Engels & City

Engels and the English City

Another person who had concerns about the city and was very close to Marx regarding his views on this matter was Friedrich Engels. His book, The Condition of the Working Class in England is internally connected to concerns related to the city. This book, which is a result of his nightly wanderings through streets, alleys, and poor districts of Manchester, links matters such as capital accumulation and class movements to city life. His studies on Manchester show that it has grown into two completely separate areas after the industrialization of Europe: the ghettos, where workers live, and the city center, where the bourgeois class live. Engels’ view toward the city is very similar to Marx. Engels describes the city as a “war against all” (Engels 24). Engels is only mentioned here because his research on Manchester is considered important in urban studies. In other words, his work is seen as part of writings about the city in the social sciences.

Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844: with a Preface written in 1892. Charleston, SC: Bibliobazaar, 2007.

Marx & City

Regarding to my interests about city and urban studies, I review some theories about city. In this post , I reviewed Marx's approach about city:

Marx and the city/countryside opposition

It can be claimed that Marx is the first prominent philosopher to think and write seriously about city life. Like his other theories, his ideas about city are heavily influenced by the industrialization process. To Marx, the most important consequence of industrialization, which resulted in an increase in the population of the cities and the emergence of the working class, was the division of labor phenomenon. Based on this new phenomenon other divisions were also created, among them, the city/countryside division. The City became the place for intellectual labor, accumulation of capital, pleasure, new experiences, new facilities, and countryside became the place for physical labor, loneliness and isolation, lack of thought and creativity, lack of pleasure and experience, and the like.
When opposing the bourgeoisie division of labor, Marx criticized the opposition of city and countryside as well. Marx’s perspective regarding city issues was a completely dialectical view. He knew that dismissing the advantages of the city and blindly praising nature and the simplicity of people in the countryside is not based on reality.
Marx has written on human isolation, self-alienation and similar issues which are the difficulties of city life, but he believes that “the solution to these problems can be found in the city” (Aryan 46). It should be noted that although Marx celebrated the modern dominance of the city over the countryside as a historically progressive development, he was more concerned with the phenomenon of the separation between town and countryside as an expression of Man’s alienated “pre-history” under the social division of labor. For Marx, moreover, the resolution of the problem was not the urbanization of the countryside in the present, but the abolition of the distinction between town and country in the socialist and communist future.
Marx believes that “the most important achievement of city life is the possibility of establishing close relationships, going through new experiences, and new ways of interaction. Marx himself hated the countryside and loved the city. Marx spent all his life in big cities” (47).

Aryan, Amir A. “City in the Hands of Theorists”. Kheradnameh, 35(1388): 46-48.

Brief History of New York City

Brief History of New York City
After around one year, I finally decided to bring my blog up to date. This post is part of my dissertation about The Myth of New York City in Paul Auster's works. this post is a brief history of New York City . and I finally decided to choose my field of work as a researcher in American Studies. This field is Urban Studies. This dissertation was the first step in my way.
New York As a City
As E.B.White mentioned, “in New York the changes are endless” (25); according to this quotation, it can be concluded that talking about New York’s conditions and characteristics during the history is a kind of undue work. Because many things in the city has been disappeared. But as he mentioned in the foreword of his book, Here is New York, “the essential fever of New York not changed in any particular, and I have no tries to make revisions in the hope of bringing the thing down to date. To bring New York down to date, a man would have to be published the speed of light” (17).
Clearly, it is not possible. Because of those unchangeable things in New York City, knowing history of the city is as much important as wandering through the streets in 2010. To approve this claim, it can be quoted form Lankevich who introduce New York as an important center of American life and a template of American society. He says: “The main characteristic of New York, from its origin as a small Dutch town to the dominant urban complex of modern times, has been continuous and rapid change. Because of importance of this city, by examining its history or one of the aspects of its history or society, we may be able to understand better what America was, is, and, might become”(Lankevich 1)
Europeans found New York, as the city is known today, in 16th century. “In 1524 the great sails of Giovanni Verrazano, the Italian sailor-explorer who had been hired by the King of France appeared in New York Bay, it was the first known European to sight what today we call the Narrows at the entrance of New York Harbor” (Mushabac & Wigan 3)
Before entrance of European invaders, New York City belonged to Native Americans known as the Lenape. They live in this area 11, 000 years before Giovanni Verrazano sailed through the Narrows. They were fragmented and lost their lands. For the new comer who had taken possession of these lands, this is the time to choose a name. As Maeder narrates in his book, Big Town, Big Time, Dutch’s coined this city:
The new land might have become New France or it might have become New Spain when the sailor Gomez was fleetingly interested in the place. Instead, once the canny Dutch merchants who had dispatched Henry Hudson to the land across the sea, the place at the mouth of Hudson’s great river became New Netherland and in May 1623 the first permanent European inhabitants of New Netherland arrived abroad a Dutch vessel named the New Amsterdam. (Maeder 2).
But this name had not an eternal destiny. In 1664, Charles II decided to present this colony his brother the Duke of York. As Lankevich narrates: “Stuyveasand, governor of New Amsterdam, learned that king Charles II of England had granted to his brother James, the duck of York and Albany, a vast tract of land” (20). Stuyveasand was the loser of this battle. “The English had taken “the whole of New Netherland” and immediately called the same by the name of York” (21).
In contrast to Dutch era, English men involved with colonists’ protests. British taxation made colonists angry and this cause to tensions in New York. These tensions were the preface of American Revolution in 1776. New Yorkers were won this time. After revolution, Hamilton began to rebuild the city as Georg Washington’s secretary of the treasury. “In 1788, New York City served as the new nation’s first capital from 1785 to 1790. Even after moving government to other cities, New York was to remain an important economic and social center of the country. It would eventually overtake Boston as America’s largest City”(Kupperberg 47).
The decade of 1800 was the time for constructing. Central park was built in 1855; German-born engineer designed Brooklyn Bridge. The population raised and the city needed to an efficient transportation system, thus Grand Central Terminal was built. Immigration is another phenomenon in 19th century. In this time, “successive waves of immigrants from Europe led to a very rapid population increase which remains one of the dominant themes of American history” (Cannon and Fletcher 40).
The process of constructing continued to 20th century.
New York’s shape was hardly changed in 20th century. The reason was a urban planner, Robert Moses. The life of many New Yorker was influenced by his work. Marshal Berman describes his impact on city in his book, The Experience of Modernity, and portrait his works in Bronx. New York in the ’60s was the kingdom of intellectuals who were located in Greenwich Village. New York was an island for Avant-gardism; Bob Dylan, Abstract Expressionism and people who known as Homosexuals belongs to this decade of New York History.
In second decade of this century, New York experienced an economic shock. Lankevich argues that “during 1960s and 1970s the economic tide was running against a city that still earned 10 percent of all the money made in America and was home to ninety-six of the fortune 500 corporations” (214).
In last years of second millennium, a famous New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani, tried to fight with crime. He wanted to record New York City as safest city in the world. But September 11, 2001 attack disappointed him.

Bibliography:

Cannon, G., & Fletcher, E. J. Canada. Clermont-Ferrand: Michelin, 2007.

Kupperberg, Paul. A Primary Source History of the Colony of New York (Primary Sources of the Thirteen Colonies and the Lost Colony). New York City: Rosen Central, 2005.

Lankevich, George. New York City: A Short History. London: NYU Press, 2002.

Mushabac, Jane, and Angela Wigan. A Short and Remarkable History of NYC. First Edition ed. New York: Fordham University Press, 1999.

Maeder Jay. Big Town, Big Time. Champaign: Sports Publishing Llc, 1998.

White, E. B. Here Is New York. New York: Harper& Bros, 1949.