelhi. MPD-2021, p. 118.
33	 Cf. Batra/Mehra, 2008, p. 404f.
34	 Cf. Ibid., p. 403, refer to Vandenhole, 2000.
35	 Ibid., also in the following.
Sonja Wengoborski/Jaspal Naveel Singh
158
an “imaginary reference”36
and ordered to demolish all ‘illegal’ housing structures
and ‘polluting’ small industries. Sundaram comments:
“Egged on by sympathetic media and advocacy groups, courts appointed
special committees spread over every aspect of civic life, causing terror and
fear in the neighborhoods they visited. A phantom civic subject emerged in
this very public legal discourse, identifiable middle-class, post-political, and
projected as the injured legatee of the urban body.”37
The latest of the Master Plans (DMP-2021) accentuates this post-political, and
consumption-oriented activism of the model middle-class citizens. To upgrade
the physical structure of Delhi, the plan proposes ‘user pays’ facilities and public-private
partnership models for managing investments and calls for more
community participation and decentralization.38
The effects of the latest Master
Plan are still unclear. With the globalized, post-political ideologies that are
emerging currently, any centralized master planning appears superfluous. The
state can do hardly more than provide the best possible legal and economic
options for citizens and organizations to plan and construct ‘their own’ cities,
according to their aspirations and needs. As it appears until now, the emphasis
has been put on middle-class life modes and the multinational cooperate world;
the general model, in theory, would however allow for any group to participate
in the processes of city planning. It is possibly the cultural differences between
the underprivileged and the powerful that are incommensurable and that have
excluded the underprivileged from participation. In the next part, we will illustrate
some aspects of these cultures of urban poverty as they are represented in
modern Hindi literature, and we thereby provide one avenue for understanding
and perhaps overcoming the discrepancies of participation in the planning and
construction of Indian cities like Delhi.
4. 	The capital in Hindi-literature
In this part of the chapter we shall first pay a visit to the observations of the destruction
of parts of Delhi in the time after the Mutiny as communicated in some
letters of an Urdu und Persian writing poet. The section to follow is devoted
36	 Sundaram , 2010, p. 247.
37	 Ibid., p. 248.
38	 Cf. DMP-2021, p. 181.
Creating the City of Delhi
159
to novels and short stories dealing with the life of the inhabitants of informal
settlements.
4.1 	 Delhi after the Mutiny
The famous poet Ghalib (1797-1869) who spent many years of his life in Delhi,
comments in his letters on the proceeding destruction of Shāhjahānābād after
the Mutiny:
“Agha Baqir’s Imambara [...] is an ancient foundation of exalted fame. Who
would not grieve at its destruction? [...] More than that, barracks for the British
soldiers are to be built in the city, and in front of the Fort, where Lal
Diggi is, there is to be a great area of open ground. It will take in the whole
area right up to the Khas Bazaar [...]. Put it this way: from Ammu Jan’s Gate
to the moat of the Fort, except for Lal Diggi and one or two wells, no trace of
any building will remain. Today they have begun demolishing the houses of
Jan Nisar Khan Chatta.”39
Six months later he notes:
“All the buildings in Fil-Khana, and Falak Paira and around Lal Diggi have
been pulled down. The fate of Bulaqi Begam’s Lane is still undecided. The
military is for pulling it down, but the civil authorities want to preserve it.”40
One year later he draws a picture of utter desolateness:
“[...] in all the wells in Lal Diggi the water has suddenly turned brackish. [...]
I tell you without exaggeration that from the Jama Masjid to the Rajghat Gate
is a barren wilderness, and if the bricks piled here and there were taken away
it would be absolutely bare. [...] Now they have cleared a path for the railway
from the Calcutta Gate to the Kabuli Gate. Panjabi Katra, Dhobi Wara, Ramji
Ganj, Saadat Khan’s Katra, Jarnail ki Bibi ki Haveli... [and other localities]
– you won’t find a trace of them. In short the city has become a desert, and
now that the wells are gone and water is something rare and precious, it will
39	 Ghalib, 1969, p. 213 (dated July 26, 1859). We want to thank Arnd Bruns M.A.,
Institute for Indology, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, for drawing our
attention to this publication.
40	 Ibid. p. 225 (dated December 16, 1859).
Sonja Wengoborski/Jaspal Naveel Singh
160
be a desert like that of Karbala.41
[...] Delhi is no more a city, but a camp, a
cantonment. No Fort, no city, no bazaars, no watercourses […].”42
4.2 	 Post-independence Hindi-literature and urbanization
In her study on three novels of Bhisham Sahni, Ines Fornell outlines the development
of the progressive literary movement in India which is held in high esteem.
It was in the 1930s that the term ‘pragativād,’ lit. ‘progressivism,’ was coined
in the context of Hindi literature. Fornell emphasizes the fact that literates such
as Premcand had taken up social issues of the poor already before the emergence
of this movement. The first All India Progressive Writer’s Conference took
place in April 1936 in Lucknow. One of its prominent participants, though never
member, was Premcand. In his keynote address which was published as an essay
titled Sāhitya kā uddeśya (The objective of literature), he explained his ideas on
matters of style, theme, such as ordinary worker’s and peasant’s lives, and his
conception of literature as criticism of life, ‘jīvan kī ālocanā.’
Mishra, in his study on modern Hindi fiction, acknowledges the influence of
the prerevolutionary Russian author Anton Chekhov on the development of the
Hindi short story and its authors,43
while Knirsch observes the relevance of social
and humanitarian issues in the development of the Hindi short stories after
1960 up to the end of the second millennium.44
However, one should not forget
that the majority of India’s population is until today rural rather than urban,45
a
fact which is reflected in the phenomenon of regionalism in Indian literature.
The capital of Bhārat, India, happens to be situated in a Hindi-speaking region.
Thus Delhi is the location of many novels and short stories written in this
language. Following the phases of city planning in post-independence Delhi as
outlined in the previous sections (3), the following part deals with literary works
reflecting everyday lives of the city’s less well-off inhabitants.
41	 [Fn. 1]: “The place where Husain and his companions were martyred, after their
access to water had been cut off.”
42	 Ibid. p. 252 (dated January 11, 1861).
43	 Cf. Mishra, 1983, p. 2-3 and 26.
44	 Cf. Knirsch, 2012, p. 58-99.
45	 Cf. The World Fact Book. South Asia. India: https://www.cia.gov/library/
publications/the-world-factbook/geos/in.html, 07.05.2013.
Creating the City of Delhi
161
4.2.1		 Heading towards the capital
Young Yashpal became a revolutionary.46
Born in 1903 in Firozpur, Panjāb, he
graduated at Lahore. After trying to assassinate a leading British official in 1929
he was arrested in 1932. It was then that he devoted himself to writing. In 1938
he was released. During his life he published more than 50 books, mainly collections
of short stories, novels, and essays. Yashpal died in 1976, as the recipient
of that year’s Sahitya Academy Award conferred to him for his Hindi-novel
Merī Terī Uskī Bāt.
In the short story Devī kī līlā, The game of the goddess, Yashpal introduces
his readers to the life of Devīlāl, a man originating from Jālandhar (Panjāb),
the region the clerks working in the Accounting Department of New Delhi’s
Central Secretariat usually come from. Housing prices are exorbitantly high in
Delhi. Thus he gave up the idea to find a room in Pahāṛ Ganj and took a room
for his wife and himself in a compound inhabited by people from his native
region, situated in Śakti Nagar about six miles away from his place of employment.
Having to spend 40 Rupees on monthly rent, he regrets paying another 19
Rupees on bus fares in order to get to work. Though he never envied the great
Sāhibs driving along in their own cars, he dreams of joining the Bābūs (clerks)
who ride home on their pushbikes. Selling her golden bangles, his wife makes
her husband’s dream of an own bicycle come true.
It could be interpreted as a clash of village life with city life that Devīlāl leaves
his new bicycle standing at a bus stop, when unaware for a moment, chatting
with a colleague and entering the bus that he used to catch until this day. After
realizing a few moments later, he immediately gets down from the bus and heads
back to the bus stop. Luckily he finds the cycle still there, takes it and goes to
worship in the Devī’s temple in order to thank the great Goddess for having spared
him the loss of the valuable means of transportation, but ironically his new
unlocked cycle gets stolen from the entrance.
46	 Cf. also in the following, Meisig, 2001, p.120-127; Sahitya Academy Awards.
Yashpal: http://indiapicks.com/Literature/Sahitya_Academy/Hindi/Hindi-1976.
htm, 07.05.2013; The Hindu. 07.05.2006: http://www.hindu.com/lr/2006/05/07/
stories/2006050700010200.htm, 07.05.2013.
Sonja Wengoborski/Jaspal Naveel Singh
162
4.2.2 	Accepting one’s fate in silent rebellion:
		 Basanti and Anaro
Basanti
Bhisham Sahni was born in 1915. In the times of disturbance that woke after
gaining independence from the Raj, the famous Hindi author, originating from
Rawalpindi (what was to become part of Pakistan in 1947), shifted with his family
to India. He published his novel Basanti in 1980.
The story is set out between two instances of slum eviction. The protagonist
is the young woman Basanti living in a bastī, in Delhi. Her father, the barber
Chaudhri, belongs to a caste, onto which the leading Rājput members of the
community look down as inferior. However, this time the imminent danger of
eviction cannot be averted by a delegation of theirs. Clad into their traditional
Rājasthāni clothes the men return empty handed from meeting an influential
Sāhib who turns the group over to his deputy rather than listening to its cause
himself.
In the introduction to his translation of Bhisham Sahni’s Basanti, Jaidev ela-
borates:
“[...] even their modest basti in Delhi is never secure. Any day, it can be busted
by a callous state apparatus which holds out to them nothing more than
bogus promises. There is no going back home (the novelist doesn’t waste even
a line on spurious nostalgia of the countryside), but even in Delhi displacement
returns inevitably, like seasons. A basti is built, only to be pulled down
by the administration, another is built, that too is going to be demolished one
day […].”47
Jaidev elucidates the capital’s attitude towards its recently immigrated inhabi-
tants:48
“In its relentless urge for expansion, the city of Delhi sucks in the labour
and lives of people whom it soon discards as dirt.” In this case the huts of the
bastī, “near Ramesh Nagar remained intact even after that colony was ready.
This happened because they did not touch it but were built upon an uninhabited
mound in between two forking roads.”49
Since its male inhabitants are masons
and artisans, the place evolves to resemble a Rājasthāni town. The women have
taken up relations with the neighbouring middle-class settlements doing house-
47	 Jaidev, 1997, p. xi.
48	 Cf. Ibid., p. x.
49	 Sahni, 1997, p. 6.
Creating the City of Delhi
163
hold-scores in a communal framework which the translator refers to in a preceding
note: “Hindi and Urdu words for which there are no equivalents in English
have been retained as such. For example, chauka-bartan is not simply washing
dishes or performing household scores, let alone handling the kitchen work.”50
Though the settlement is “far from being a slum”,51
its lack regarding legality
keeps up a state of uncertainty and insecurity that rests on its inhabitants.
Again Jaidev explains that things are not as plain as one might expect them
to be:
“Within this overall frame where survival is posited as the lone virtue for the
victims of an inequitable class system, the novelist introduces a variety of
complex threads. For the basti is not a simple, homogenized class space. It is
split from inside along caste and gender lines. What the administration and
its Sahibs, with the help of law and police, do to the basti, the basti Rajputs do
to those below them in the caste hierarchy, and in turn the latter do the same
to their daughters and wives.”52
Thus her father treats Basanti as a kind of commodity, marrying her off for an
attractive sum to an old tailor – a marriage Basanti refuses not in open rebellion
but rather she runs away from what was supposed to be her home.
Chance has it, that Basanti is saved from this marriage. Her father and the
tailor had the date fixed spontaneously, yet at this very morning police and
trucks arrive at the site in order to clear the basti that is meant to be torn down.
Everybody grabs whatever household-goods the families are able to take along
with them. Basanti’s father treats his wife as if she was a pack mule and he just
bothers not waking up his young son whom he carries protectively in his own
arms. Meanwhile some of the unemployed inhabitants of the bastī are paid to lay
hand on what used to be their own homes.
Regarding Basanti Jaidev remarks:
“Even before she is sixteen, she has seen enough of men, families, classes.
[...] It is a homage to her resilience and natural vivacity that she can take in
all these blasts of wisdom without shedding her spontaneous laughter, her
delicate dreams, or her zest for living.”53
50	 Jaidev, 1997, p. xvii.
51	 Sahni, 1997, p. 5.
52	 Jaidev, 1997, p. xi.
53	 Ibid.
Sonja Wengoborski/Jaspal Naveel Singh
164
Anaro
Mañjul Bhāgat (Manjul Bhagat) was born in 1936 in Meerut, but brought up in
Delhi where she devoted herself to writing. She died in 1998. Anaro is a short
Hindi novel that was published in 1977 and laid the foundation for Bhagat’s
fame as an awarded writer. It was translated into several languages; the author
herself translated it into English.
Anaro is the tough mother of a girl and a boy. Her husband, Nandlal, a mechanic,
had brought her from Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh, to Delhi at the age of 14.
During his wife’s first pregnancy, he had started a relationship with a mistress.
He either lives on Anaro’s costs or runs off and vanishes for months. Anaro
scratches a living out of doing household scores at several middle-class homes
situated at Greater Kailash and East of Kailash.
“Anaro was still ignorant of the mysteries of married life, when she conceived
Ganji. That winter, all of them had to shift to Madangir. The Golden Bridge
slum settlement was being demolished. Each hut was in shambles. They were
all bundled on to a waiting truck and left standing on the bare grounds of
Madangir. Nandlal was on one of his sprees. He had vanished days earlier.
For a couple of days she had a covered cot, standing close to her head to shield
her from the icy winds. Then she could bear it now longer. She collected torn
bits of tarpaulin, straw, tin, wood and jute rags, and proceeded to build a hut.
The neighbours lent a hand. Thereafter, she built and rebuilt her little hut into
a stronger home, never asking her husband for help.”54
Living in Madangir, she brings up her children alone. She managed to fix a concrete
roof on her hut that does not ever leak even during the monsoon. Though
illiterate, she holds a saving account. She yet ends up with almost unlimited
obligations to all those households from which she borrowed money in order to
meet her sense of duty of what is traditionally supposed to be taken care of by
the bride’s parents. Her life’s aim is to see her daughter married decently and
she readily even ruins her health to achieve this goal. She fulfils what should be
a father’s duty, making her husband return from Mumbai only for the sake of
formality. She devotes herself to this task, striving to fulfil what she considers to
be done to keep up pride and honour, ever willing to stick to caste rules. In doing
so she transcends the framework of the role model of a traditional wife without
ever reflecting on this point. At the end of the novel Nandlal acknowledges his
54	 Bhagat, 2001, p. 55.
Creating the City of Delhi
165
wife’s capabilities by assigning her an imaginary place of honour traditionally
reserved to males:
“Listen! Listen to me, all of you gathered here. This day, I honour my wife,
declaring my deep-felt admiration for her. She is indeed not my wife... but
my elder brother. I am proud that she has so enhanced my prestige in the
community.”55
4.2.3 	In times of disillusionment: Pollution
The author Gaurinath was born in 1972, holds an M.A. degree in Hindi and
worked for several years as an Assistant Editor for the monthly magazine Haṁs
in which the short story Pradūṣaṇ was published in 1998.56
Its protagonist is
Manoramā, a young woman born in a village and brought to Delhi by her husband
Vinay.
The story begins with memories of her first encounter with Delhi. For a start
the young couple lived in a small room in Wazirpur. Reaching there the place
gave her an impression as if entering a mound of dirt and garbage, the acidic air
had caused her cuffing. As for that first home Manoramā remembers a horrible
mixture of dust, dirt, saliva and slime with acid as soon as she set her foot in
front of the door of their room, the stinking drainage and the factory noise added
to the nuisance caused by a complete lack of facilities such like a toilet, a
decent space for having a bath or washing clothes. Feeling ashamed to defecate
openly in public, her husband had to accompany her in the darkness of early
mornings or after the setting of the sun, to do so at the faeces besmeared banks
of a nearby drain ditch. Adding to these difficulties Vinay worked far away from
Wazirpur at a shop behind Old Delhi Railway Station near Chandni Chowk. In
the following month they had shifted to Sīlampur where living conditions were
perceptibly better and both of them could make use of the nearby public toilets.
But in spite of the improvement of the outward living conditions, the mother of
a now four-year-old daughter experiences another kind of pollution: Santosh, a
far off relative of her husband’s, tries to court her during the head of the household’s
absence. The main part of the short story deals with these temptations
that Manoramā somehow manages to resist. Thereby she also resists the social
55	 Ibid., p. 62.
56	 Gaurīnāth (Gauri Nath), p. 42: http://in.linkedin.com/pub/gouri-nath/33/a82/72b,
07.05.2013.
Sonja Wengoborski/Jaspal Naveel Singh
166
‘pollution’ of urban poverty. The social organization of the urban settlement is
far removed from what the inhabitants were used to from their villages.
5. 	Conclusion
In this contribution we have first outlined a post-colonial history of Delhi’s official
management of urban poverty. We have identified three major trends in this
management: an idealistic approach of the 1950s and 1960s, a hasty interventional
phase of the 1970s and 1980s, and finally the contemporary neo-liberalist
strategy. These phases represent India’s grapple with coming to terms with
both its colonial past and its place in a globalized modernity, in which Delhi
certainly takes a principal position. Urban poverty is somewhat orthogonal to
these developments and the double standards that emerge from dealing with it
are manifestations of Delhi’s paradoxical disposition. The literary accounts that
we have presented show how individuals themselves deal with this situation;
for instance when Anaro tries to reconcile her sense of duty with her disintegrating
family structures, or when Manoramā for time being effectively resists
Santosh’s courtship and thereby saves her family from splitting up. The role of
strong women in these literary accounts is perhaps no coincidence. It appears
as such Anaros, Basantis and Manoramās, are an integral element in keeping
families and communities functioning; although their incredible efforts and their
careful manoeuvres remain largely veiled behind the grand designs of official
city planners, politicians and other ‘strong men.’ We hope our contribution alleviates
such misrepresentations to a degree.
Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Professor Dr. Konrad Meisig, Dr.
Hans-Christian Petersen, Arnd Bruns M.A. and Mustafa Hameed M.A. for valuable
comments on earlier drafts of this article. All remaining shortcomings are
of course our own.
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169
Urban Meeting Locations of Nicaraguan
Migrants in Costa Rica’s Metropolitan Area
and the Spatial Effects on their Social
Support Networks
Hauke Jan Rolf
1. 	Introduction
After a brief review of the theoretical framework, key historical and current
migration processes of Nicaraguans to Costa Rica are presented. Furthermore,
the general urban development of Latin American cities and more specifically of
the metropolitan region of Costa Rica’s Central Valley are discussed to respond
to the spatial distribution or rather concentration of Nicaraguan migrants within
this urban area. Subsequently, three exemplary places of the case study are
described and compared to illustrate the specific relationship between locations
and the local and transnational support networks of Nicaraguan migrants in the
urban area. The article finishes with some conclusions about the presented places
and the reciprocal impacts between these locations and the local and transnational
support networks.
2. 	Theoretical framework of the case study
The migration from Nicaragua to Costa Rica has a long historical tradition and
has always been transnational even though the term transnationalism had not
been used in social sciences until the appearance of the so-called globalization,
that is the increasing social, political, and above all economic interconnection
and interdependence of the world, induced by technological innovations of new
Hauke Jan Rolf
170
transport and communication media.1
Instead of unidirectional movement of
people with a gradual process of an inevitably long-term settlement and socio-cultural
assimilation, the Nicaraguan migration to the neighbouring country
in the south has always been characterised as durable, circular, pendular
or rather multidirectional movements. This resulted in bi-national economic,
cultural and familiar interrelations, plural socio-cultural identification and, last
but not least, political tensions between the two involved nations and societies.2
These processes correspond with the features of transmigration defined by Linda
Basch, Nina Glick Schiller and Cristina Blanc-Szanton:
“We define ‘transnationalism’ as the processes by which immigrants forge
and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies
of origin and settlement. […] Immigrants who develop and maintain multiple
relationships – familial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and
political – that span borders we call ‘transmigrants’. […] Transmigrants take
actions, make decisions, and develop subjectivities and identities embedded
in networks of relationships that connect them simultaneously to two or more
nation-states.”3
Particularly over the last twenty years, the migration of Nicaraguans to Costa
Rica has been highly politicised in Costa Rican immigration policy debates. It
is not only due to a rapidly increasing inflow of migrants since the beginning of
the 1990s and its transnational character as “[…] the ongoing interconnection
or flow of people, ideas, objects, and capital across the borders of nation-states,
in contexts in which the state shapes but does not contain such linkages and
movements […]”4
. But the increase in attention to the Nicaraguan immigration
(and related problematisation) is also because of its new directions. While historically
the migration from Nicaragua has always been characterised by movements
within the frontier region and towards the rural areas, urban immigration
dynamics of Nicaraguans to Costa Rica’ s metropolitan Central Valley are still
a new phenomenon.
1	 Cf. Castells, 1996; Beck, 1997; Urry, 2001; Sassen, 2002; Dürrschm idt, 2002.
2	Cf. Morales Gamboa/Castro valverde, 2006; Sandóval García, 2003; Jim énez
Matarrita, 2009.
3	 Basch et al., 1994, p. 7-8. Cf. also Pries, 2010; Faist, 2000; Levitt et al., 2003;
Portes et al., 1999.
4	 Glick Schiller/Levitt, 2006, p. 5.
Urban Meeting Locations of Nicaraguan Migrants
171
Looking at the urban migration movements of Nicaraguans to Costa Rica, it
is fruitful to explore the specific structure and functions of the local and transnational
networks that they have created within and beyond the metropolitan area.
In this context, a focus on migrant networks is useful to explain not only the
dynamics of the so-called chain migration (that is the effect of following migration
processes as a result of pioneering emigration paths) but also to explore the
migrants’ social resources. On one hand, due to the precarious living conditions
of the majority of Nicaraguans in Costa Rica’s urban area, they have established
reciprocal social support networks that help them cope with the everyday
struggle for socioeconomic and spatial resources on a local level. On the other
hand, they stretch their social ties to kin, friends and other affiliated actors in
their country of origin on a transnational level. In a multidirectional perspective,
these transnational ties serve as much to broaden the potentials of the migrants’
social resources as to fulfil social obligations towards their descendants and other
relatives, close friends and sometimes informal creditors, who stayed behind
in Nicaragua.
The approach of social support, for its part, is an activity-oriented focus on
social networks that highlights not only the structural relationships and social
positioning of the network’s members (for example by focusing on the ability
to stabilise horizontal and/or vertical socio-economic linkages of social bonding
and bridging) but also the quality of such relationships and the functional
contents of social interactions.5
According to the activity-focus, social resources
of networks are not just understood as potentially available social capital
of a somehow solidarity bonded and homophilic structured community but as
concrete social interactions that generates collective opportunities and orientations.
In consequence, this approach is markedly appropriate to explore the
specific character of a social relationship (if it is unidirectional or reciprocal,
unidimensional or multiplex et cetera) in correlation to the particular constitution
of the social ties (if they are primarily family-, community- and/or workbased).
By this means, it is possible to focus not only on structural elements of
social networks, predicated for example on their size and relational density,6
but
also to highlight the dynamics of social interactions. This approach offers the
opportunity to differentiate between potential and actual support, received and
perceived help, autonomy and dependence or positive and negative impacts.
In addition, the focus of social support provides the possibility to distinguish
5	Cf. Putnam , 2000; Ryan et al., 2008.
6	 Cf. Hollstein, 2006; Holzer, 2006.
Hauke Jan Rolf
172
between different kinds of support capacities upon which the social networks
depend, such as functional, economic, informative or emotional functions.7
However, it could be criticised that the spatial dimension of social support
networks has been neglected or even rejected within this concept. In consideration
of the diverse character of social networks and their different structural
and functional interlinkages with regard to distinctive localities of socio-spatial
settings such as an urban area, it seems to be extremely important to focus on the
spatial effects of social networks.
When analysing the collected data of ethnographic interviews and observations
resulting from a fieldwork period in Costa Rica’s metropolitan highlands
in 2009-10, one of the main questions the researcher had to deal with was how
these social networks are organised and reproduced within the urban space and
to what extent migrants’ meeting locations influence their social support relationships
both locally and transnationally.
The ethnographic fieldwork was launched on two assumptions. First, it had
been supposed that such concrete meeting places would serve not only as a
precondition for social linkages by providing direct face-to-face contacts for the
exchange of information, goods and different types of support, but also as localities
of socio-cultural representation within the foreign society to highlight the
distinctive collective identity as Nicaraguan migrants. In this perspective, the
physical space can only be reflected on as socially generated or rather occupied
and is therefore always an expression of the social structure and the socio-political
struggle of power relationships. As Pierre Bourdieu says,
“The physical space could only be thought of as an abstraction, […] as a lived
and occupied space that means a social construction and a projection of the
social space, a social structure in an objectivated condition […], the objectivation
and naturalisation of past and current social relations.”8
The conceptualization of the physical space as a reproduction of past and current
social power relationships thus demonstrates the importance of focusing
not only the contemporary structure of the urban space, but to adopt an entirely
historical perspective of the urban and socio-spatial development in all its sedimentary
complexity (equivalent to a biographical exploration of the city and its
society, its physical materialisation and social milieus).
7	 Cf. Diewald, 1990; Nestm ann, 2001; Keupp, Röhrle, 1987.
8	 Bourdieu, 1991, p. 28 (translation by the author).
Urban Meeting Locations of Nicaraguan Migrants
173
The second prior assumption was that these locations cannot be understood
as separate places that exist independently from the spatial and social surrounding.
Instead of defining these places as internally coherent and static, it is argued
that their uniqueness results especially from the dynamic interconnections with
other locations and social constellations. Inspired by Doreen Massey, these localities
are considered to be interrelated with the socio-spatial environment of
the city as a whole. To quote Massey,
“With such a set of connections, and such a history, it becomes clear that to
romanticize places as settled, coherent and unchanging is highly dubious. […]
to see places as bounded can lead to their interconnections being ignored,
and thus may result in parochialism. To see them […] as particular sets of
interconnections in a wider field might hold open the possibility of both appreciating
their local uniqueness and recognizing their wider interlinkages.”9
In a relational socio-spatial perspective, as it has been framed by Bourdieu and
Massey, such localities can hardly be seen as internally closed. Focusing on
the social interactions it is obvious that spatial-related activities are as much
directed to local strategies and orientations as to interconnections to the entire
urban space and society. According to this theoretical comprehension, the
social interrelations are not just contextualised within an intrinsic logic of the
very local places themselves. These locations are reciprocally interlinked with
the physical and social environment and also with other external socio-spatial
constellations on an urban scale, but also on a national and even transnational
level. From this perspective, these places not only interrelate to different social
networks within an urban setting, in addition they may also function as gateways
between local and transnational ties. Moreover, it remains to be seen if
these urban places themselves have been transformed on the basis of the diverse
interactive processes of local and transnational exchanges into kinds of transnational
localities.
The illustrated assumptions have led to the comparison of several urban locations
where the social interactions of Nicaraguan migrants’ networking take
place in a different manner. To this end, characteristic localities of activity and
settlement of the Nicaraguan migrant population have been investigated, such as
two precarious residential districts, diverse inner-city parks, certain restaurants
and bars, clubs and dancing halls as well as churches and the offices of migrants’
associations and civic organisations. Out of this broad variety of places, three
9	 Massey, 1995, p. 66.
Hauke Jan Rolf
174
particular locations are discussed in this article to identify the interconnections
between specific local and transnational networks of social support and distinctive
spatial settings. The exemplarily compared locations are (1) a suburban squat
named La Carpio with a remarkable proportion of Nicaraguan inhabitants, (2)
the main baseball stadium of San José, the capital of Costa Rica, and (3) the inner-city
park called La Merced that is mostly frequented by Nicaraguan migrants.
3. 	Historical and current migration processes of
	 Nicaraguans to Costa Rica10
Currently, as well as historically, Nicaraguans are and have been the most important
migrant group in Costa Rica with more than 50 % of all foreigners living in the
country (see the table below).Approximations vary between six and ten percent of
the national population without knowing the precise proportion of temporary, seasonal
and particularly irregular migrants. Moreover, updated representative statistics
are not available since the last national census in the year of 2000. Supposed
approximations resulting from selective case studies mostly act on the assumption
that more or less 50 % of the Nicaraguan migrants are in the country illegally.
Populace of Costa Rica and the proportion of inhabitants born outside the
nation concerning their country of origin between 1950 and 2000
National Census
1950 1963 1973 1984 2000
Populace 800,875 1,336,274 1,871,780 2,416,809 3,810,179
Foreigners 33,251 35,605 22,264 88,954 296,461
Nicaragua 18,954 18,722 11,871 45,918 226,374
Panama 2064 3255 1598 4794 10,270
USA 956 2001 2151 5369 9511
El Salvador 574 769 766 8748 8714
Columbia 610 676 517 1678 5898
Others 10,143 10,182 5361 22,447 35,694
10	 The historical review of Nicaraguan migration to Costa Rica is based on the work
of: Morales Gamboa, Castro Valverde, 2006; Rosero-Bixby, 2004; Alvarenga
Venutolo, 1997. Cf. also Huhn, 2005; Pérez, 2006; Funkhouseret al., 2002.
Urban Meeting Locations of Nicaraguan Migrants
175
Percentage of inhabitants born outside the nation concerning their country of
origin relative to the populace of Costa Rica between 1950 and 2000
1950 1963 1973 1984 2000
Born
outside the
country 4,2 2,7 1,2 3,7 7,8
Nicaragua - 2,4 1,4 0,6 1,9
Panama - 0,3 0,2 0,1 0,2
USA 0,1 0,1 0,1 0,2 0,2
El Salvador - 0,1 0,1 0,0 0,4
Colombia - 0,1 0,1 0,0 0,1
Others - 1,3 0,8 0,3 0,9
Percentage of inhabitants born outside the nation concerning their country of
origin and relative to all foreigners in Costa Rica between 1950 and 2000
1950 1963 1973 1984 2000
Nicaragua - 57,0 52,6 53,3 51,6
Panama - 6,2 9,1 7,2 5,4
USA 2,9 5,6 9,7 6,0 3,2
El Salvador - 1,7 2,2 3,4 9,8
Colombia - 1,8 1,9 2,3 1,9
Others - 30,5 28,6 24,1 25,2
Source: Inec (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos de Costa Rica).
From the national census 2000.
There have always been migratory movements from Nicaragua to Costa Rica for
economic, cultural and familial reasons. Traditionally, these dynamics occurred in
the border region of the two neighbouring countries and could be explained by the
narrow historical and socio-cultural interrelationships within this region and by
the minor influences of the historically weak central nation states. Moreover, in
the 19th
century the political boundary had changed in bellicose conflicts when the
province Guanacaste became part of the Costa Rican territory after the failure of
a Nicaraguan military invasion in 1856. Furthermore, the definite borderline had
still not been clearly defined until the beginning of the 20th
century – and still is the
cause of bilateral tensions. Even after the declaration of a contractually fixed line of
demarcation, systematic border control had not been established for decades until
the appearance of the first migration movements for political reasons due to the rise
of the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. Even today, the frontier is still not con-
Hauke Jan Rolf
176
trolled like in other immigration countries, but the Costa Rican state spends much
more public funds to check the legal entrance to the territory than before.
While traditionally the Nicaraguan immigration to Costa Rica had mainly
been directed towards rural areas to work in the seasonal agricultural production
of coffee and bananas, the urban migration of Nicaraguans to Costa Rica’s metropolitan
area is still a quite new phenomenon, appearing only within the last twenty
years. The main explanation for historical movements from Nicaragua to Costa
Rica is the migration for labour reasons, forced by the distinctive economic development
of the two states. While Nicaragua is one of the poorest countries of the
whole Latin American hemisphere Costa Rica is one of the wealthiest and is also
called Switzerland of Central America with regard to the numerous mountains
and the relative socio-economic prosperity. In distinction to former movements
and migratory intentions of Nicaraguans towards Costa Rica, the first significant
wave had resulted from the earthquake of 1972 in the Managua region and the
rates accelerated each year to reach a preliminary peak in the 1980th
due to the
civil war in Nicaragua (at first against the Somoza regime and afterwards against
the Sandinista authority). In the time of civil war the former political emigration
of a few intellectuals and opposition members became increasingly a mass phenomenon
of the Nicaraguan population that originated mostly from the devastated
rural regions. In conjunction with the high rates of Nicaraguan immigration, the
demand for a stricter regulation of the immigration policy within the Costa Rican
society also increased. In spite of a more restrictive legislation in Costa Rica in
the 1990s, the Nicaraguan migration did not decline even though the civil war had
ended. In contrast, the established social networks between former refugees and
latter newcomers had created a constant chain of migration no longer led by seasonal
labour intents but rather by the aim for a permanent life in a wealthier country.
With regard to the concept of dual labour markets, the predominately young
migrants mainly found work in labour segments of lower income, mostly without
any access to insurance or a formalised contract.11
For example, in 2001 64 % of
the workers hired in the coffee production were migrants and a remarkable 94 %
did not possess all of the necessary documents to work in this sector.
Finally, the new phenomenon of the Nicaraguan migration to the metropolitan
Central Valley is also characterised by an economic integration into the lower
segments of the urban dual labour market, although the types of activity differ.
Accordingly, the male Nicaraguans work predominantly in the sectors of lower
services and construction or are hired as informal vendors and security guards.
Female migrants mostly work as housemaids, employees in restaurants and other
11	 Cf. Piore, 1979.
Urban Meeting Locations of Nicaraguan Migrants
177
unqualified services or in the so-called maquiladora industry that is mainly characterised
by textile processing, and in some cases they work as prostitutes. In
distinction to their marginal proportion in the agricultural sector, the female population
represents more than 50 % of the urban migrants (see the table below).
Proportional Distribution of Nicaraguan and Costa Rican males and females
in selected labour segments in comparison (2000)
Nicaraguans Costa Ricans
Labour segment Males
Agricultural unskilled worker 28,8 14,5
Mason/carpenter 8,7 3,7
Unskilled worker in the sector of mining and
construction 8,3 2,3
Security guard 5,9 4,6
Formal vendor 3,4 5,6
Agricultural skilled worker 3,2 6,0
Unskilled worker in manufacturing industry 2,7 2,0
Welder/mechanic/metal worker 2,3 1,5
Truck or personal driver 2,0 7,5
House employee/concierge 2,0 1,6
Percentage 67,3 49,3
Nicaraguans Costa Ricans
Labour segment Females
House maid 48,4 14,9
Service in restaurants 10,3 5,7
Formal vendor 7,1 9,9
Unskilled worker in the textile industry
(maquliladora) 4,2 2,6
Agricultural unskilled worker 3,5 1,8
Skilled worker in the textile and leather
production 2,9 4,8
Street vendor 2,3 1,7
Nursing service 2,1 1,9
Cashier 2,0 3,1
Other non qualified services 1,9 0,7
Percentage 84,7 47,1
Source: Flacso (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Costa Rica), 2005.
Hauke Jan Rolf
178
In consideration of the historically restricted migration to the Central Valley – for
example, it had been forbidden to the black Caribbean national population to move
to the metropolitan area up to the declaration of the Second Republic in 1948 – this
new type of urban migration meant a profound change for the Costa Rican society.
As the centre of cultural, political and economic activities as well as the core of national
self-identification, Costa Rica’s urbanised Central Valley has always played
a quite important role for the country’s development and was treated like an exclusive
and precious space of – not only topographically – higher spheres.
4.	 The urban development of Latin American cities
	 and Costa Rica’s metropolitan area
To explain the specific location, spatial distribution and clustering of Nicaraguan
migrants within Costa Rica’s metropolitan Central Valley relative to their
settlement, economic and socio-cultural activities, it seems to be important to
explore the genealogical context of the urbanised space. Therefore, it is quite
useful to highlight some benchmarks of the general urban development in Latin
America and of Costa Rica’s metropolitan highlands specifically. These outlines
could serve for a better comprehension of the current aspects of socio-spatial
fragmentation within the urban space into which the Nicaraguan migrants have
settled.
In the era of globalization, significant processes of urbanisation and migration
are seen as two closely meshed phenomena of contemporary social
transformation.12
In Latin America, for its part, the process of urbanisation has
begun much earlier than in Africa or Asia, and much faster than previously
in North America or Europe. In consequence of a policy of the so-called import
substituted industrialisation, high levels of internal migration and urban
birth rates have accelerated the relative percentage of the urban Latin American
populace from 17 to 70 percent just between the years of 1965 and 1987.
Nowadays, the proportion of the urban populace in Latin America has reached
almost 80 percent. While historically the process was mainly characterised by
a tendency of metropolisation, meaning a high concentration of the populace in
the most important urban agglomerations (mostly the capital), by now the process
of urbanisation predominately takes place in metropolitan areas of smaller
scales.
12	 Cf. Sassen, 2002; Rolf, 2006.
Urban Meeting Locations of Nicaraguan Migrants
179
The metropolitan area of Costa Rica’s central highlands is such a mid-size
urban agglomeration that contains the four main cities (San José, Alajuela, Cartago
and Heredia) with a populace of almost 3 million inhabitants, corresponding
to more or less 50 percent of the national population. Even if the rapid urban
growth of the 1960s and 70s has decelerated, the annual growth still represents
2,8 %, representing a duplication within 25 years. (In comparison: in 1990 the
annual growth still corresponded to a proportion of 3,7 %)
Referring to the typology developed by Axel Borsdorf, Jürgen Bähr and Michael
Janoschka, the urban transformation of Latin American cities is characterised
by four steps from the dense colonial city to the fragmented urban agglomeration
of current days.13
The originally Hispanic colonial city – in distinction to
the Portuguese – was structured in the strict logic of a military camp according
to a grid with a central square, the plaza mayor, surrounded by the main buildings
such as the cathedral, the city hall, other administrative buildings and the
residents of the most important families. The farther the inhabitants lived from
this central core, the poorer they were.
This centralised structure has been transformed in a second step of urban
transformation in the beginning of the 20th
century, which the authors call the
emergence of the sectoral city. This corresponds to a partial and linear suburban
development that depended on the infrastructural subdivisions with a strict
segmentation between places of economic production and residence as well as
between the residential districts of the urban rich and the working class.
In a third step, Borsdorf et al. describe the era of the rapid growth and industrialisation
of Latin American agglomerations during the 1960s and 70s as
a development which they call the polarised city. This era of urban expansion
is basically characterised by high rates of rural-urban migration, a significant
lack of housing and the appearance of activities such as the taking over of
peripheral or rural public land and the construction of huge marginal squats
by the urban poor while the centres were still predominantly occupied by the
richer ones.
The last and current step represented by the fragmented city corresponds
to a more diverse and sometimes opposite transformation of a so-called archipelagoisation
on a micro level with downgraded and abandoned inner-city
spaces next to the central business districts, peripheral gated communities of
the upper and middle class next to consolidated or precarious squats, and residential
islands within industrial districts. Last but not least, this transformation
process was strengthened by the effects of the IMF and World Bank structural
13	 Cf. Borsdorf et al., 2002.
Hauke Jan Rolf
180
adjustment programs of the 1980s which had induced the de-formalization of
the urban labour markets on one hand and on the other the informalisation of
urban development. The privatisation of urban space and infrastructure was on
the one hand accompanied by the appearance of gated community-projects of
different size and on the other by the emergence of an informal and commercialised
housing and rental market within the various squats. At the same time,
the establishment of a few countable social housing programs during the 1960s
and 70s has mostly ended due to the constraints of reduced public investment
budgets.
Urban Meeting Locations of Nicaraguan Migrants
181
The described panorama of the fragmented city also coincides with the current
situation of Costa Rica’s urbanised Central Valley. In distinction to some
other agglomerations, the uncontrolled spatial expansion in the metropolitan
highlands is restricted in size due to the surrounding mountains that delimit
the Central Valley. Nevertheless, the urban region is characterised by a mainly
horizontal urban sprawl corresponding to aspects such as the high frequency of
earthquakes and a traditional culture of estate property.
As in other Latin American cities the climax of land takeover ended in the
1980s and the current process is mainly characterised by a densification of the
populace within the existing squats in terms of parcelling out the already occupied
space. Even if Costa Rica has not experienced such a process of economic
decline and de-industrialisation like other Latin American nations and cities
during the so-called lost decade of the 1980s – a process which Mike Davis has
identified as an urban expansion without economic growth14
- the metropolitan
region of the Central Valley is confronted with a tendency to urbanised pauperisation.
And remarkable proportion of these urban poor equates to the segment
of Nicaraguan migrants.
In consideration of the socio-spatial fragmentation it is finally quite important
to ask how the Nicaraguan migrants are spatially distributed and where they
settle, work and live within the metropolitan area. According to Davis’ opinion,
the spatial locations of social inequality do not necessarily correspond with processes
of ghettoization. On one hand, the so-called slumlords, which are local
estate agents, do not necessarily fit in with the characteristics of poverty, on
the other, many construction workers live within the building yards where they
work and most of the house maids live directly in the houses and gated communities
of their employers. Nevertheless, a spatial concentration of poverty is
verifiable, and these are in consequence also the districts where many of the Nicaraguan
migrants are located (that is in the South, the North and the North-West
of the metropolitan area). The comparison of the average housing conditions of
Nicaraguans and Costa Ricans also shows high rates of Nicaraguans in precarious
dwellings (see table below).
14	 Davis, 2007.
Hauke Jan Rolf
182
Indicators of the Housing Conditions corresponding to the origin of the head
of a household 2000 (in  %)
Characteristics Costa Rican Nicaraguan
Type: slum dwelling (tugurio) 1,2 7,2
Housing in bad condition 9,6 25,3
Without connection to water 10,1 18,2
Without connection to canalisation 6,8 17,0
Sanitarian equipment but without canalisation
or sewage work (tanque séptico)
7,1 28,4
High density 9,5 27,3
Source: Inec (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos de Costa Rica). Data
from the national census 2000.
5.	 Presentation of three exemplary urban locations
In the following three exemplary urban locations are presented to show that
especially in a fragmented metropolitan area such as the San José region the
migrants’ socio-spatial orientation and operating range is not just exclusively
limited to their places of settlement, but also to different meeting places in public
and (semi-)private spaces. Referring to some results of the own research
project, these places serve to illustrate the specific relationship between the spatial
distribution or rather concentration of Nicaraguan migrants in the urban area
and the impacts that spatial effects could have on the formation of their social
support networks. To this end, the comparative presentation contains: first a suburban
squat with a remarkable proportion of Nicaraguan inhabitants; second,
the baseball stadium in San José; and third, an inner-city park which is mainly
frequented by Nicaraguan migrants. Even if it is not possible to compare these
quite distinctive places by their size, structure and social diversity in all their
dimensions, it is still fruitful to compare these locations with respect to their
functional role for specific types of social networks.
Urban Meeting Locations of Nicaraguan Migrants
183
5.1.	 The suburban squat La Carpio
The suburban squat called La Carpio with about 20,000 inhabitants is one of the
largest in Costa Rica’s metropolitan area and has a considerable concentration
of the Nicaraguan population with a proportion of almost 50 %. As opposed to
other squats, in the case of La Carpio the Nicaraguan households did not move
into precarious dwellings of an area already occupied by Costa Ricans, but rather
were part of the original land takeover in 1993, which was one of the latest.
The social support networks within this area were mainly led by a common
strategy of all inhabitants (Nicaraguans as well as Costa Ricans and a few other
Hauke Jan Rolf
184
migrant groups) to pursue local interests such as the regulation of their property
rights, access to basic infrastructure (like paved roads, electricity, fresh water
and drainage), access to public housing programs, the establishment of educational
and health services, playgrounds and so on.
The social networks are predominately structured by local family- and community-based
neighbourhood associations and semi-institutionalised organisations
centred on very local activities without any transnational ties that exceed
personal contacts to visitors or newcomers from the country of origin. While
practical and material help is predominantly based on social support networks
resulting from the neighbourhood associations and the resident family members,
mostly emotional support is contextualised with transnational ties by the interviewees
from La Carpio. In contrast, transnational exchanges, for their part, are
quite a rare phenomenon in the squat. Apart from some political campaigns of
Nicaraguan politicians that visited La Carpio during their stay in Costa Rica to
engage the migrants’ sympathy for their candidature in the native country, political
activity in La Carpio is mainly represented by debates and conflicts with the
city council, the public administration and the state. The economic activities are
also locally based, even if some of the stores and stalls sell traditional food from
Nicaragua that is demanded from Nicaraguans as much as from Costa Ricans.
In a socio-cultural perspective, an interesting fact about La Carpio is that the
Purísima, one of the most important traditional festivities in Nicaragua, is today
celebrated in the squat by almost all inhabitants. Instead of representing an exotic
and exclusively Nicaraguan festivity, the Purísima has become more and more a
symbol for the entire district to show their community-based intercultural identity
and function in part as a nostalgic retrospective view by the Nicaraguans. As
numerous interviewees from La Carpio stressed, they do not really distinguish
between Costa Rican and Nicaraguan inhabitants in the squat and highlight the
political and infrastructural achievements they have fought for collectively. Moreover,
after a long period of shame and stigmatisation due to living in this squat,
today they feel proud to call themselves Carpeños, which has become a more important
feature of self-identification for many interviewees than their Nicaraguan
origin. As Martha Lidia A., a 24 year old Nicaraguan resident of La Carpio, said:
“Before, hmm (...) before I always felt in a way (…) kind of ashamed to be
from La Carpio. And, well (…) additionally to be Nicaraguan, hmm (…) I
always told the people that I live in Uruca because (.) because I was afraid of
what they might think. (…) If they think that I am a criminal, that I have a
bad education, that, hmm (.) that I am not a trustworthy person. (…) But now
I feel something like (.) proud in a way, (...) to be Carpeña. (…) proud of all
Urban Meeting Locations of Nicaraguan Migrants
185
that my parents have achieved, the whole community has reached. […] We
are all proud now, proud to call ourselves Carpeños.”15
5.2.	San José’s baseball stadium
15	 Martha Lidia A., 24, resident of La Carpio, in Costa Rica since 1998. Interview
from 25.11.2009.
Hauke Jan Rolf
186
Another location that has been studied during the ethnographic fieldwork in
Costa Rica is the main baseball stadium of San José. It serves as a meeting
place not only for the Nicaraguan population but also to connect them with other
groups of migrants from the Caribbean and from Central and South America.
While Costa Ricans are mainly interested in soccer, the baseball stadium is frequented
mostly by Nicaraguans, but also by Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Columbians
and other migrant groups and people (so for example a single retired US-citizen),
according to the predominant sport of their home country.
As a somehow protected place that is partly open, partly separated from
the outside world, the stadium has a strong family-oriented character, where
migrant families can go for a weekend activity without spending much money
(for example, in contrast to shopping malls, where they can hardly remain for an
entire day-trip without being forced to buy something). Normally they just pay
the symbolic entrance fee and bring their own lunch. Due to the shared interest
in baseball, the stadium serves as a meeting place not only between migrants and
the national population, but also, and predominantly, between different migrant
groups that would not interact in such a way in other public areas. Moreover, the
visitors come from all parts of the urbanised Central Valley and use the location
of the stadium to get in contact with others whom they could not meet elsewhere
because of the lack of alternative time and spatial opportunities.
Reactively, the importance of the migrants for the Costa Rican Baseball is
not just reflected in the physical and symbolical occupation of the once abandoned
and neglected stadium by Costa Ricans, but also in the constellation of
the teams. While some teams are composed of players of different nationalities,
others signal their predominantly Nicaraguan origins by giving themselves
names like the Tiburones Nicaraguenses, the Nicaraguan Sharks, or the Equípo
Managua, the Managua team, to refer to their home country or even city. Moreover,
while the baseball stadium is mainly a place that brings together people
of different nationalities at the local level, it has also been used (or misused) in
a transnational way during the election campaign in Nicaragua when the candidate
of a Nicaraguan political party came to Costa Rica and held a speech in the
stadium to his ex-compatriots, in full recognition of their importance for their
home country as they send remittances, start investments and keep transnational
ties alive.
Additionally, Julio César R., the general director of the Costa Rican National
Baseball League, a Nicaraguan who moved to Costa Rica more than 20 years
ago, also reported about a special event when a famous team from the Nicaraguan
capitol Managua has been invited to play against a selection of Nicaraguan
migrant players in San José:
Urban Meeting Locations of Nicaraguan Migrants
187
“They all (.) all the Nicaraguan migrants have been very thankful that we
could have organised this game. (…) Well, our team lost but (.) the stadium
was almost overcrowded. (.) And such an ambiance! Almost like in Nicaragua,
with all the banners, the equipment, (.) the music. (…) The event has also
been noted in the Nicaraguan newspaper.”16
5.3.	The inner-city park La Merced
16	 Julio César R., 37, the general director of the Costa Rican National Baseball
League, in Costa Rica since 1991. Interview from 13.11.2009.
Hauke Jan Rolf
188
The third place being discussed in greater detail here is the inner-city park La
Merced, also called the Nica Park by Costa Ricans as well as by Nicaraguans
themselves. For about 15 years now, the once abandoned park has been occupied
physically and symbolically by Nicaraguan migrants and serves as a central
location with a variety of support functions for the Nicaraguan communities.
Surrounded by a church, a hospital and low-rise buildings, the inner-city park
has a rural character that might fit with the predominately rural origin of many
Nicaraguan migrants. Moreover, next to the park is an important bus station
where many buses arrive from the outskirts like La Carpio where most of the
Nicaraguan migrants live. The park is frequented during the entire week and
especially on the weekends – and even during the rainy season it serves as a central
meeting location until the afternoon when the thunder storms usually start.
In a way, the park is a place of cultural reproduction where Nicaraguan festivities
are celebrated, traditional Nicaraguan food and utensils are sold by informal
vendors and where Nicaraguan music is played by traditional musicians.
Moreover, it is also a place of collective socialising and emotional support, a
first connection for newcomers as well as the last resort for long-time migrants
in precarious situations.
The support functions within the park are quite diverse and range from brief
informational support about employment, housing or legalising the immigration
status to a profound kind of support concerning the reunion of family members
and friends and the creation, maintaining and stabilising of a durable social network
between compatriots and - more specific - certain occupational groups like
the housemaids that only have public spaces such as these to meet and interact.
Apart from these local support functions, the park is embedded in transnational
ties in ways that go far beyond the regular queues in front of the public
phones to call the family in Nicaragua and to indulge in the reproduction of
a socio-cultural nostalgia. It is because the park environment has profoundly
changed over the past 15 years. The entire district around the park, once abandoned
by the Costa Rican population, has now become an area of so-called
ethnic businesses, with numerous remittance banks, typical bars and restaurants,
lawyer offices and NGO accommodations for legal support, hotels for newcomers
and postal, travel and goods transport agencies to Nicaragua.
At the same time, the park itself has witnessed a dramatic social change.
Long-term migrants recount in a nostalgic way that the park used to be a place
for socialising, familial meetings and even served as a marriage market, and
lament the park’s socio-spatial decline into a place which is today characterised
by criminality, alcoholism and prostitution. Moreover, the informal vendors
within the park have a lot of trouble with the municipal police, which was not
Urban Meeting Locations of Nicaraguan Migrants
189
the case in the past. As Danélia C., a 50 year old political activist for the rights
of the Nicaraguan migrants, reported:
“Always, always. I am going to the park since I have come to San José (…).
This is the place where the Nicaraguan community is gathering, where you
can meet your folks. The park is the park. The park has always been the park.
[…] But the problem is that the park has changed a lot, you see, you’ve got all
this proliferation of, (.) of prostitution, of alcoholism, of drugs, of criminality
(…). Before, the park has been a much more familial place (.) but (.) with the
time it has lost, hmm, (.) a little bit it’s spirit.”17
In contrast, newcomers, the informal vendors or the prostitutes, as some of them
ascertained in the interviews, still see the importance of the park to meet and
link together with their compatriots, to support each other or just to do their
business.
While there has been some kind of institutionalisation of the migrant activities
in the entire district around the park which originated from the park itself,
the park has changed its symbolic relevance for the heterogeneously structured
community of Nicaraguan migrants over time.
In this sense, one’s symbolic self-positioning towards the park seems to be
not only a possibility of social differentiation towards the Costa Rican society
but also among the Nicaraguan migrants themselves to distinguish, for example,
between newcomers and long-term migrants, between well established and
precarious migrants, and to point out (or conceal) one’s social status within the
migrant group and the Costa Rican society. Accordingly, Javier M., a 34 year
old Nicaraguan musician, noted:
“Yes, there are differences (...) I would say that, hmm, the people who go to the
Parque de la Merced (…) they, hmm, they are just the men on the street, (.) the
people originally from the countryside. […] I would say that the Nicaraguans
who go to the Plaza de la Cultura or to the Parque Central have a kind of (.) a
little bit more like, hmm, (…) they have a higher cultural level. (.) Or they think
that they are something better (.) or something like that. They go to Kentucky
to eat a chicken and they wouldn’t eat the food from the park, I think.”18
17	 Danélia C., 50, Nicaraguan political activist, in Costa Rica since 2002. Interview
from 18.10.2009.
18	 Javier A., 34, Nicaraguan musician, in Costa Rica since 2005. Interview from
10.12.2009.
Hauke Jan Rolf
190
6.	Conclusions
By contrasting and comparing these different locations, the particular connections
between different types of social support networks and the specific conditions
of concrete meeting places have been identified. In this context, it has
been assumed that the collective linkages to a certain place reinforce as much
the network’s composition as the socialised place is produced and reproduced
reactively by the social action and the physical and symbolic occupation of a
particular group such as the Nicaraguan migrants.
The previous assumptions and the comparison of the different places in a
fragmented urban agglomeration such as Costa Rica’s central highlands have
led to a differentiation between more locally-oriented places with a high importance
for the direct migrant’s networking and of more transnationally related
locations for the reciprocal exchange between the host and the native country.
While, for example, in the La Carpio squat only locally-based entrepreneurial
activities could be set up sustainably and other activities, such as the establishment
of a remittance bank or a transport agency, have been implemented but
have never been successful, the district around the park as a central hub of the
socio-spatial activities of locally widespread Nicaraguan migrants has changed
into a space of semi-professional transnational activities. Therefore, it is questioned,
whether this area is not only a transnational interlinked location with
constant and multiple interconnections across national borders that are anchored
in the migrant’s daily live or if such a park could also be called a significantly
transnationalised place.
Further investigation could probably focus on the interconnections between
specific transnational localities on both sides of the border to highlight the interlinkages
among different types of networks. Such investigation in the tradition
of multi-sited ethnography19
could explore for example the mutual exchange
relations of the diverse business persons involved in the fields of remittance
banking, transborder travel or goods transportation agencies. The spatial clustering
of such activities on both sides of the border could be understood as a
geographical mapping of transnational social networks.
19	 Marcus, 1995.
Urban Meeting Locations of Nicaraguan Migrants
191
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193
Urban Poverty and Gentrification
A Comparative View on Different Areas in Hamburg
Ingrid Breckner
Since the end of the 20th
century, German cities with population growth such
as Munich, Berlin, Hamburg or Cologne are facing a strong spatial polarisation
due to economic, cultural and political diversities, which more and more influences
the access to labor and housing. In this context, gentrification became a
keyword for such types of urban changes in media and scientific discussions,
although convincing empirical data explaining and generalising such developments
are still lacking.1
According to Tom Slater “[…] a careful analytical indictment
of the mainstream research output (typified by scholarship concluding
that gentrification is acceptable if it is ‘managed’ by policy) is necessary but
not sufficient. Such an indictment needs to be coupled with further research that
seeks to document displacement (in any or all of its forms) ‘from below’ in the
sobering terms of those who experience it. The absence of qualitative accounts
of displacement is striking and shocking when juxtaposed with quantitative
measures, or with all those accounts of the trials and tribulations of the new
middle class.”2
The critical reflection of literature on gentrification over four decades3
shows
that quite different reasons and procedures of urban transformation are summarised
under the term of gentrification, which tends to lose its descriptive and
explanatory capacity. In order not to enter into such a precarious discussion,
the following arguments shall focus on three differently structured urban spaces
in Hamburg: Ottensen, St. Pauli and Wilhelmsburg. Their different stages of
urban transformation are related to specific economic, political, social and cul-
1	 Cf. Breckner, 2010.
2	 Slater, 2011, p. 580.
3	 Cf. Lee et al., 2008.
Ingrid Breckner
194
tural structures and processes, however, all of them are labeled as more or less
gentrified. These examples show different aspects of the relationship between
urban poverty, gentrification and urban policies and underline the necessity of
scientific analysis with a focus on displacements of poor populations based both
on quantitative and qualitative empirical findings.
As the complexity of micro-spaces can never be understood without relating
them to their interferences with an always specific meso- and macro-spatial con-
text4
and the overlapping of different urban functions, I shall start my argumentation
with a brief presentation of poverty in Hamburg, followed by a view on
structural specificities and developments in the urban spaces under investigation
and a final discussion of relations between poverty and gentrification in the development
of the selected urban areas and in a general perspective.
Poverty pockets in a wealthy city:
The case of Hamburg
Hamburg is the second biggest metropolis in Germany with approximately
1,800,000 inhabitants. Situated on the Northern and Southern shores of the river
Elbe, the city had the chance to develop the largest German harbor since medieval
times. Nowadays, commercial relations with China are dominating the business
on a growing number of container terminals. Therefore, the harbor moved
step by step to the West because the new large container ships needed more and
more depth and the digging of sand from the river became increasingly difficult
due to costs, lacking storage space for contaminated sands and an old tunnel
under the river, which cannot be removed. The port is politically still considered
as the heart of the urban economy, although the port businesses lost their
central importance for the local labor market due to technological innovations.
New economic activities in the sectors of aviation, biotechnology, health, media,
entertainment, tourism and other services created growing job opportunities
mostly for educated people. They attract increasing numbers of students as well
as regional, national and international immigrants. At the same time, many low
skilled elderly people lost their jobs with few perspectives to access the postindustrial
labor market. They represent the group of long-term unemployed labor
force more or less hidden by the way of diverse statistical tricks.
The long lasting tradition of international relations related to port activities
and those based on service economies lead to a population of more than 100 na-
4	 Cf. Läpple, 1993.
Urban Poverty and Gentrification
195
tionalities speaking more than 300 languages in Hamburg. 2012 nearly 30 % of
the population had a migration background, meaning that these persons or their
parents were not born in Germany. Because a lot of these inhabitants had the
chance or were forced to get a German citizenship, the percentage of foreigners
– as people without a German passport – in Hamburg is much lower (14 %).
Both figures show huge differences regarding urban spaces: In Hamburg’s central
district nearly half of the population has a migratory background, while
those with the highest percentage cope with up to 70 % of immigrants; low
numbers of immigrants are characteristic for semi-central and marginal districts
with high percentages of middle and high income residents.
Beside immigration the growing regional, national and international tourism
and a high number of commuters to the city from the suburban surrounding (see
chart 1) contribute to the cities diverse labor force as well as to its importance as
a rich consumer capital in northern Germany.
Chart 1: Commuters to the City (Green Arrows) and from the City (Red
Arrows) 2002
Source: Soyka, 2006, p. 2
Ingrid Breckner
196
This inflow of consumer capital changed the perspective of urban policies: In
Hamburg, many administrative, political and economic capacities are invested
for the marketing of the city while neglecting the serious effects of social and
spatial polarisation on the increasingly difficult living conditions of poor and/
or excluded people.
The City-State of Hamburg5
is administratively subdivided into seven districts
and a huge number of highly diverse neighborhoods.
The map in chart 2 has been updated recently in the context of the regular
Social Monitoring, provided by the federal administration with responsibility
for urban and environmental development, planning and construction. Green colors
in the legend indicate a high socioeconomic status with positive, stabile or
negative dynamics in the micro-spatial development of the last year. Blue colors
indicate a mid-range status with different dynamic aspects. Low and very low
status is indicated by yellow and red colors and shows risky urban developments
in Wilhelmsburg as part of the inner city district as well as on the margins of the
city center and some peripheries. This picture shows that Hamburg has poverty
pockets with specific characteristics referring to their history, their social and
economic structure, policy-interventions and activities of the civil society in
place.
The selected neighborhoods under investigation in this article are Wilhelmsburg,
Ottensen and St. Pauli, all of them situated near the city center with its low
density of inhabitants. They are marked dominantly with red and dark yellow
colors but in different extensions. The population of Ottensen and St. Pauli were
of similar size in 1990 but St. Pauli lost nearly a third of its population in the last
20 years; Wilhelmsburg was always much more populated and had to cope with
a growing number of inhabitants in the last 20 years (see table 1).
Spatial mobility patterns for the investigated neighborhoods show decreasing
numbers of immigrants but – with the exception of Ottensen in 2010 – a still
positive migration balance. The reason for this difference is the fact that urban
renewal of residential buildings from the 19th
century was completed in Ottensen
during the 1990s and there is not very much space for new construction activities.
Urban renewal led to bigger flats and a decrease of social density so that
there is no more capacity for many interested newcomers. The figures related to
foreign immigrants show the highest concentration in Wilhelmsburg and more
5	 City-states in Germany as Hamburg, Berlin and Bremen have a double political
function: They act as federal states with access to respective taxes and delegate
communal responsibilities to their districts. In so far they have more money at their
disposal and the right to decide about their federal laws.
Urban Poverty and Gentrification
197
	 Chart 2: Social Fragmentation of Neighborhoods in the City-State 		
	 Hamburg 2011
Source: Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg, 2012, p. 29.
than the cities’ average also in St. Pauli. These two areas still offer a higher percentage
of social housing and less living space per inhabitant than Ottensen and
the average of Hamburg. Ottensen and St. Pauli are dominated by single-households
and single-parent families, but access to jobs is much easier in Ottensen
than in St. Pauli and Wilhelmsburg and indicates different education levels of
the population. Higher education expresses itself also in different income levels,
Ingrid Breckner
198
where Ottensen corresponds to the average of Hamburg, while inhabitants of St.
Pauli and Wilhelmsburg reach only 2/3 of the average. The dependency on social
welfare in Wilhelmsburg ranges between 20 and 26   %, in St. Pauli between
14 and 20  % and in Ottensen between 8 and 14  %.6
Table 1: Social Characteristics of Investigated Neighborhoods
from 1990 to 2010
Ottensen St. Pauli Wilhelmsburg Hamburg
1990 2010 1990 2010 1990 2010 2010
Population 33,161 33,052 31,888 21,469 46,686 50,472 1,7 million
Incomings 8900 3367 9555 2952 6444 4329 0,18 million
Outgoings 7508 3413 8322 2799 5418 4043 0,16 million
migration
balance
+1352 -46 +1233 +153 +1,026 +286 +0,02 million
migrant
background
- 25,5 % - 35,8 % - 56,8 % 29,6 %
social
housing
- 7,8 % - 18,9 % - 29,4 % 10,7 %
living
space p.p.
31,8 37 23,6 31,1 26,9 28 37
Singles - 60,3 % - 68,7 % - 47,9 % 53,1 %
single parents
(a)
- 38,8 % - 41,8 % - 29,8 % 30,5 %
jobless
(15-65)
- 5,7 % - 9,0 % - 10,7 % 6,1 %
income
2004
29,270 € 20,509 € 20,354 € 32,505 €
(a) of all households with children
Source: Statistikamt Nord, selected data by Ingrid Breckner
6	 Cf. Kastendieck/Broockm ann, 2012, p.6.
Urban Poverty and Gentrification
199
Urban transformations in Ottensen, St. Pauli and
Wilhelmsburg since the 1980th
Looking back on the long-term history of Ottensen, St. Pauli and Wilhelmsburg
we can find some explanations for the diversities in the urban tissue of Hamburg
and these areas. An important year for the cities’ development is 1937, when
Adolf Hitler decided to enlarge the city through the incorporation of huge parts
of its surroundings. With his ‘Greater Hamburg Law’, Altona (including Ottensen)
became a district of Hamburg as well as Harburg (including Wilhelmsburg).
For a long time, these areas were on the periphery of the traditional Hanseatic
City and suffered degradation in the process of industrial decay after 1960.
Ottensen, as a traditional manufacturing area, was first scheduled to be renewed
by the way of the demolition of old urban structures. However, the existing
plans for physical ‘slum clearing’ provoked intensive and continuous political
protest in the 1970th
which succeeded in realizing the first participative ‘soft renewal’
approach in Hamburg. Physical, social, symbolic and regulative changes
of the urban space where negotiated in an integrative perception plot by plot and
street by street between inhabitants, advocatory planners and architects, house
owners and representatives of the city. This renewal process required more than
30 years and is still ongoing in certain areas; but it achieved highly appreciated
results. Today, Ottensen is one of the most sought-after living spaces near to the
city center because of its functional and social mix, offering a wide range of
life opportunities for different social milieus. It became interesting for so called
‘gentrifiers from inside’ (e.g. former students engaged in the slow and integrative
modernisation and now well paid academics) and people from outside with
better salaries, yet still offers public housing for low income people constructed
on former industrial plots. The mix of milieus in Ottensen is also evident in
the structure of services and commerce in the neighborhood, which allows the
residents to satisfy their daily requirements in this multicultural ‘urban village’.
Until the beginning of the 21st
century St. Pauli survived with its image ‘poor
but sexy’. With its well-known red light district around the Reeperbahn, the area
attracted huge numbers of male tourists mostly on weekends and offered living
space for different groups of low income people: students, artists, lower working
class. The biggest house owner in the area showed a lot of responsibility
for the ‘left overs’ in the postindustrial society: He offered acceptable rents for
housing and commercial space, encouraged his tenants to take care of elderly
and infirm neighbors and held weekly “open hours” in the lounge of his hotel in
order to understand the development process and to find the right moment for
necessary interventions. For the last decade the city of Hamburg has been trying
Ingrid Breckner
200
to modernize this area full of urban survival spots. An old brewery on the shores
of the river Elbe has been replaced by expensive private and rental housing and
opened ‘the village’ for middle class people. Two over-dimensional open air
stages became the central place for events. When travelers and homeless people
discovered these public places with roofs against rain for sleeping or meeting
points, the management of the place installed a water system in the roof of the
stages and let it rain at random with the aim to discourage the unexpected und
unwanted persons from using this public area. Parts of St. Pauli’s low budget
milieu started to organise an anti-gentrification protest together with owners of
traditional shops and entertainment areas, encouraged by young professionals.
However, the pressure of neoliberal renewal continues, forced by local, national
and international real estate investors: They buy buildings and plots in advance
for hotels, offices and high level housing under minimal formal political control,
expecting high revenue in the future. The power of protest from the local and
regional civil society is ineffective as long as policies and the cities’ middle and
upper class mainstream support the modernisation strategy without a solution as
to where and how the specific milieu of St. Pauli is to survive under acceptable
social, economic and spatial conditions. St. Pauli’s traditional social mix faces
an extreme risk of erosion and will produce extensive welfare costs together
with much individual and collective insecurity.
Since the 1960s, Wilhelmsburg suffers from intensive urban decay. The flood
in 1962 claimed more than 300 victims because dams in this area where lower
than in other parts of the city. After the flood, the whet low standard houses
where no longer attractive for those inhabitants who could afford to live in other
areas. House owners lost interest in investments and politicians declared that
Wilhelmsburg should no longer be treated as a residential, but primarily as an
industrial area. Thus, the first “guestworkers” took over the residences considering
the low prices and short ways to their jobs in the port or the railway company.
In the 1970s, the city changed its policy and decided to build the new public
housing quarter Kirchdorf Süd in Wilhelmsburg near the highway, without providing
adequate public transport, educational, health and daily life infrastructure.
For quite some time the more than 50,000 residents of Wilhelmsburg where
forced to organise themselves and to find a way of living in this geographically
isolated island in the river Elbe and cosmopolitan ‘city in the city’. Until the
beginning of the 21st
century, Wilhelmsburg was a well-known symbol of marginalisation
and exclusion. As housing costs in Hamburg increased, students
started to discover this city diaspora in their search of cheap housing. Many of
them turned back quickly because they could not find the basic infrastructure for
their daily life and felt mostly frightened by the wide range of social and cultural
Urban Poverty and Gentrification
201
diversities. Better-off immigrants suddenly began to flee their “arrival city”7
once they could afford it in order to lose the discriminating address. The cities’
decision for the “Leap over Elbe” after 2000 was based on the recognition that
the city state of Hamburg could not cope with the intended economic growth
and rising immigration if everything concentrated on the north side of the river.
Under this perspective, Wilhelmsburg and the further south of Hamburg became
interesting as economic and social development areas. However, this meant a
change of the living conditions in Wilhelmsburg. This difficult task within an
urban area neglected for a long time was expected to be solved with the complementary
implementation of an International Building Exhibition (IBA) and
an International Garden Show (IGS).8
IBA opened in March 2013 and presents
innovative ecological housing concepts, new models of energy supply, renewal
of downgraded public housing with immigrant residents under the key themes
“Cosmopolis”, “Metrozones” and “Cities and Climate Change” until autumn
2013.9
The opening anniversary was accompanied by anti-gentrification demonstrations
of local people and political activists articulating their realistic fear of
rising housing costs for low income residents. This risk is structurally given as
long as legal rent regulations consider only new rental contracts for the yearly
identification of the average rent for different housing stocks which cannot be
exceeded by house owners. Thus, if in Wilhelmsburg IBA succeeds in motivating
private investments in the housing stock, it will clearly result in rising rents
for those residents. Housing security under these conditions is provided only
for tenants in the public housing stock as long as their rents are legally limited,
which is the case for maximum 15 years. The International Garden Show aims
at improving the green spaces and leisure facilities in the area, which again has
the effect of increasing property values and attracting well off residents.
The urban transformations in the three areas under investigation can be summarized
as follows and will be used as empirical material for the interpretation
of relations between poverty and gentrification in these urban spaces.
7	 Cf. Saunders, 2011.
8	 Cf. Internationale Gartenschau (IGS) Hamburg: http://www.igs-hamburg.de,
07.05.2013.
9	 Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA) Hamburg: http://www.iba-hamburg.de/
en/nc/themes-projects/projekte-a-z.html, 07.05.2013.
Ingrid Breckner
202
Ottensen District of Altona, since 1937 part of Hamburg suffered
degradation and social conflicts until the 1960s. Plans
for ‘slum clearing’ turned to participative urban renewal
under professional coordination after huge political protest
since the 1970swith effects of stabilisation through
gentrification from the in- and outside. This first integrative
(physical, social, symbolic and regulative) renewal
approach in Hamburg created a mix of spaces for different
social and economic milieus coexisting nearly without
conflicts. But the loss of poor population and rising living
costs are evident.
St. Pauli This ‘poor but sexy district’ still hosts a temporary amusement
park and touristic spaces with niches for different
low budget milieus under pressure of neoliberal renewal
since 2000. Local, national and international real estate
investors force the modernization of the area with lacking
formal political control but accompanied by intensive
protest from different groups of Hamburg’s civil society.
Wilhelmsburg Since its integration in the city state of Hamburg in 1937
the Elbe island became the most expensive example of
social, economic, political and ecological failures of
urban governance. The flood experience in 1962 and
disinvestments lead to a neglected infrastructure (schools,
public transport, etc.), poor leisure areas and dominating
immigrant economies. For a long time, self-regulation
of neighborhoods was the only survival strategy and
came under pressure of urban renewal strategies with the
International Building and Garden Exhibitions (IBA/IGS)
opening in 2013 due to local protest and high professional
expectations.
Urban Poverty and Gentrification
203
Relations between poverty and gentrification
in urban developments
The analyzed examples of urban spaces in Hamburg show developments in
different stages of post-industrial modernization. The case of Ottensen stands
for participative renewal, possibly simultaneously also empowerment and displacement
of less educated immigrants with low incomes. Poor young people
living independently from their families with high cultural and social capacities
are more and more excluded from the housing market in Ottensen because of
constantly rising rents. There are no precise data to examine exactly who moved
away for what reasons and who arrived in which socioeconomic condition in
specific phases of the modernization process. The only fact we know definitely
is that immense protest lead to a slow modernization process with the participation
of politically oriented residents. Today, there is still a social and functional
mixture in the area as long as the existing public housing stock remains under
legal rent regulation, thus securing access to people with low income. If this
political regulation erodes, the quarter shall become dominated by middle and
high income groups and will risk the loss of its urban flair currently consisting
of social, cultural and functional diversity and tolerance.
In St.Pauli and Wilhelmsburg the modernisation process initiated much later
than in Ottensen under completely different societal conditions. Neoliberal
policies had been established for more than a decade and Hamburg, as a tenant
metropolis with moderate prices for real estate properties, was discovered by
national and international investors seeking good revenues. Since the financial
crisis in 2008 there is a huge interest from the in- and outside to use real estate
properties as an investment because the trust in banks is decreasing.10
Under
these conditions urban renewal cannot be discussed any more as such: It has to
be precisely contextualised with economic, political and social developments on
a regional, national and global level. Its immediate or long term micro-spatial
effects are much more difficult to relate to their reasons than in the long lasting
renewal process in Ottensen since the end of the 1970s. The cases of Wilhelmsburg
and St. Pauli show that the post-industrial labor market is less accessible
for poor and elderly people without qualifications for rapidly changing and
heavily internationalized service jobs. Therefore, overlapping of unemployment
or precarious jobs and poor housing or homelessness succeeded to a growing
number of the population even being part of the middle class. This explains
the wide spectrum of people protesting against urban transformation in general
10	 Cf. Mester, 2013, p. 27.
Ingrid Breckner
204
and interventions in the housing market in particular. This is the only reason
why the city of Hamburg decided quite quickly to rebuy the inner city area called
“Gängeviertel”, which was given to an investor from the Netherlands who
speculated with the property for more than six years waiting for higher profit.
This example shows that members of the local government and the city’s public
opinion is still traumatised by the 20 years of fights for buildings in Hafenstraße
(Harbor Street), which finally resulted in a collective renewal process with the
participation of the former squatters and the assistance of advocatory planners.
At the moment it is difficult to foresee how the ongoing protest activities in
St. Pauli and Wilhelmsburg will develop in the future. There is some constructive
activity from the educated second and third generation of the population
with migratory background articulating their identification with the formerly
neglected neighborhoods. They protest against possible displacement caused
by the political creation of a social mixture, because they do not want to lose
their social networks established in the urban diaspora.11
Those immigrants, who
can afford it, buy houses in their well-known quarters by pooling the money of
larger families. Even if they earn less than small German households, they become
economically successful in concurrence for the same flat or building due to
their social capital. This situation often creates jealousy in parts of the German
population which does not recognize, that this is the only possible way to keep
their living environment in a discriminatory surrounding housing estate.
All over Hamburg the really poor population in central and semi-central districts
is increasingly at the risk of displacement to the margins of the city or its
suburbs. As chart 3 shows, the city center was highly populated in the 1960th
.
Until the end of the 20th
century the central area of Hamburg lost its residential
function because of disinvestment in the old housing stock, lack of green areas
and ongoing commercialization of these central spaces. Those who moved to the
margins or to the suburbs were the classical middle classes expecting a more homogenous
and healthy residential environment. Since the beginning of the 21st
century we observe a trend called re-urbanisation (in contradiction to suburbanisation)
or ‘renaissance of the city’in Hamburg and other German metropolis12
.
New attractive residential opportunities in central areas are highly sought-after
by well-off households from the cities’ periphery and from outside.13
11	 Cf. Blokland, 2003.
12	 Cf. Läpple, 2005; Kanai/Läpple, 2005.
13	 Cf. Menzlet al., 2011; Breckner/Menzl, 2012.
Urban Poverty and Gentrification
205
Chart 3: Distribution of Population in Hamburg in Dependency to the
Distance to the City Centre	
Source: Breckner et al., 1998, p. 27
They rent and buy residences while people with lower incomes cannot afford the
expensive housing costs in the central areas. Demographic change also creates
pressure for the poor population in central city districts because even middle
class parents, whose children left home, decide to reduce their living space
and prefer to move to central areas.14
Thus, the attractiveness of central urban
living spaces goes hand in hand with risks of displacement for poor elderly and
young people, single parent families and new immigrants to closer or further
peripheries. These households mostly cannot afford or are not able to drive cars
and are in danger to lose their established social contacts and necessary health
infrastructure. Therefore, in the future poverty and capacities of self-organisation
need to be analyzed in marginal districts of metropolis and in suburbs where
we cannot expect yet the same complex competences for the production of
space as in megacities of developing countries.15
The German overregulation of
spatial planning and the still existing lack of cooperation between institutions
and professions involved in the production of space risk to create new poverty
issues outside of the metropolis in cases of low political responsibility and lack
of economic resources for societal inclusion.
14	 Cf. Slavik, 2013, p. 25.
15	 Cf. Dell, 2009.
Ingrid Breckner
206
Literature
Blokland, Talja, Urban Bonds: Social relationships in an inner city neighbourhood,
Cambridge 2003.
Breckner, Ingrid/Menzl, Marcus, Neighbourliness in the City Centre: Reality
and potential in the case of the Hamburg HafenCity, in: New Urbanism.
Life, Work, and Space in the New Downtown. ed. by Ilse Helbrecht/Peter
Drksmeier, Farnham/Burlington 2012, p. 133-148.
Breckner, Ingrid, Gentrifizierung im 21. Jahrhundert, in: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte
17 (2010), p. 27-32.
Dell, Christopher, Tacit Urbanism. Hawkers and the production of space in
every day Kolkata, Rotterdam 2009.
Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg/Behörde für Stadtentwicklung und Umwelt,
Sozialmonitoring Integrierte Stadtteilentwicklung Bericht 2011, Hamburg
2012.
Kanai, Miguel/Läpple, Dieter, The Resurgence of Urban Centralities: a look
at contemporary New York , ed. by London School Of Economics And
PoliticalScience, London 2005.
Kastendieck, Hanna/Broockmann, Sonja, Das Hamburg der Gegensätze, in:
Hamburger Abendblatt, 22.03.2012, p 6.
Läpple, Dieter, Thesen zu einem Konzept gesellschaftlicher Räume, in: Die
aufgeräumte Welt. Raumbilder und Raumkonzepte im Zeitalter globaler
Marktwirtschaft, Loccumer Protokolle 74/92, ed. by Jörg Mayer, Loccum
1993, p. 29-52.
Id., Phoenix aus der Asche : Die Neuerfindung der Stadt, in: Die Wirklichkeit
der Städte, ed. by Helmut Berking/Martina Löw, Baden-Baden2005,
p.397-413.
Lees, Loretta et al., Gentrification, New York 2008.
Menzl, Marcus et al., Wohnen in der HafenCity – Zuzugsmotive, Alltagserfahrungen,
nachbarschaftliche Aktivitäten. Materialien zur HafenCity Hamburg
Nr. 1, ed. by Hafencity Hamburg GmbH, Hamburg 2011.
Mester, Volker, Spekulanten treiben Immobilienpreise hoch, in: Hamburger
Abendblatt, 27.03.2013, p. 27.
Saunders, Doug, Arrival City – The Final Migration and Our Next World, Toronto
2011.
Slater, Tom, Gentrification oft the City, in: The New Blackwell Companion to
the City ed. by Gary Bridge/Sophie Watson, Malden (USA)/Oxford (UK),
2011, p. 571-585.
Urban Poverty and Gentrification
207
Slavik, Angelika, Wer braucht schon ein viertes Zimmer?, in: Süddeutsche
Zeitung, 27.03.2013, p. 25.
Breckner, Ingrid et al, Auswirkungen der Umlandwanderung auf den Hamburger
Wohnungsmarkt, ed. by Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg/Baubehörde/Amt
für Wohnungswesen, Hamburg 1998: https://www.hcu-hamburg.
de/research/arbeitsgebiete/prof-dr-ingrid-breckner/forschung, 07.05.2013.
Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA) Hamburg: http://www.iba-hamburg.
de/en/nc/themes-projects/projekte-a-z.html, 07.05.2013.
Internationale Gartenschau (IGS) Hamburg: http://www.igs-hamburg.de,
07.05.2013.
Soyka, Andrea, Arbeit im Kernstadt-Umland-Gefüge, 2006: http://www.sub
urbanisierung.de/downloads/Verpflechtungsmuster.pdf, 07.05.2013.
209
Europe’s only Megacity
Urban Growth, Migration and Gentrification
in 21st
Century Mos­cow
Julia Röttjer/Jan Kusber
At the beginning of the 21st
century, Moscow is the largest city and the only
Megacity in the European context.1
It is therefore a case study to be considered
in the frame of this conference volume about perspectives of cultural sciences
on urban slum areas and their inhabitants. The capital of the Russian Federation
has been growing constantly over the last 20 years and the city itself is currently
home to approx. 12,000,000,2
the Moscow agglomeration to more than
17,000,000 inhabitants, in other words 12 % of the Russian population.3
Moscow
is the true centre of the Russian Federation, not only as the focus of a centralised
political system, but also as the hotbed of Russian economy. It has been
a widely accepted saying that the Russian capital is “one of the most expensive
cities of the world” – it also seems to stand for gated communities, a concentration
of powerful oil companies, Soviet city planning heritage, the menacing
collapse of traffic and an extremely uneven distribution of wealth. At the same
1	 One may discuss the case of Istanbul here. Fedor Kudriavcev speaks of European
cities in contrast to cities like Istanbul, Cairo and – Moscow. Cf. Kudriavcev,
2012, p. 374. The heritage of the socialist metropolis planning stands against this:
Lentz, 1997, p. 110.
2	 Statistical projection on the basis of the last official number in 2010 (11,514,300),
the inclusion of new areas into the city, and the development since 2002:
Vserossiiskaia perepis’ naseleniia 2010 goda: http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/new_
site/perepis2010/croc/perepis_itogi1612.htm, 07.05.2013.
3	 Cf. Makhrova, 2006: http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2006/0247/tema01.php,
07.05.2013.
Julia Röttjer/Jan Kusber
210
time, the Moscow of today does not appear to feature the aforementioned “urban
slum areas” in a sense that might be associated with other Megacities.4
Nevertheless,
processes of social segregation and gentrification as well as urban migration
into and within the city are issues which concern the development of this
European Mega-Agglomeration and will be considered in this paper. Its aim is
to put Moscow into the debate of this collection, because this Megacity is worth
to be researched permanently and interdisciplinary. Within its limited space we
shall briefly focus on some points of recent developments in Moscow:
•	 Urban growth: What are the general stages in Moscow’s development until
today? What current challenges are there and what is the character of the
anticipated future growth?
•	 Urban migration: Who lives where in this city and what spaces are occupied
by different groups of Muscovites? Which groups are migrating into the city?
What can be said about the urban poor?
•	 Gentrification: Who ‘owns’ the city? What groups are migrating within the
city and what are the reasons? How are groups of Muscovites expelled from
different areas of the city?
Not all points shall be answered fully, but there always is a historical perspective
as a rele­vant context-setting category. As this article is written by two historians,
this may be their appeal for a closer collaboration of historical and social sciences
dealing with the phenomena in question.
4	 During its history, poverty in Russia has been a topic that was investigated on
many levels, and poverty in the city of Moscow has naturally been included in this
research. However, at the same time it can be witnessed that St. Petersburg seemed
to be more in focus concerning the sketching of urban social issues – cf. for a recent
example Jahn, 2010.
Europe’s only Megacity
211
Urban growth and development of
”The best city in the world”5
The city of Moscow gradually grew around the Moscow Kremlin, beginning in
the 14th
cen­tury. It was the capital of the Grand Duchy, after 1547 Tsardom of
Muscovy up to 1712, when Peter the Great made the newly founded St. Petersburg
his capital. Of course, the loss of the function as the political centre of the
state led to a decrease of population of approximately 150,000 down to some
120,000, however, with its location in the Russian heartland and still being centre
of commerce the city soon recovered. Moscow once again became capital of
the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1991, and of the Russian Federation since 1991.6
Situated on either bank of the Moskva River, during the 16th
to 17th
centuries
the city grew up in divisions, formerly separated from one another by walls: the
Kremlin, Kitaigorod (”walled town”, but interpreted as “Chinatown” by folk etymology),
Bielyigorod (”white town”), Zemlianoigorod (”earthworks town”), and
Meshchanskiigorod (”bourgeois town”) out­side the city walls. When Catherine
II came to power in 1762, the city’s filth and smell of waste and the irregularity
of the streets were depicted by observers as a symptom of disor­derly lifestyles
of lower-class Russians, most of them with a peasant background. Elites called
for the improvement of sanitation, which became part of Catherine’s plans for
increasing control over social life. Although her ambitious General plan for Moscow
(1775) as a whole failed, the main achievements were the Mytishchinski
water-pipe (built 1784-1804) and the street lightening, which made the centre
of the city more secure. After the fire of 1812 as a result of Napoleon’s campaign,
the city ramparts were replaced with the Boulevard Ring and Garden Ring
roads, replacing the walls around Bielyigorod and Zemlianoigorod, respec­tively.7
The city’s population grew from 250,000 to above 1,000,000 by the end of the
19th
century. National political and military successes from 1812 through 1855
calmed the critics and validated efforts to produce a more enlightened and stable
society. There was less talk about the smell and the poor hygienic conditions.
5	 In 2013, Moscow is putting on a festival named “The best city in the world” –
see the official Moscow website, presentation for the press March 29th
, 2013:
Pravitel’stvo Moskvy(1): http://www.mos.ru/press-center/presentations,
07.05.2013.
6	 Cf. on the history of the city in general: Luzhkov, 1997. On the persistence through
the political changes of revolution and the breakdown of communism: Schlögel,
2011.
7	 Cf. on the rebuilding of Moscow after 1812: Schm idt, 1989, p. 143-202.
Julia Röttjer/Jan Kusber
212
However, with Russia’s failures in the Crimean War in 1855-56, confidence
in the ability of the state to maintain order in the slums eroded and demands for
improved public health placed the issue of filth back on the agenda.8
In the second
half of the 19th
century, Moscow was connected by railway: The first line was
the one to St. Petersburg, opened in 1852. At the end of the 19th
century, Moscow
had become the centre of the country’s railway network and saw an influx of
migrating peasants, who were the needed work force for the industrialisation in
fin de siècle Moscow. With no general urban planning and no concept for public
transport and housing at hand, factories were built at the embankments of the
Moskva River, near to Kremlin, for example the chocolate factory “Einem”.9
After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks moved the capital from Petrograd
to Moscow in order to evade the wakes of the World War and the raging civil
war. Whereas the population in Petrograd declined seriously, Moscow became the
world capital of socialism with a further increase in population. The first Five-YearPlan
saw Moscow as a centre of light and heavy industry.At the end of the twenties
it became a “peasant metropolis”10
. But the massive influx of peasants was a source
of great concern for party officials. In their opinion, peasants, as members of a
“petit-bourgeois” class, represented an “uncultured mass” fond of drinking, with
no discipline or religious beliefs and a general lack of political consciousness. So,
the city with now 2,000,000 inhabitants not only needed outstanding new buildings
designed and built by avant-garde architects (Le Corbusier, Mel’nikov, and others)
as worker-clubs and houses for leisure entertainment, but a general development
plan. This “Master Plan for the Reconstruction of the City of Moscow”, devised
by a commission under Lazar Kaganovich and co-signed by Stalin and Viacheslav
Molotov on July 10th
1935, was intended as an offen­sive against the old Moscow,
which would transform the city as a whole. Four years in the making, the plan
called for an expansion of the city’s area from 285 to 600 square kilometres that
would take in mostly farmland to the south and west beyond the Lenin (nowadays
Spar­row) Hills. It involved 16 major highway projects and the construction of sev-
8	 Cf. Martin, 2008, p. 243-274. This subject was important, though a minor one
during the revolution of 1905, cf. Thurston, 1987.
9	 Cf. Huber, 2007, p. 25; Dönninghaus, 2012. The company became the famous
“Red October” in Soviet times. The site was bought by a developer in 2004, the
production moved to the rim of Moscow. Since, there have been several fantastical
plans for a mix-use project in close proximity to the Kremlin, but nothing could be
realised yet. Cf. Makarova, 2010: http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2010/2/ma25.html,
07.05.2013.
10	 So the title of a cultural study by Hoffm ann, 1994.
Europe’s only Megacity
213
eral monu­mental buildings of “state-wide significance”, the well-known skyscrapers
that were to dominate the boulevards’ perspectives.11
It foresaw 15,000,000
square meters of new housing to accommodate a total population of approximately
5,000,000 within the next decades. Representative streets modelled after Haussmann’s
boulevards in Paris were built, most prominent the Gorkii street.12
The city
would be surrounded by a green belt up to a width of ten kilometres.
Even while the master plan was being drawn up, old Moscow was giving way
to the new. One of the showpieces of the Soviet capital was to be the Moscow Metro,
which broke ground in March 1932, went into service in May 1935 and serves,
with its successively built lines, especially the ring line, as the backbone of public
transportation until today.13
A second project, begun in the early 1930s, was the
Moscow-Volga Canal built by an army of 200,000 forced labourers, which opened
in July 1937. The hopes to make the system of rivers and waterways the major
route for the transport of goods failed. The rail­way remained and still is the dominant
means of transportation. In the year 1939, the popula­tion of Moscow rose to
over four million and by 1959, with the banned returning because of the dissolution
of the GULAG after Stalin’s death in 1953, the number of inhabitants approached
the 5,000,000 mark. The General plan of 1935 was superseded ahead of time.
During the Khrushchev-period, entire villages in the Moscow region and
farmland that had been cultivated for centuries were ploughed under to make
way for new apartment blocks organised in micro-districts.14
The prototype of
such housing developments was Novye Cheremushki, south of the city centre.15
Later, the neighbourhood of Medvedkovo in the city’s south-west and other outlying
areas were subjected to the same process. Neverthe­less, the new party programme
of 1961, which promised that the housing shortage would be eliminated
during the first decade of building communism (1961-70), was far from having
been realised in the country and in Moscow.
To bring the blue- and especially the white-collar-workers to their working place
in the centre of the Soviet Union’s capital, the MKAD (Moskovskaia kol’tsevaia
avtomobil’naia doroga), a ring road used only for military purposes, was opened to
the public in 1962.16
It had four lanes running 109 kilometres along the city borders.
11	 Cf. for the Stalinist architecture Noever, 1994. The building of the high rises was
begun after 1945.
12	 Cf. Rüthers, 2007, p. 75-152.
13	 Cf. Neutatz, 2001.
14	 Cf. Colton, 1995, p. 358-381.
15	 Cf. Rüthers, 2006.
16	 Cf. Kudriavcev, 2012, p. 375.
Julia Röttjer/Jan Kusber
214
The MKAD marked the admin­istrative boundaries of the city of Moscow until the
1980s, when outlying suburbs beyond the ring road were being incorporated.
Whereas struggling heavily with controlling the migration into Moscow –
especially the peasants, who came there just to sell parts of the harvest, melons
from Astrakhan and other products to overcome the dysfunctions of planned
economy,17
– the Summer Olympic Games of 1980 presented an unparalleled
opportunity to showcase the superiority of Soviet athletes as well as the achievements
of Soviet socialism in front of a world-wide audience.18
Extraordinary
measures were taken to prepare for this grand festival. A renaissance of urban
planning, typical of host cities, resulted in not only new stadiums, training facilities,
and hotels, but also a new airport at Sheremetevo. The city itself was
‘polished up’: Roads were newly paved, trees were planted − dissidents and the
poor were banned or otherwise expelled from the city.19
When the USSR was dissolved in 1991, Moscow became the capital of the
Russian Federation. Since then, the emergence of market economy in Moscow has
produced an explosion of Western-style retailing, services, architecture, and lifestyles.
The city has continued to grow during the 1990s to 2000s, its population
rising from less than 9,000,000 to more than 11,000,000. Mason and Nigmatullina
argue that Soviet-era urban-growth central planning (before 1991) produced
controlled and sustainable metropolitan development, typified by the building of
the greenbelt in 1935. However, there has been a dramatic growth of low-density
subur­ban sprawl since then, created by a heavy demand for single-family dwellings
as opposed to crowded apartments. In 1995-97 the MKAD ring road was widened
from the initial four to ten lanes. In December 2002 Bul’var Dmitriia Donskogo
became the first Moscow Metro station to open beyond the limits of MKAD. The
Third Ring Road, intermediate between the early 19th
-century Garden Ring and
the Soviet era outer ring road, was completed in 2005.20
The greenbelt is becoming
more and more fragmented and satellite cities are appearing at the fringe. Summer
dachas are being converted into year-round residences, and with the proliferation of
automobiles there is heavy traffic congestion. These fragmentations of the borders
of the megacity and its expansion beyond those rims have to be noted when considering
the Moscow agglomeration and its population.21
17	 Cf. on the migration and mixture of population in the 60s and 70s: Gavrilova,
2001, p. 130-171.
18	 Cf. Kusber, 2003, p. 108f.
19	 Cf. Kuperm ann, 2007.
20	 Cf. Kudriavcev, 2012, p. 375.
21	 Cf. Mason/Nigm atullina, 2011.
Europe’s only Megacity
215
A view at the different historical layers of Moscow housing − from the
Khrushchevki of the 1950s to later Soviet complexes and postmodern
apartment blocks
Urban migration
Moscow is an independent federation subject of the Russian federation. At the
same time, the city is the administrative centre of the federation subject it is
surrounded by, the “Moscow region” (Moskovskaia oblast’). Within the oblast’,
there are many larger cities and smaller towns located within the direct vicinity
of Moscow. More than one million commuters are on their way to Moscow and
back every day, while three to four million Muscovites spend the summer on
dachas outside the city boundaries. Within this agglomeration there exists not
only a close interconnection in terms of traffic, but in the labour and housing
markets as well. Tenden­cies that are true of the housing market of Moscow
itself quickly spread into the agglomer­ation, which has seen an unusually high
building activity in the last years; it attracts not only Muscovites but also private
housing investors from all over Russia.22
22	 Zubarevich, 2012, p. 265.
Julia Röttjer/Jan Kusber
216
23
23	 Table is based on numbers from Demograficheskii ezhegodnik Rossii, 2001,
p. 22 (1989); Demograficheskii ezhegodnik Rossii, 2010, p. 29 (1995-2009)
and from the official site of the 2010 census of the Russian Federation (2010):
Vserossiiskaia perepis’ naseleniia 2010 goda: http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/new_
site/perepis2010/croc/perepis_itogi1612.htm, 07.05.2013.
1989199520002005200820092010Development
1989-20002000-20101989-2010
Russia147,400148,460146,890143,474142,009141,904141,914-0,35 %-3,39 %-3,72 %
Moscow
City
8,9729,0859,93310,40710,47010,50910,56310,71 %6,34 %17,73 %
Moscow
Region
6,6896,6726,6286,6306,6736,7136,753-0,91 %1,89 %0,96 %
Table1:PopulationofMoscow,MoscowregionandRussia,1989-2010(in000)23
Europe’s only Megacity
217
The table shows the rate of the growth of the Moscow population in comparison
to that of the entire country; however, it also demonstrates that the fastest
expansion of Moscow population happened between 1995 and 2000 and that
it is currently slowing down. While in 1989, the combined population of Moscow
city and region made up 10,6 % of the Russian popula­tion, in 2010 this
rate rose to 12,2 %. According to the census of 2010, Moscow has 11,503,501
inhabitants and the Moscow region 7,095,120, which mostly live in urban-type
settlements.24
Table 2: Population of Moscow agglomeration in 2002 and 2010; division into
Moscow city counties (okrugi) and urban/rural population of Moscow region25
Overall 2002 Overall 2010
Percentage
of Population
in relation to
Moscow city
and Region in
2010
Per-
centage
Growth/
Decrease
in 2010 in
relation to
2002
Moscow City
and Region
17,001,292 18,598,621 100,0 % +9,4 %
Moscow City 10,382,754 11,503,501 61,9 % +10,8 %
Moscow Region 6,618,538 7,095,120 38,1 % +7,2 %
24	 Cf. Vserossiiskaia perepis’ naseleniia 2010 goda: http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/
new_site/perepis2010/croc/perepis_itogi1612.htm, 07.05.2013.
25	 The data was taken from the official web sites of the 2002 census: Vserossiiskaia
perepis’ naseleniia 2002 goda: http://www.perepis2002.ru/index.html?id=42,
07.05.2013, and from Vserossiiskaia perepis’ naseleniia 2010 goda: http://www.
gks.ru/free_doc/new_site/perepis2010/croc/perepis_itogi1612.htm, 07.05.2013.
For the values of 2002, the city of Zelenograd, counted separately in the census,
was taken as the city okrug Zelenogradskii. Also, three in 2002 still independent
smaller settlements were included in this table in the values of the South-Eastern,
Western and Eastern okrugi, of which they became a part later on, in order for
comparison with 2010.
Julia Röttjer/Jan Kusber
218
Overall 2002 Overall 2010
Percentage
of Population
in relation to
Moscow city
and Region in
2010
Per-
centage
Growth/
Decrease
in 2010 in
relation to
2002
City okrug Eastern
(Vostochnyi)
1,394,497 1,452,759 7,8 % +4,2 %
City okrug Western
(Zapadnyi)
1,049,104 1,285,914 6,9 % +22,6 %
City okrug
Zelenogradskii
215,727 221,712 1,2 % +2,8 %
City okrug
Northern
(Severnyi)
1,112,846 1,100,974 5,9 % -1,1 %
City okrug
North-Eastern
(Severo-
Vostochnyi)
1,240,062 1,359,508 7,3 % +9,6 %
City okrug
North-Western
(Severo-Zapadnyi)
779,965 942,223 5,1 % +20,8 %
City okrug Central
(Tsentralnyi)
701,353 741,967 4,0 % +5,8 %
City okrug
South-Eastern
(Iugo-Vostochnyi)
1,116,924 1,318,885 7,1 % +18,1 %
City okrug
South-Western
(Iugo-Zapadnyi)
1,179,211 1,362,751 7,3 % +15,6 %
City okrug
Southern (Iuzhnyi)
1,593,065 1,716,808 9,2 % +7,8 %
Moscow Region:
urban Population
5,248,534 5,683,710 30,6 % +8,3 %
Moscow Region:
rural Population
1,370,004 1,411,410 7,6 % +3,0 %
Europe’s only Megacity
219
The city itself takes up 2,510 km² and is divided into twelve counties (okrugi)
which, since the last city extension on July 1st
2012, consist of 146 administrative
sub-structures.26
In comparison to other big Russian cities, Moscow, as the centre of a centralistic
and authoritative state, features many advantages for big companies
including the energy sector. Thus, despite the fact that Moscow has a general
post-industrial economy with more than 80 % of the gross regional product
due to services, it is important that the large producing companies have their
headquarters mostly in Moscow. The corporate tax princi­ples in this centralised
economic system provided for the payment of taxes at headquarters, at least
until the issuing of a new regulation in 2012, which still excludes Gazprom.
These taxes, paid to the capital by companies that produce goods elsewhere and
offer their services all over the country, make up 43-45 % of the huge Moscow
budget which comprised 38 billion Euros in 2011. Not only a high percentage
of the Russian population is living in and around Moscow; also, compared to all
of Russia, there is an even higher proportional amount of investment, housing
construction and retail. The concentration of investment and financial resources
is the motor of change to urban society. The share of Muscovites that can be
defined as middle class doubles the overall Russian rate – it is about 40 %. The
average income in Moscow is comparatively high – in other large Russian cities
it is 35-60 % lower than in the capital.27
In Moscow, the nominal average monthly
employment income in 2010 was 908 Euros, and the average pension was 192
Euros, the average living space was 18,7 square metres per person.28
Moscow has always featured a low birth rate in comparison to the death rate,
not unlike other very large cities. Especially in the 1990s, the birth rate sank to a
very low level: While there were 120,000 children born in 1985, the number was
only 68,500 in the year 1995. Still, during these years the population of the city
26	 There were 10 counties (okrugi) with 125 districts (raiony). In July 2012, with
Novomoskovskii and Troitskii two more okrugi were added, consisting of 21
administrative sub-structures, which are called “settlement” (poselenie). Cf. the
official Moscow city site: Pravitel’stvo Moskvy(2): http://www.mos.ru/authority/
structure, 07.05.2013.
27	 Cf. Zubarevich, 2012, p. 265-267, based on information by the Moscow
Independent Institute for Social Policy. As middle class indicators, Zubarevich
uses two out of three of the following: income, education level and self-conception.
28	 Cf. Federal agency of state statistics: Regiony Rossii. Osnovnye sotsialnoeconom
icheskie pokazateli grodov 2011: http://www.gks.ru/bgd/regl/b11_14t/
IssWWW.exe/Stg/centr/moskv-g2011_1.htm, 07.05.2013.
Julia Röttjer/Jan Kusber
220
rose. Concerning the average life expectancy, the capital has a lot to offer to its
inhabitants and even leaves St. Petersburg far behind: For males the life expectancy
is 67 years (for Russia in general: 60), for females it is 77 years (for Russia
in general: 73). These facts contribute to the phenomenon that the population of
Moscow is increasing while the overall Russian population is declining. But the
decisive factor is the migration into the city, which has always been playing an
important role in Moscow until today.29
Table 3: Migration in Moscow City and Region compared to Russia, in 200930
Moscow
City and
Region
Russia Moscow City
and Region
Russia
Arrivals
Total Number
of Arrivals
Arrivals, Rate
per 1000 Population
Total Number of Arrivals 191,709 1,987,598 11,1 14,0
Arrivals from Other
Regions of Russia
155,805 766,436 9,0 5,4
Arrivals from
Foreign Countries
35,904 279,907 2,1 2,0
Departures
Total Number
of Departures
Departures,
Rate per 1000 Population
Total Number
of Departures
68,156 1,740,149 4,0 12,3
Departures to
Other Regions
of Russia
64,117 766,436 3,7 5,4
Departures to
Foreign Countries
4,039 32,458 0,2 0,2
29	 Cf. Zaionchkovskaya/Mkrtchyan, 2009: http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/2009/
0389/tema02.php, 07.05.2013.
30	 Data was taken from Demograficheskii ezhegodnik Rossii, 2010, p. 29 (table
1.7), p. 408, 411, 414 (table 7.2.).
Europe’s only Megacity
221
Moscow
City and
Region
Russia Moscow City
and Region
Russia
Net Migration
Total Number
of Net Migration
Net Migration,
Rate per 1000 Population
Total Number
of Net Migration
123,553 247,449 7,2 1,7
Net Migration from
Other Regions of Russia
91,688 0 5,3 0
Net Migration from Foreign
Countries
31,865 247,449 1,9 1,7
The aforementioned influx of migrants into the city during the 1920s brought
both men and women into the city. They were in search of work, and not intent
on founding large families, so a relatively low birth rate and small number of
children became a consistent feature of the Moscow population. However, in the
1960s until 1980s the progressing urbanisation in Russia spread this trend and
led to an approximation of the overall Russian population age pyramid to that of
the capital. Similar features were characteristic of the age pyramid of Moscow
in 1989, but at the beginning of the new millennium the migration surge not only
balanced the natural decline, it also rejuvenated the city’s population.31
Like in
other large cities, the educational level in Moscow is rather high compared to the
rest of the country. Being asked about their sources of income in the census of
2010, 57 % of the Muscovites named employment income, including self-employment
and family business, as a source, 27 % pensions (including invalidity
pensions) and only 3,5 % (other) social benefits or governmental support. One
quarter of the respondents stated that their income was dependent on other individuals.
Thus, the rate of pensioners, the vast majority of them in the age groups
60 years and older is about the same level in Moscow as it is in all of Russia.32
It
is a phenomenon uncharacteristic for megacities with such high living expenses
31	 Cf. Zaionchkovskaya/Mkrtchyan, 2009.
32	 Respondents were all individuals 15 years or older. Multiple answers were possible,
but app. 86 % gave only one and app. 14 % two sources; three answers or more
were seldom. Analysed data was taken from 2010 census: Vserossiiskaia perepis’
naseleniia 2010 goda: http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/new_site/perepis2010/croc/
perepis_itogi1612.htm, 07.05.2013.
Julia Röttjer/Jan Kusber
222
that the group of pensioners and the ratio of older population is so strong, fostered
by city government, which subsidises the pensions out of its own budget.33
The migration history and the present situation which have been forming
Moscow’s population make it a multi-ethnic and multi-religious city. The strongest
groups in the Russian capital who perceive themselves as non-Russian, are
inhabitants of former Soviet republics, mainly Ukrainians, Tatars, Armenians,
Azerbaijani and Belo-Russians, but there are also other large groups, such as of
Mordovians, Jews and Uzbeks:
Table 4: Overall population of Moscow City and Region, according to Nationality34
Population, according to Nationality
Moscow City and Region 1989  % 2002  % 2010  %
       
Overall Population 17,001,292 100,0 % 18,598,621 100,0 %
Russians 14,047,917 89,7 % 14,830,772 87,2 % 16,133,082 86,7 %
Ukrainians 438,508 2,8 % 401,452 2,4 % 273,578 1,5 %
Tatars 281,898 1,8 % 218,934 1,3 % 205,245 1,1 %
Armenians 78,305 0,5 % 164,085 1,0 % 169,772 0,9 %
Azerbaijani 31,322 0,2 % 110,214 0,6 % 76,184 0,4 %
Belo-Russians 125,288 0,8 % 101,565 0,6 % 70,890 0,4 %
Jews 313,220 2,0 % 89,258 0,5 % 53,145 0,3 %
Mordovians 46.983 0,3 % 45,243 0,3 %    
Chuvash 31,322 0,2 % 28,541 0,2 %    
Uzbeks 15,661 0,1 % 24,312 0,1 % 61,368 0,3 %
Chechens (city only) 14,465 0,1 %    
Ossetians (city only) 10,561 0,1 %    
Moldavians (region only) 10,418 0,1 %    
Koreans (city only) 8,630 0,1 %    
Kazakhs (city only) 7,997 0,1 %    
Bashkir (city only) 5,941 0,1 %    
33	 Zubarevich, 2012, p. 268.
34	 The data analysed was taken from the census of 2002: Vserossiiskaia perepis’
naseleniia 2002 goda: http://www.perepis2002.ru/index.html?id=42, 07.05.2013,
and from the census of 2010: Vserossiiskaia perepis’ naseleniia 2010 goda:
http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/new_site/perepis2010/croc/perepis_itogi1612.htm,
07.05.2013. Cf. for 1989: Gavrilova, 2001, p. 420 (table 7).
Europe’s only Megacity
223
Official data cannot provide any information about the significant number of
nonregistered migrants from Russia and outside Russia living in the capital (table
3 and 4).
Gentrification and segregation in inner Moscow
Prior to 1992, almost all houses in Moscow were state owned, municipal or
corporate. There were practically no private houses in Moscow during Soviet
times. In the first years following the perestroika period the resources for
municipal housing programmes in Moscow were scarce, while new forms of
investment and public private partnerships had yet to evolve. The last census of
the Soviet Union in 1989 had shown that the housing situation and its problems
were an important issue for the Muscovites, but in 1995 there were still about
650,000 households waiting in line for the opportunity to new living quarters
and many Muscovites were living in a shared apartment (kommunalka).35
In
order to effectively reduce this waiting line, the municipal building company
DSK (the former Building Combine No. 1), which had survived the perestroika,
continued in the construction of prefabricated housing.36
But the city was not
only short of living quarters, but also of territory. The authorities thus turned to
the five-story-buildings with a programme to relocate the dwellers in order to
gain area for high rise living quarters. During the first years of the new millennium,
the inhabitants in need to be relocated represented competition for those
already waiting – so, people from the waiting list who had filed their respective
applications in 1987, were able to gain access to new living quarters in 2006.37
The capital could not provide nearly enough living quarters to its population
and suffered an overall lack of investment into housing and city planning. At the
point of dissolution of the Soviet Union, an intense era of construction began
35	 Cf. Kulakova, 2006, p. 238-241. The estimate percentage of kommunalka dwellers
reaches from 9 % (Kulakova, 2006, p. 238) up to 45 % (Badyina/Golubchikov,
2005, p. 118).
36	 The house type P-44/17, first built in 1979, was continued until the year 2000;
the 17-story panelled building can boast a total area of 18,814 m² in Moscow.
Since 1998, new prefabricated types were introduced, as the P-44T, P44-TM, and
the model Jubilee, advertised as “the first and only prefabricated house of a new
generation with winter gardens (porches) and free layout.” Cf. Domostroitel’nyi
kombinatNo. 1: http://www.dsk1.ru/Houses/History, 07.05.2013.
37	 Cf. Kulakova, 2006, p. 242f.
Julia Röttjer/Jan Kusber
224
in Moscow almost immediately. The historic city centre attracted most of the
activity, driven by the needs of the emerging market economy with all the new
financial and business services and municipal policy alike. The concentration of
wealthy companies or financial services and their headquarters in the city centre
was followed by a concentration of wealthy inhabitants. So already in the early
1990s, individuals and businesses started to purchase apartments in top quality
locations in order to renovate them luxuriously. Badyina and Golubchikov, who
analyse these processes, especially in the inner micro-district Ostozhenka, summarise
this phenomenon: “However, a central location and an expensive renovation
[…] turned out to be not quite enough. […] The evolution from apartment-by-apartment
to house-by-house and then to block-by-block elite housing
(re)construction signified the emergence of systematic gentrification in inner
Moscow.”38
The micro-district of Ostozhenka is located south-west to the Kremlin in an
area that was used as meadowland until the middle of the 19th
century. At the
end of the 19th
century, the majority of tenants were small-scale retailers, craftsmen,
state servants of low ranks, students and impoverished members of the
intelligentsia; landlords were mostly merchants. In the case of Ostozhenka, the
extreme neglect of building stock in the late Soviet Moscow was even more evident:
The general plan of 1935 had designated a site nearby to the megalomaniac
– yet never realised – project of the “Palace of Soviets”. Thus, there were long
existing plans to comprehensively redevelop the entire quarter with the palace,
which prevented building or renovation on a smaller scale.39
At the beginning of the 1990s, the rate of Ostozhenka inhabitants living in a
kommunalka was between 60 % and 70 %,40
and thus significantly higher than
the average in central Moscow. With the introduction of housing privatisation
in 1991, inhabitants gained the right to privatise their own living quarters free
of charge; two years later one third of all flats in Moscow were in private hands.
With the developing market economy this served as a basis for the mechanism
of well-off private persons and agencies buying the separate kommunalka rooms
from their inhabitants and combining them into apartments or office floors. The
social structure of the micro-district started to change, the overall population
declined, and the proportion of wealthier people started to rise, while the for-
38	 Badyina/Golubchikov, 2005, p. 115.
39	 Cf. Gdaniec, 2005, p. 145; Badyina/Golubchikov, 2005, p. 115-117. The 1883
cathedral Christ the Saviour that occupied the lot foreseen for the palace, was
demolished in 1931.
40	 Cf. Gdaniec, 2005, p. 173 and Badyina/Golubchikov, 2005, p. 118, respectively.
Europe’s only Megacity
225
mer kommunalka inhabitants left, supported by the city rehousing programmes.
After the 1998 Rouble crash and the following economic pause, large development
started to invest in the real estate sector. Ostozhenka, where the cathedral
“Christ the Saviour” overshadowing the micro-district was being rebuilt on its
former site long dedicated to the “Palace of Soviets”-project, was being marketed
as an elite location in close proximity to the Kremlin. The new developments
did not consist of the mere merging of single rooms into apartments, but of
comprehensive building projects and the more there were the more intensive the
elite status perception became.41
In Moscow, land ownership is separate from building ownership, so the
land owner is the municipality, while developers can lease parcels to build on.42
The city administration took an active part in promoting the physical and social
change in areas such as Ostozhenka by resettlement mechanisms that required
inhabitants to leave if their building had been marked by the city as in urgent
need of repair. The administration had – and still has – to provide the expelled
with an alternative housing or, in case of ownership, to compensate them. Often,
these terms have been less favourable for the residents than direct negotiations
with the investors. The vacated buildings could then be demolished, often ignoring
the regulations of the sophisticated Russian monument preservation law,
and give way to the new elite projects. Of the 3,725 officially registered tenants
in 1992 in Ostozhenka, 1,263 persons were forced to rehouse during this compulsory
programme until 2004, while 1,584 persons had been relocated after
private negotiations with developers. Additionally, there is a large number of
Ostozhenka residents who sold their privatised rooms and flats or rented them
41	 Cf. Badyina/Golubchikov, 2005, p. 118-120.
42	 In 2007 and 2008 Moscow legislation has been altered in order to assimilate it to
the federal laws: new possibilities of land ownership or long-term land lease are
being introduced. Also, the Moscow mechanism of planning the project in detail
beforehand, and only then letting the parcel of land designated to that project,
has changed: it is the objective to achieve more competitive and transparent
forms of land lease. A row of projects begun in Moscow before the introduction
of this legislation which were suspended, have since been revised or cancelled.
Supposedly, an emphasis was put on some projects that had been planned in an
especially semi-legal or extra-legal relationship between city administration and
investor; cf. Nobis, 2012, p. 130-135. On the network of authorities and developers
and its personal, “intimate character” see also Badyina/Golubchikov, 2005, p.
121f.; Gdaniec, 2005, p. 170f.
Julia Röttjer/Jan Kusber
226
out and went to live elsewhere. So, the structure of the area’s population has
undergone a thorough change.43
Today, real estate agencies claim that “Ostozhenka Street, ‘the Golden Mile’,
is the most prestigious residential area not only in Moscow, but in entire Rus-
sia.”44
According to a ranking by “Financial News”, Ostozhenka street made it
into the top ten of the “most expensive and desirable streets in the world.”45
In
2010 the average price to buy a flat in one of the developments in Ostozhenka
was 19,000 Euros per square metre. In one of the old buildings, depending on
the status of renovation, the square metre costs from 5,500 up to 14,000 Euros
(the lower end of the range being in proximity to the average price in Moscow
city). The “Moscow Times” summarises the new character of this central area:
“Just next door from the multi-cultural, cross-class and eclectic Arbat, Ostozhenka
could be a world away, or anywhere in the world, for that matter.
[…] These top-end buildings remain worlds in themselves, with neither obvious
links to the city neighbourhood that surrounds them at a distance, nor
direct access to immediate infrastructure — although one elite supermarket
has finally opened on Korobeinikov lane this year. It has been alleged that
most of the apartments here were bought during the gold rush by those who
never actually intended to live in them, making the whole place the world’s
fanciest ghost-town.”46
This perception of a separate world in itself and the elite concept is fostered
by another phenomenon not alien to other Megacities: In order to protect the
property of the new owners, concierges and door codes are not enough, but
extra security guards and fences have started to arise and produce small islands
of gated communities. Up until now, despite discussions about it, not the whole
area of Ostozhenka has been fenced off. But elsewhere in and especially around
Moscow, larger stretches of settlement have become gated quarters, public space
43	 Cf. Badyina/Golubchikov, 2005, p. 120-123.
44	 Agency Knight Frank; http://www.knightfrank.ru/eng/residential/homes/show/
t6UJ9A0052FN/, 07.05.2013.
45	 NewsAgencyRianovosti,09.03.2011:http://en.rian.ru/business/20110309/1629267
00.html, 07.05.2013.
46	 Introduction to interview with three real estate agents in The Moscow Tim es,
13.10.2010:http://www.themoscowtimes.com/realestate/residential/analysis/article
/ostozhenka-unusual-in-every-way/418724.html#no, 07.05.2013. For average price
see also Zubarevich, 2012, p. 265.
Europe’s only Megacity
227
has become private in the fenced areas of postmodern cities.47
The two phases
that Badyina and Golubchikov observed in Ostozhenka – “the spontaneous individual-driven
process of housing rehabilitation before 1998, and the ‘systematic’
property-led gentrification thereafter”48
– can also be paralleled with other
global Megacities. However, other phenomena cannot, such as the relatively
substantial living space that still remains in Moscow’s city centre or the absence
of an intermediate phase with artists and creative professionals in the role of
“gentrifiers” that later on have to leave themselves after a new wave of recon-
struction.49
Of course, the specific historical circumstances of the Soviet period,
such as property legislation, city planning, housing shortage, kommunalkas and
deteriorated buildings, has had an impact. So had the experience of Soviet society
and its collapse, with the subsequent crisis. Some of Moscow’s urbanisation
features can be compared to other post-socialist capitals such as Budapest, Warsaw
or Prague. But the individual historical, cultural and global context points
to the unique features of every case study.50
As has been shown, the transition from state owned to personal property
housing took place especially during the first ten years after the fall of the
USSR: two thirds of housing stock became private through privatisation and
new construction. The less well-off population generally stayed in state-owned
flats they rented or leased. This was the basis for the UN-Habitat-Report human
settlements in 200351
which aimed at a definition of the term “slum” under such
circumstances. It is true that there are no big slum areas in Moscow like the Banlieues
in France52
or the favelas of South-American cities. Slums are intermixed
47	 Cf. Gdaniec, 2005, p. 182, 193; Badyina/Golubchikov, 2005, p. 120-123;
Shevchenko, 2009, p. 167, points out the similarities between erecting fences
around luxury buildings and fortifying the doors of quite ordinary apartments
with the aim of “warding off outsiders”. Her interpretation is that the fencing
phenomenon has an identical appearance to that in other globalized cities, but also
reacts to a specific post-Soviet utopia aspiration (p. 175).
48	 Cf. Badyina/Golubchikov, 2005, p. 127.
49	 The latter example refers to the Paris quarter of Roquette. Cf. Gdaniec, 2005, p.
194f. Cf. for the current state of research on gentrification in general Lees, 2010,
and for the German debate Holm , 2010, and Twickel, 2010.
50	 Cf. Badyina/Golubchikov, 2005, p. 127.
51	 Cf. UN-Habitat, Global Report on Human Settlements 2003, The Challenge of
Slums, Earthscan, London; Part IV: ‘Summary of City Case Studies’, p. 195-228:
http://www.unhabitat.org/downloads/docs/GRHS.2003.0.pdf, 07.05.2013.
52	 Cf. Weberet al., 2012, p. 50-56.
Julia Röttjer/Jan Kusber
228
into parts of Moscow, as well in Ostozhenka53
, where gentrification has now
been underway for almost 20 years, as in other areas. The report’s listing for
the nuclei of slums names kommunalkas, which are used by two or more families
who share the kitchen and other facilities (including hostels, dormitories
and hotels) and outdated and dilapidated buildings, typically the first generation
of mass housing with low quality construction and facilities. They are shabby,
consist of so called squatter flats or even look abandoned from the outside.
Residents there are entitled to housing improvement or free alternative accommodation,
but queues are long and move slowly according to availability of
municipal housing stock. The most obvious category in 2003 was deteriorated
houses, primarily post-World War II structures that are recognised as damaged
or otherwise unsuitable for constant habitation. All these types are sometimes
in the periphery but quite often, because of the urban growth, in central areas of
the city.54
The people living there are pensioners, invalids, single parents, student
families, refugees, run-away-children, orphans, people of no fixed abode
(”BOMji”) and other kinds of nonregistered people.
The Putin-government and local administrations tried hard and with some
success to alter the situation of the pensioners, who live in Moscow probably
better than in many parts of Russia, but the other groups, especially nonregistered
migrant workers (from the former USSR) do not find a place in the housing
and social policy of state nor city. They are needed for the growing wealth of
Moscow, but are the social losers of the situation because of difficult access to
adequate housing, medical care and education.55
The role of supporting NGOs
is tolerated in this context, but unsecure under contemporary political contexts
in Russia.
Current growth and future development
The Russian capital is growing at breath-taking speed. Traffic jams, noise and
smog are just a few of the negative side effects. Neither the city’s infrastructure,
nor housing and traffic planning, nor parks and recreational areas can currently
meet the demands of the inhabitants. The city’s General plan up to 2020 has
53	 In 2004 there were still 77 shared apartments for 440 people (199 families) in
Ostozhenka. Cf. Badyina/Golubchikov 2005, p. 123.
54	 Cf. Krasheninnokov, 2003: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dpu-projects/Global_Report/
cities/moscow.htm, 07.05.2013.
55	 Cf. Nazarova, 2007, p. 364.
Europe’s only Megacity
229
already been rendered obsolete.56
Another aspect of the housing problem is the
fact that apartments and houses have become objects of speculation, meaning
that speculative vacancies exacerbate the housing shortage. It makes sense to
buy apartments as investment and it does not matter much whether or not they
are occupied. Of course, this is not true of the majority of flats, but there is still
no equilibrium between demand for housing and occupation rates of existing
housing.
In 2007, 33 million cars were registered in Moscow, but only 1.6 million
parking spaces. Every year sees 200,000 additional cars hit Moscow’s streets,
800,000 cars are on the street at any one time. Moscow has 1,300 km of streets,
40 % less than the required road network compared to other major European
cities. Moscow’s spider-web street grid has not been upgraded, purely because
the city planners could not anticipate such explosive urban growth.57
Michael
Blinkin on the other hand argues that these are also the results of socialist planning
heritage that conceived the net of streets as a fishbone system and not as a
system of urban highways on which the individual transport can flow.58
In April
2012 the new mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobianin confirmed the ambitious expansion
plan for the Moscow Metro: By 2020, a second Circle line shall help to
relieve the city’s traffic situation. The costs will be enormous:59
Over the next
eight years, the backbone of the public transport system in the Russian capital
will be dramatically strengthened. The expansion plans until 2016 see the construction
of 75,6 km of new routes and 37 new stations – at a cost of 460 billion
Roubles (11,5 billion Euros). The mayor has recently confirmed the next fiveyear-plan
for the development of the metro: from 2016 to 2020 an additional
75 km and 33 new stations are to be added – 100 billion Roubles (2,5 billion
Euros) have to be set aside for this each year. This will bring a change in the
architecture of the Metro network – the so-called “third interchange”: The first
is, in metro-language, the group of interchange stations in the city centre, the
second is the current circle line. These are to be relieved through a significantly
56	 Cf. the official plans: Integrated Body for Urban Design Policy and
Developm ent of Moscow; http://stroi.mos.ru/eng/default.aspx?m=31&d=31,
07.05.2013.
57	 Cf. Russia-Now(1): http://www.russia-now.info/russia/moscow/news/moscow_s_
growth_is_causing_headaches_for_planners_31.html, 07.05.2013.
58	 Cf. Blinkin, 2012.
59	 Cf. Integrated Body for Urban Design Policy and Developm ent of Moscow;
http://stroi.mos.ru/eng/default.aspx?m=31&d=31, 07.05.2013.
Julia Röttjer/Jan Kusber
230
further reaching second circle line.60
In comparison to other Megacities, the public
transport, although very efficient, is at times beyond its capacities and needs
to be adapted to the mass of commuters on their way to work and home again.61
During the last months of Dmitri Medvedev’s presidency, a new plan was
announced that will eventually strongly influence the further development of
Moscow: the incorporation of vast territories (1,480 additional [!] to the existing
1,070 square kilometres in 2012) in the South of the city centre. This announcement,
as so often, came first − and only then began serious planning and talks
with the mayor of Moscow and the governor of the surrounding Moscow region,
Sergei Shoigu. The intention of Medvedev was obviously to create new administrative
quarters for the government and thus to alter the traffic from centre to
the periphery. But will this work, as Fedor Kudriavcev remarked, with some ten
thousand government clerks dispatched from the centre?62
Last but not least: The brief sketch on urban growth always connected with
the problems of expansion, transport and housing, needs one last comment on migration
within the context of changing political and ideological times. It poses the
question, of whose city one wants to talk. It was the city of the Moscow bourgeois
in the 19th
century63
, of the nationalities of the Tsarist Empire and of the peasants
and workers of the Soviet Empire who were attracted by a socialist metropolis
− which despite all problems of housing and urban development offered them
far more opportunities than other socialist cities in most of the Republics of the
USSR. This was especially true for migrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus.
They were, not only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, perceived as unloved
guests at the very least and necessary work force at the same time and have
been and sometimes still are facing open hatred, as a series of incidents shows.64
Conclusion
In 2008 Monica Rüthers stated that megalopolis Moscow will stay a fancy and
glamorous city where the rich and the middle class try at any cost to stay as near
to the city centre as they can. On the other hand, the gap between the rich and
60	 Cf. Russia-Now(2): http://www.russia-now.info/russia/russia_news/moscow_to_
build_second_metro-circle_line_cost_22_billion_euro_96.html, 07.05.2013.
61	 Cf. Blinkin, 2012, p. 282.
62	 Cf. Kudriavcev, 2012, p. 377 f.
63	 Cf. Ruckm ann, 1984.
64	 Cf. Zubarevich, 2012, p. 268.
Europe’s only Megacity
231
the poor widens.65
This is also the tenor in blogs on gentrification.66
The gentrification
processes were already reflected in public art exhibitions: The project
Auditorium Moscow, shown in the White palace (Belaia palata) in the heart
of old Moscow, was for example initiated by the Museum of Modern Art in
Warsaw in cooperation with curators Ekaterina Degot and David Riff.67
It also
reflected on the changes that have been taking place in Ostozhenka. The fact that
this criticism takes an artistic form is notable in itself, such as the dislocation of
population cannot happen entirely without upheaval. However, while the more
resistant tenants sooner or later had to face violent methods used to expel them
from their quarters, very little concerted protest on their side has taken place.
This perceived absence of public protest, also against the demolition of historic
sites, has been assigned to the fact that during the high tide of new development
in the inner city, the list of severe and of everyday problems for the population
in this time of crisis was extensive: simply too much to deal with them all, the
problem of a sound city planning was easily outranked, if one was not the particular
person to be expelled from one’s neighbourhood in the city centre.68
Indeed, the nearer to the centre, the more coveted the living space. The middle
class has been and still is looking for property in the micro-districts or lives in
a rented apartment and seeks a dacha. Rüthers has described that there was in fact
no suburbia outside of Moscow in 2008, just the province. It remains to be seen
whether the plans for a new administrative centre in the South of big Moscow
alter the situation. There are slight evidences that suburbs and closely connected
cities such as Khimki on the way from the airport Sheremetevo downtown, with
a shorter way to work, shopping malls and Ikea, will bring some change. Here,
the daily migration does not rise. But it is still an example of neoliberal growth
and the absence of comprehensive urban planning that sees city, suburbia and
region in a context.69
65	 Cf. Rüthers, 2008, p. 505.
66	 Cf. Gentrification Blog: http://gentrificationblog.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/
moskau-stadtumbau-fur-neue-reiche/, 07.05.2013; Chtodelat News: https://
chtodelat.wordpress.com/tag/gentrification/, 07.05.2013.
67	 Cf. Auditorium Moscow: http://auditorium-moscow.org/en/about.html, 07.05.
2013. While some enterprises and the Polish government supported the project,
no participation of the Russian government or the city of Moscow was to be seen.
68	 Cf. Badyina/Golubchikov, 2005, p. 123-126. For the prolonged, even “total crisis”
and its handling by the Muscovites see Shevchenko, 2009.
69	 Cf. Golubchikov, 2011.
Julia Röttjer/Jan Kusber
232
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237
Contributors
Ingrid Breckner holds the chair of Urban and Regional Sociology at the HafenCity
University Hamburg and is head of the universities PhD-Committee. Her
research practice is focused on different social aspects of urban and regional
development as housing, social effects of ecological regeneration, migration,
multilingualism, poverty, social practices in urban districts et cetera.
Contact: ingrid.breckner@hcu-hamburg.de.
Ilya V. Gerasimov, Ph.D. in History (Rutgers University, USA) and Candidate
of Sciences in History (Kazan State University, Russia), is Executive Editor of
the Quarterly Ab Imperio and Director of the Center for the Studies of Nationalism
and Empire in Kazan (Russia). His main research interests are the new imperial
history of Russia, social history, anthropology of violence and sociology
of criminality, history of Russian Progressivism.
Contact: ig@abimperio.net.
Jan Kusber is Professor and Chair for East European History at the Historical
Institute of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. He has published widely
on the History of the Russian Empire in the 18th
and 19th
century. 
Contact: kusber@uni-mainz.de.
Wolfgang Maderthaner is Director General of the Austrian State Archive. He
is an expert in European Labour and Social History and has published widely in
the fields of Urban History/Anthropology, Cultural Studies, industrial and postindustrial
accumulation/regulation. His most recent publication (co-edited with
Helmut Konrad) is a comparative study on the global crisis in the 1930s (2013).
Contact: wolfgang.maderthaner@oesta.gv.at.
Spaces of the Poor
238
Hans-Christian Petersen is Assistant Professor for East European History at
the Historical Institute of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. His main
research interests are the history of science, especially the history of the German
Ostforschung, biographical research and the history of urban poverty and social
spaces.
Contact: peters@uni-mainz.de.
Hauke Jan Rolf is a member of the Research Training Group “Transnational
Social Support” at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. He is an urban
sociologist with the specialisation in urban development, migration studies and
transnationalism.
Contact: hauke_janr@web.de. 
Julia Röttjer is a historian, art historian and political scientist. Her main research
interests are cultures of remembrance, memory politics and politics of
history as well as architecture, city planning and urbanism. She is a PhD-Candidate
at the Leibniz Institute of European History Mainz (IEG) within the research
group “Knowledge of the World – Heritage of Mankind: The History of
UNESCO World Cultural and Natural Heritage”.
Contact: juliaroettjer@gmx.de.
Jaspal Naveel Singh is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Language and Communication
Research at Cardiff University in Wales, UK. His current research
explores the upcoming hip hop scene in Delhi as a tool for empowering marginalized
youths and emancipating parts of India’s urban society.
Contact: singhjn@cardiff.ac.uk.
Mark D. Steinberg is Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
His most recent research and publications have focused on the
city, modernities, emotions, religion, violence, revolution, and utopia – in lateimperial
Russia, especially, but always in comparative perspective.
Contact: steinb@illinois.edu.
Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley,
and Researcher at the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique,
Paris. A MacArthur Foundation Fellow and recipient of the Lewis Coser
Award of the American Sociological Association, his research spans urban relegation,
ethnoracial domination, the penal state, incarnation, and social theory
and the politics of reason. His books are translated in some twenty languages
Contributors
239
and include the trilogy Urban Outcasts (2008), Punishing the Poor (2009), and
Deadly Symbiosis (2013), as well as The Two Faces of the Ghetto (2013) and
Tracking the Penal State (2014). For more information, see loicwacquant.net.
Contact: loic@berkeley.edu.
Sonja Wengoborski is Teaching and ResearchAssociate at the Institute of Indology
of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Contemporary South Asian
literature and learning in tandem in second language acquisition in the context
of South Asian Studies follow upon her Indological specializations in Sinhalese,
Hindi, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and the history of South Asian religions.
Contact: wengobor@yahoo.de.
Jerry White teaches modern London history at Birkbeck College, University of
London. He is the author of numerous social histories of London life, and is currently
writing a book on London in the First World War for publication in 2014.
Contact: jerry.white@bbk.ac.uk.