Scenescapes: How Qualities of Place Shape Social Life

By Daniel Aaron Silver and Terry Nichols Clark

Let’s set the scene: there’s a regular on his barstool, beer in hand. He’s watching a young couple execute a complicated series of moves on the dance floor, while at the table in the corner the DJ adjusts his headphones and slips a new beat into the mix. These are all experiences created by a given scene—one where we feel connected to other people, in places like a bar or a community center, a neighborhood parish or even a train station. Scenes enable experiences, but they also cultivate skills, create ambiances, and nourish communities.

In Scenescapes, Daniel Aaron Silver and Terry Nichols Clark examine the patterns and consequences of the amenities that define our streets and strips. They articulate the core dimensions of the theatricality, authenticity, and legitimacy of local scenes—cafes, churches, restaurants, parks, galleries, bowling alleys, and more. Scenescapes not only reimagines cities in cultural terms, it details how scenes shape economic development, residential patterns, and political attitudes and actions. In vivid detail and with wide-angle analyses—encompassing an analysis of 40,000 ZIP codes—Silver and Clark give readers tools for thinking about place; tools that can teach us where to live, work, or relax, and how to organize our communities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9780226357041

Book preview

Scenescapes

Scenescapes

How Qualities of Place Shape Social Life

Daniel Aaron Silver and Terry Nichols Clark

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago & London

Daniel Aaron Silver is associate professor of sociology at the University of Toronto at Scarborough. Terry Nichols Clark is professor of sociology at the University of Chicago.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-35685-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-35699-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-35704-1 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226357041.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Silver, Daniel Aaron, author.

Scenescapes : how qualities of place shape social life / Daniel Aaron Silver and Terry Nichols Clark.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-35685-3 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-35699-0 (paperback : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-35704-1 (e-book) 1. Social ecology. 2. Sociology, Urban. 3. Place (Philosophy)—Social aspects. 4. Situation (Philosophy)—Social aspects. I. Clark, Terry Nichols, 1940– author. II. Title.

HM861.S56 2016

304.2—dc23

2015031996

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Acknowledgments

1  Setting the Scene

2  A Theory of Scenes

3  Quantitative Flânerie

4  Back to the Land, On to the Scene: How Scenes Drive Economic Development

5  Home, Home on the Scene: How Scenes Shape Residential Patterns

6  Scene Power: How Scenes Influence Voting, Energize New Social Movements, and Generate Political Resources (with Christopher M. Graziul)

7  Making a Scene: How to Integrate the Scenescape into Public Policy Thinking

8  The Science of Scenes (with Christopher M. Graziul)

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgments

This book emerged from the distinctive scenes around the University of Chicago, which facilitates wide-ranging and open-ended intellectual collaborations, friendships, and explorations. Our own scene centered on weekly Wednesday evening meetings for nearly a decade. Multiple cohorts of talented visitors, postdocs, undergraduates, and graduate students have been regular participants, physically and via Skype.

Scenescapes is emphatically a collective product of the scenius of these meetings. Certain individuals have nevertheless offered key support that we acknowledge. Larry Rothfield was a leader in the project’s initial formulation when he was faculty director of the Cultural Policy Center. Clemente Navarro helped refine the theory and develop methods for analyzing scenes. He has been a constant partner in developing scenes analyses in new and exciting directions with his research teams in Spain.

The number of students and assistants who have contributed to the research behind Scenescapes is too long to list, though we are deeply grateful to all. Some 10–15 assistants each year for almost a decade helped assemble, check, double-check, and analyze the scenes database. Some stood out in leadership roles. Sam Braxton and Eric Rodgers led in consolidating our ever-evolving merge files and in helping with initial hypotheses. Chris Graziul was a constant resource on methods and analyses. Meghan Kallman and Whitney Johnson coordinated many tasks. Jessica Gover provided crucial support in preparing the manuscript.

International scenes project collaborators include for Canada, Diana Miller and Matt Patterson; for France, Stephen Sawyer; for Spain, Clemente J. Navarro Yáñez; for South Korea, Chad Anderson, Miree Byun, Wonho Jang, Seokho Kim, and Jong Youl Lee; for Japan, Yoshiaki Kobayashi, Chihiro Shimizu, and Shinya Yasumoto; for Poland, Marta Klekotko and Magda Kubecka; and for China, Di Wu, Jefferson Mao, Cary Wu, and Rui Lin.

Financial support was generously provided by the Cultural Policy Center, Urban Network, University of Chicago, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada), and University of Toronto; and financial support to the international scenes collaborators came from many other sources, especially the cities of Paris and Seoul, as well as the National Research Framework (Spain), Polish Ministry of Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs.

We benefited from conversations and feedback from friends and colleagues, often at meetings and workshops where we presented drafts of chapters, such as the International Sociological Association, American Sociological Association, American Political Science Association, Social Science History Association, Midwest Political Science Association, European Sociological Association, European Urban Research Association, International Conference on Cultural Policy Research, Social Theory, Politics, and the Arts, and University of Chicago Urban Forums’ Modeling Local Area Processes. We are especially grateful to those who read and commented on earlier drafts of the chapters (or their forerunners): Stephen Sawyer, Erik Schneiderhan, Diana Miller, Matt Patterson, John Paul Rollert, Clemente Navarro, Jon Baskin, Bill Daniels, Terry Nicholson, Elena Bird, Ilana Ventura, Filipe Silva, Forest Gregg, and three anonymous reviewers for the University of Chicago Press.

Anita Silver read every sentence of the manuscript word by word, subjecting it to an exacting Mom Test that issued the final verdict on readability and comprehensibility. We thank her for this and more.

Some portions of this book draw from or adapt previously published work, which we acknowledge here:

Silver, Daniel, Terry Nichols Clark, and Clemente Jesus Navarro Yanez. Scenes: Social Context in an Age of Contingency. Social Forces 88 (July 2010): 2293–2324.

Silver, Daniel. The American Scenescape: Amenities, Scenes and the Qualities of Local Life. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society (2012): 97–114.

Silver, Daniel, and Terry Nichols Clark. The Power of Scenes: Quantities of Amenities and Qualities of Places. Cultural Studies 29, no. 3 (2015): 425–49.

Silver, Daniel, and Terry Nichols Clark. Buzz as an Urban Resource. Canadian Journal of Sociology 38, no. 1 (2013): 1–32.

Silver, Daniel, and Diana Miller. Contextualizing the Artistic Dividend. Journal of Urban Affairs 35, no. 5 (2013): 591–606.

1

Setting the Scene

A group waves their hands across a storefront window as motion-sensing devices play music to their movements. Down the street, a few dozen enthusiasts have an impromptu outdoor paint fight. Upstairs in a dive bar pool hall, droning electronica plays amid flashing lights while people with brightly colored hair and tattoo-covered arms eat vegan food. This is not the Latin Quarter, Greenwich Village, or Haight-Ashbury. It is East Toronto. Similar scenes exist in many other cities.

Yet these scenes of indie art, cafes, and electronic music are not the only ones. In bucolic Ave Maria, Florida, all roads lead to a central cathedral and the coffee shop TV is tuned to Mass. The Village, near Vallejo, California, transforms scenes from the paintings of Thomas Kinkade into an urban aesthetic promising calm, not chaos. Peace, not pressure. Celebration, Florida, evinces a Disney Heaven of safety and cleanliness. Scenes like these, and many others, are part of our everyday social environment. They factor into crucial decisions, about where to work, where to open a business, where to found a political activist group, where to live, what political causes to support, and more. How, why, and how much? This book provides tools for thinking about these questions, and some answers.

Scene as the Aesthetic View of Place

This book is about scenes, what they are, where they are, why they matter. Scene has several meanings. One usage emphasizes shared interest in a specific activity: the jazz scene, the mountain climbing scene, and the beauty pageant scene. Another highlights the character of specific places, typically neighborhoods or cities: the Haight-Ashbury scene, the Wicker Park scene, and the Nashville scene.

Our approach to scene extends these first two meanings, seeking a more general level of analysis. As a first step on this analytical ladder, think about a neighborhood as a film director, painter, or poet might. There are people doing many things, sitting in a cafe, entering and exiting a grocery, milling about after a church service, cheering the home team. Then ask what style of life, spirit, meaning, mood, is expressed in all of this. Is it dangerous or exotic, familial or avant-garde? How could others share in that spirit, experience and embrace its meaning sympathetically, or reject it? What, in other words, is in the character of this particular place that links to broader and more universal themes?

The Simple Ability to Perceive and Participate in Scenes Contains Remarkable Complexities

This third meaning—the aesthetic meaning of a place—is our focus. It implies a way of seeing that we are all familiar with to some degree. Different places feel different. You can see the differences pass by as you walk, or bike, or drive (slowly, with the windows down) around most any city. Here, fashionable people in high-end restaurants are getting ready for a museum gala or film opening—a glamorous scene. There, families in blue jeans are setting up picnic tables in a park for a barbecue—a neighborly scene. The list could go on, and it will, in later chapters.

Yet however familiar and intuitive such scenes are, they are quite remarkable in a number of ways that are worthy of reflection: namely, in that (1) they are possible at all, that we can coordinate our behavior based on them; (2) we can recognize and differentiate among them; and (3) they matter for things we care a lot about, like why some people and places are more economically successful than others, among other things. Let us consider each of these in turn, as they structure the chapters that follow.

Embedded Meaning Makes Scenes Possible

For the first, how scenes are possible at all, think about what happens when something goes wrong. Imagine for a moment two different scenes.

One is in a jazz club. The lighting is dark, glasses are clinking, smoke is in the air, people are talking, the band is playing and joking with the crowd between sets, cocktail waiters and waitresses artfully dodge around the tables, black-light paintings line the wall, and the audience spills out into the street, where groups stand smoking cigarettes and eating food from a nearby takeout.

The other is a classical music performance. The audience sits up straight, silent absent the occasional cough, wearing suits, ties, and formal gowns; the orchestra, in black and white, sits at stiff attention following the conductor’s cues; fragile chandeliers hover overhead; and all are surrounded by architecture that evokes neoclassical temples, designed to provoke awe and reverence.

Box 1.1 Classical Musicians Are Experimenting with New Venues and New Music

In Silver Spring, a cellist plays in duo with electric guitar, their music wrapped in an envelope of reverb and static from the computer processors onstage. In Baltimore, a saxophone and bass clarinet perform acoustic compositions by acclaimed 20th-century composers in tandem with new electronic pieces by younger ones, interspersed with a live contribution from a DJ. And in Washington, a composer who wants to form a new-music group turns, not to conservatories, but to Craigslist.

Classical music is thought of as a world of formal wear, red velvet seats and Mozart concertos. But young classical musicians here and elsewhere are increasingly exploring additional ways to express themselves. Once upon a time, young conservatory musicians wanted to grow up to play as soloists with major orchestras. Today, many of them are forming bands instead.

[They] represent an attempt to break down the traditional concert format, which can seem stiff and off-putting to the younger crowd whom all musicians these days would like to attract. The New York performance space Le Poisson Rouge, a club-style venue that features contemporary and classical music acts, is drawing attention nationwide. Locally, groups look hopefully at Busboys and Poets, or the Millennium Stage, or the basement of the Harman Center, while the Sonic Circuits Festival, a celebration of the eclectic and electronic, holds some events at the visual arts center Pyramid Atlantic in Silver Spring.

The crowd [at Busboys and Poets] is so mixed, all the young people, the vibe in there, said Nick Kendall, a 31-year-old violinist with the bluegrass-jazz-uncategorizable, classically trained string trio Time for Three.

— Anne Midgette (2009)

Now imagine a mistake: a musician hits a wrong note or plays during a rest. What happens in the jazz club? Chances are the other musicians continue to play. The wrong note, while unintended, is a kind of welcome surprise. It interrupts usual improvisational habits, and the musicians launch into a new key, a new time signature, that they had not expected. The audience cheers, and afterward, the offending musician takes a special bow, all have a laugh and pour another round of drinks.

And during the classical performance? If a New York Philharmonic violinist accidentally played during the pauses in the great duh-duh-duh-duh theme in Beethoven’s Fifth? The audience would gasp, the offender’s face would go beet red, and if the show did not stop right then, as soon as it was over, he or she would be looking for a new line of work. Critics would write about the horror of the experience.

How do people know how to respond appropriately in such different scenes? It is somewhat amazing. Likely few audience members would have met before. Especially in a big city, they will be from different regions, ethnic backgrounds, ages, and so on. To be sure, the musicians know each other better, and their training may lead them to expect certain things from one another. But take the same jazz musicians and put them in a classical performance, or in a wedding ceremony for that matter, and watch much of their jazziness be replaced by more formal standards. Put classical musicians in a crowded bar and watch the reverse occur.

We know how to respond to the situation appropriately partly because something in the situation tells us how to do so. Think again of the jazz club and the Beethoven concert, of what is going on not only in the venues but also outside and around them. The whole situation, from the movement of the waiters to the design of the building, from the nearby restaurants to the posture of the musicians, conspires to say things about how to behave: Be ready for a surprise, express yourself! in the jazz scene; Follow established forms elegantly, with refinement and grace! around the concert hall. Messages, or mantras, like these are written into the situations through which we routinely move, encoded in our streets and strips. They make phenomena like scenes possible. Chapter 2 explores these multiple meanings of scenes in more detail.

Aesthetic Intuition plus the Transformation of Desires into Activities and Amenities Makes It Possible to Recognize Different Scenes More Clearly

And here is a second remarkable feature of scenes: we can recognize their subtle aesthetic differences, often without much ado. For instance, in Toronto, scenes with an offbeat, avant-garde feel (think pop-up art galleries and indie rock clubs) are near others with a more glamorous, exhibitionistic, uninhibitedly flamboyant ambiance (think nightclubs and velvet ropes). Separated by only a few hundred yards, participants in both scenes tend to have similar demographic and educational profiles. Yet these scenes can be experienced as separate worlds—a difference marked linguistically when the indie-hipsters brand the clubbers as 905ers, somewhat sneeringly imputing to them a suburban area code.

Similarly strong aesthetic and cultural distinctions recur elsewhere. We make them all the time, often without any explicit or official markers. Some cities do try to formally define their scenes. Chicago under Mayor Daley II installed distinctive sculptures and icons for different neighborhoods, even rocket-shaped towers with rainbow stripes for its gay neighborhood, Boystown. Many cities post signs like Entertainment District or Chinatown to flag what type of scenes to expect there.

But by and large these official signs merely recognize formally scenes that are already known. The real scenes spill out over the official signage. Their true characters are more complex, and sometimes more in dispute.

Still, the differences are there, and we see them. How? Partly because we are not only cognitive creatures. We also react to distinctive aesthetic cues. We perceive the world not only as neutral facts and data, but also as full of value-charged objects about which we render judgments: a beautiful sunset, an ugly smokestack, an inspiring skyline, a tacky strip mall.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant pioneered in identifying this aesthetic component of mental life in his aptly titled Critique of Judgment. It has been a recurrent, if often subterranean, theme in psychology and social science, but seldom addressed explicitly. Perhaps the key figures here are the Gestalt theorists.

Two of their ideas are crucial for understanding scenes. First are what they called affordances. The idea is that things afford certain responses; they call out to us. A door handle asks to be turned; a set table invites us to sit and enjoy a meal.

Second is the idea of the Gestalt itself. We see and understand elements of our world holistically, rather than summing the component parts. If we see a tree, for example, we do not see branches, then leaves, then a trunk, and then add all those things together in our minds to make a tree. Instead, we see the tree as a complete entity.

The various elements of the situation, that is, come to us in some kind of totality, where each part fits, like each stroke of a painting. This means that, while things afford certain responses, what they say varies situationally. The same gesture acquires different meanings in different contexts. In one situation, a raised hand is a friendly greeting. In another, it is an act of aggression.

While these abilities to take in the holistic meaning of a scene and to respond to the behavioral cues embedded in objects may be in some sense hardwired into our mental architecture, they are also clearly subject to historical and social variation and refinement. Anthropologist Grant McCracken lists fifteen ways of being a teenager in North America in 1990: rocker, surfer-skater, b-girls, Goths, punk, hippies, student government, jocks, and on and on. Economic historian Deidre McCloskey compares this to the 1950s: You could be mainstream or James Dean. That was it (McCloskey 2006, 26). This expanding multiplicity of styles is not written in nature, even if the potential may in some sense be genetic.

Box 1.2

Man is a consuming and sportive animal as well as a political one.

— John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems ([1927] 1954, 139)

The Empire State Building may be recognized by itself. But when it is seen pictorially it is seen as a related part of a perceptually organized whole. Its values, its qualities as seen, are modified by the other parts of the whole scene, and in turn these modify the value, as perceived, of every other part of the whole. There is now form in the artistic sense.

— John Dewey, Art as Experience ([1934] 2005, 141)

The things of the world are not simply neutral objects which stand before us for our contemplation. Each one of them symbolizes or recalls a particular way of behaving, provoking in us reactions which are either favorable or unfavorable. This is why people’s tastes, character, and the attitude they adopt to the world and to particular things can be deciphered from the objects with which they choose to surround themselves, their preferences for certain colours or the places where they like to go for walks.

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception (2004, 63)

Historical and social changes into the twenty-first century—some of which are summarized in figure 1.1—have rendered more persons more sensitive to subtle aesthetic differences, which have become more sharply delineated in day-to-day experience. The great economist Alfred Marshall outlined the general logic. He called it the transformation of wants into activities. By wants Marshall meant basically what we would today call preferences. These are, so to speak, in your head (or heart, or gut—somewhere internal), such as desire for comfort and security. But wants can also include the wish to have a home that is not cramped but somehow elevating. Or to live near friends who stimulate you and give you a sense of intimacy and warmth.

Figure 1.1

For most persons through most of human history it has been difficult to realize many if not most of their wants, or even to clearly distinguish among them. Growing general affluence, safety, health, education, and mobility change this drastically, as do the declining, or at least less automatic, influence of the extended family, of the Company Man, of traditional religion, and the concomitant rise of various types of relativisms in culture, science, and spirituality, from Picasso, to Einstein, to Esalen.

Box 1.3 The Expressive Revolution Takes Hogtown and the Pork Butcher to the World

Historically Victorian and blue-collar cities like Toronto and Chicago are changing.

Ernest Hemingway wrote a column for the Toronto Daily Star. He once complained, Christ, I hate to leave Paris for Toronto, the city of churches (Lemon 1985, 57). There are now in Toronto more holistic health centers, acupuncturists, yoga studios, and martial arts schools per postal code than there are churches and religious organizations.

In 1975, Saul Bellow wrote, There were beautiful and moving things in Chicago, but culture was not one of them (69). In 1976, Milton Rakove described Chicago as Dick Daley’s town. Uncultured and parochial . . . not an Athens, neither a Rome, nor a London, and never a Paris (Rakove 1975, 41). In 2003, Mayor Daley II had the street-level bus stops and rail entrances redesigned to match those in Paris. In 2009, the director of the National Endowment of the Arts said, Mayor Daley should be the No. 1 hero to everyone in this country who cares about art (Jones 2009).

— The authors

This is a quite general shift, from a life experienced as necessary to one experienced as contingent. One symbol is the workplace, less determined by physical givens like rivers and lakes and more by proximity to people and skills. Another is the typical career path, which more frequently involves half a dozen different jobs rather than lifelong attachment to one firm. Still another is religion, where, as Robert Putnam and David Campbell have shown, there are more liminals, people who move back and forth in and out of various faiths. And even for those who stay in the religion of their forebears, that religion, as philosopher Charles Taylor argues, must increasingly acknowledge and define itself against the availability of many, many other viable spiritual options. Style, personal meaning, and aesthetics all accordingly increase in personal and social salience.

More wants become more effective. As they do, organizations and occupations spring up to meet them; they become amenities. The vague desire for an uplifting home becomes a home décor shop and an interior design firm. The diffuse wish for intimate warmth becomes a patio supply store, a family-friendly restaurant, and a smiling bartender.

Amenities like these become platforms for living practices. Now there are people who devote themselves, day in and day out, to excellent interior design or maintaining wonderfully welcoming restaurant ambiance. You can dedicate your life to indie rock or body art. And a whole menagerie of social types acquires sharper form. Hipsters and Bobos, Patio Men and nerds, metrosexuals and soccer moms, and many more. Our analysis of the World Values Survey (in chapter 6 and elsewhere) shows that across dozens of countries there has been a dramatic increase in cultural organization membership and a diversity of value shifts.

As vague preferences become practices and amenities, they are transferred from our heads and enter into the world. We can then see them there, before us. They crystallize in real organizations and occupations, like tattoo parlors, twentieth-century art galleries, cafes, or fishing lodges. They are listed in the yellow pages, pay taxes, have conventions, and sometimes are even counted in national censuses. You can look them up on Google Maps to get a feel for what types of activities characterize a place.

And the social scientist can document and analyze them. For instance, as figure 1.2 shows, in Canada between 1999 and 2008 the number of musical groups, dance companies, independent artists, and performing arts establishments doubled, dramatically outpacing a total average growth rate of 20 percent for all businesses. Sports and health facilities and clubs also rose steeply; zoos, record stores, bowling centers, and amusement arcades were among those contracting. Building on this type of information, we can identify local differences in kinds of amenities, classify them as different types of scenes, and investigate the causes and consequences of their variations.

Figure 1.2

This figure shows the percentage change in the total number of various arts, culture, and leisure establishments across Canada between 1999 and 2008. For example, dance companies and musical groups nearly doubled in this period. The black bar shows change in total businesses as a benchmark: everything above it grew faster than total businesses did; everything below it either grew more slowly or contracted during this period. These are six-digit NAICS categories, descriptions of which are available at the Statistics Canada website. Source: Statistics Canada, Canadian Business Patterns (1999–2008).

Much of this book does precisely this type of analytical work. For now, the key point is to build from the more intuitive, experiential basis of scenes; you can feel them, some as sacred, others as entertaining, perhaps others as corrupting. We recognize these differences in scenes not only because of some innate aesthetic intuition, not only because we are desiring creatures with a broad range of wishes and hopes, but also because scenes have become woven into the fabric of our distinctive social environments.

As Scenes Become More Sharply Delineated, Their Effects Become Stronger

If scenes emerge as effects of various wants and preferences, when crystallized as amenities and activities, they become potent causes. This is because when scenes become more sharply delineated around us, they become more likely to worm their way into the center of all sorts of everyday decisions—decisions about where to live, to work, to locate a firm, what political party to support, what causes to fight for, and much more. This points to the wide-ranging social consequences of scenes.

Consider first residential effects of scenes. At the turn of the twentieth century, these would have been less salient for most Americans. The typical town might have a pub or two; the typical person, a farmer, would need several hours travel to get there. Leisure time would be scarce. No doubt churches often rang with the sounds of music and families told stories to one another. Still, if you had the chance to move, or even to think about why you would stay where you are (to think about your residence in the subjunctive, we could say), issues like jobs, farming and forestry, ethnic and religious heritage, and family probably loomed larger than bars or restaurants or sports or galleries, which simply did not enjoy enough of a critical physical and experiential mass to enter as directly into the decision-making process

Things have changed dramatically since then, as Nobel laureate economist Robert Fogel has documented. A century ago, he writes, the typical household in OECD nations spent 80 percent of its income on food, clothing, and shelter. Today, these commodities account for less than a third of consumption (2000, 160). Leisure, moreover, by his estimation rose in the United States from 18 percent of consumption in 1875 to 68 percent in 1995 (191).

The Great Recession of 2008 narrowed options. That many recent college graduates are choosing to move in with mom and dad rather than set out on their own is only one of its less painful results. Still, the long-term trends seem to be broadly continuing. In the United States, for instance, as figure 1.3 shows, the hospitality and leisure sector was one of the first to return to its prerecession employment levels, and has been on a steady upward trend as a share of the total labor force since the 1940s.

Figure 1.3

This figure shows the percentage of the US labor force employed in the hospitality and leisure sector from 1939 to 2015 and its arts, entertainment, and recreation subsector from 1990 to 2015 (data for the latter are not available before 1990). Despite the general 2008 recession, there was no substantial slowing in the growth of hospitality and leisure jobs as a share of the total workforce. Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics (2015).

The arts, entertainment, and recreation segment of this sector has also shown steady growth (with especially strong gains in the 1990s), and was back to its prerecession level by early 2013. The number of personal trainers grew rapidly in the 2000s. After analyzing trends in the cultural economy through the 2000s, Carl Grodach and Michael Seman conclude, At the national level, the cultural economy has not experienced a major decline or reorganization during recession. In fact, from 2006–2009, cultural sector employment has only nominally decreased nationally (−.35%) and the [30 metro] regions we study experienced a slight gain (1.2%). Similarly, the basic geography of the cultural economy remains unaffected. And their examination of artists in particular reveals a similar pattern: Nationally, artists appear unaffected by the economic downturn with their slow, steady growth in absolute numbers from 2006 to 2009 (2013, 24).

These trends confirm what observers of postindustrial societies like Daniel Bell, Gary Becker, and Edward Glaeser have long held: that the postindustrial transition increasingly places education, personal relations, and amenities at the center of life, for both producers and consumers. More jobs involve, in Bell’s (1973) memorable terms, not a game against nature or machines but rather a game with other people. A honed sensitivity to what those other people enjoy and value becomes increasingly prized; work itself begins (for many) to approximate a lifestyle decision about how to meaningfully spend one’s day rather than necessary toil until the weekend. More consumption involves choices among products and services differentiated by styles, designs, and personal and aesthetic meaning, from fashion to iPods to coffee to movies. The fortunes of more cities become more defined by how they concentrate, as Glaeser puts it, not the means of production (e.g., factories and warehouses) but rather the means of consumption (e.g., restaurants and nightclubs), which, like personal services, are difficult to outsource abroad or economize through labor-saving measures like standardization or automation. Indeed, retail trade among health and personal care stores was barely affected by the Great Recession.

This lifestyle shift toward specific consumption concerns implies that when thinking about where to move, or why to stay, for a larger percentage of the population than perhaps ever before, the character and style of a city’s or neighborhood’s amenities matter. To test this, ask a group of recent or soon-to-be college graduates how many would choose an $80,000 per year job in Peoria versus a $50,000 per year job in Chicago. Many will choose Chicago, suggesting that the economic amenity value of access to Chicago’s scenes is as much as $30,000.

But scenes matter not only for the young and the affluent. Some important sociological research shows that many low-income African American neighborhoods have considerable concentrations of local amenities, which endow the neighborhood with value that cannot be measured by income alone.¹ Similarly, retirees increasingly choose downtown condominiums for the distinct style of life they afford: easy access to the opera, restaurants, charming waterfronts, and more. Later chapters detail such patterns.

Further, sometimes unintended, consequences begin to accumulate around these sorts of scene-driven residential decisions. This is because all sorts of characteristics may be strongly correlated with people’s tastes for various scenes. For instance, if people from a certain ethnic background, or with certain political attitudes, enjoy certain types of scenes, they will tend to sort themselves into ethnic or political residential enclaves. And with little direct intent: they more consciously focus on locating in the neighborhood with the interesting Thai restaurants and yoga studios or near the golf course, NASCAR track, or soccer field. The result is what journalist Bill Bishop (2008) calls the Big Sort. Like-minded people cluster near one another and begin to live increasingly bubbled lives, echoing back to themselves their prejudices and predispositions. Without a basis in personal interactions or common activities, the other—political, religious, ethnic—can be reduced to caricature and stereotype.

But this type of echo-chamber effect is not the only possibility. Some types of scenes cut across lines of education, age, politics, or race, reshuffling historic patterns of residential segregation in the process. These often have activist organizations that encourage participants to reach across seemingly hard-and-fast cleavages. Asian-style martial arts clubs, as we explore later, are a prime example of organizations that bridge across racial and educational differences, as are some churches and arts organizations. And popular culture is in many ways a contemporary lingua franca. The central point is that, whether we are talking about reinforcing or reshuffling classical social boundaries, scenes have become potent forces in defining the composition of our residential communities. These residential effects of scenes are the topic of chapter 5.

Box 1.4 Teaching Urbanism to New Downtown Residents

Kyle Ezell, an urban planner in Columbus, Ohio, has . . . developed a course for suburban empty nesters and retirees that not only teaches how to pick a city retirement destination, but also the finer points of such urban needs as . . . how to tool around on a motor scooter. . . . He has also written a guide, Retire Downtown: The Lifestyle Destination for Active Retirees and Empty Nesters. . . .

He will consult with cities and developers on making downtowns more residentially friendly. He also will host a series of parties around the country to promote the ruppie lifestyle this fall. . . . Ruppie is Ezell’s coinage for retired urban people.

Ruppies are different from yuppies, because they aren’t fixated on material things, he said. They want to help, to be part of the community and be creative and keep revitalized.

Whatever they are called, their numbers are potentially huge, as the nation’s Baby Boomers face retirement en masse, apparently with a desire for a new place to live and substantial funds to pay for it. I think that all of the businesses, all the cultural institutions, everybody is trying to figure out what this emerging demographic is all about, says Ty Tabing, executive director of the Chicago Loop Alliance. The civic group is sponsoring one of Ezell’s ruppie parties. . . .

People who have been scared to death of urban environments can talk to people who are into it already, he said. The ruppies are going to tell their stories here, how their lives have changed.

Paul Dravillas likes the show and tell idea. He and his wife, Patricia, navigated a learning curve after they sold their Orland Park home two years ago and bought a South Loop condo. CTA buses, in particular, were a curiosity after a lifetime of owning two cars.

Getting rid of one car was difficult, says Dravillas, 69, who spent his childhood on the South Side. But he says they don’t miss that second car; he’s happy to whip out his senior citizen bus pass for almost daily trips on the No. 3 bus. I did hear ‘Are you crazy?’ from my friends a little bit—no, make that a lot when we announced we were moving to the city, he says with a laugh. But we love being back in the city. We do so many more things now—Millennium Park, the Cultural Center, sailing from Burnham Harbor, than we ever would have done if we had been driving back and forth from the suburbs.

— Mary Umberger, Helping Cities Lure More ‘Ruppies’ (2006)

Their economic effects are just as profound. Scenes, at least some of them, can serve as laboratories of consumption. By way of comparison, think first of the great IBM or Bell research labs, especially in their midcentury heyday. These were laboratories of production, devoted to pure experimentation with an eye to new types of products, like computers or transistors. Many of these had no direct commercial payoff, and some of those that did only did so later, and not directly for IBM or Bell. But the results were transformative, yielding innovations in data search algorithms, laser eye surgery, bar codes, wireless Internet, and much, much more.

Scenes—particularly those with more alternative, expressive, transgressive, and glamorous dimensions—also provide key stimuli for economic innovation. Elizabeth Currid’s ethnography of New York City restaurants, bars, and nightclubs showed how fashion designers, popular musicians, and avant-garde artists would dance and drink, rub shoulders, observe one another’s latest aesthetic ventures on the dance floor, and sometimes take home new ideas and inspirations. Richard Lloyd’s ethnography of Chicago’s hip Wicker Park documented how the neighborhood scene figured into the broader chain of cultural production, providing, among other things, a standing reserve of coolness and buzz that could be drawn on by the likes of software designers or restaurant entrepreneurs. The point—clear and simple to firms like Apple or Facebook—is that the tone, the mood, the color scheme, and the sounds that come with using a product can be just as economically decisive to its success as the script beneath it. These aesthetic qualities do not come from nowhere. They are refined and honed through life in scenes—on the dance floor, the catwalk, the promenade, at the racetrack, the concert hall, the gallery opening—which in turn provide the stylistic material that designers can streamline and package.

Even finance reporters have learned to discuss design issues explicitly in evaluating new products and companies. This marks a sea change for those schooled in the dreary science of economic theory, past tense. Gary Becker wrote about buzz, as do we; Sherwin Rosen in The Economics of Super Stars pondered topics like the Beatles or Oprah Winfrey.

Box 1.5

[Berlin’s Café de Westens is] . . . a school and a very good one at that. We learned to see there, to perceive and to think. We learned, almost in a more penetrating way than at the university, that we were not the only fish in the sea, and that one should not look at only one side of a thing but at least at four.

— A regular describing one of Berlin’s main prewar bohemian hangouts, quoted in Elizabeth Wilson, Bohemians (2000, 35)

To be sure, aesthetics and the expressive are as new as Aristotle, but their democratic scope and economic and social reverberations reach far deeper and wider than ever before. Indeed, they can create whole new economic sectors and classes of work. Before Starbucks, cafe culture in America was restricted to a handful of neighborhoods in college towns like Berkeley or Cambridge, or a few grungy neighborhoods in Seattle. No Loitering signs were the norm.

Now the US coffee shop industry includes about 20,000 locations. These generate combined revenue of around $10 billion. You can get a decent cappuccino in any suburb, and the barista is a recognizable social type. And while Starbucks’ initial expansion put some indie coffee shops out of business, the net effect has been an increase in small and offbeat cafes as more Americans have cultivated a taste not only for fancy caffeinated drinks but also for hanging out, chatting, reading the paper, and working in a cafe setting—all of which was formerly more or less the province of artists and intellectuals. In a similar way, the iPod taught a generation to appreciate the power of aesthetic design. These innovations generate new needs, new demands, and with them, new products, new jobs, and new industries.

Scenes provide key resource bases for contemporary workplaces, in much the same way that fertile soil, good sun, and clean air provide crucial resources for the farmer, and assembly lines and oil do for the industrialist. This economic salience implies profound transformations in theories of economic growth. Documenting and working through these transformations is the topic of chapter 4.

Box 1.6 Japan Leader Is Poll Victim after Fashion Faux Pas

Throughout history, the shortcomings of political leaders have been a depressing litany: corruption in office, sex scandals, verbal gaffes and the like. But it’s rare for a politician to fall out of favor over fashion sense (or lack thereof).

Yet that seems to be the fate that history has singled out for Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. True, the beleaguered leader was already struggling in the polls, but his popularity has taken a nose dive since his appearance in public wearing a shirt that one U.S. fashion blogger described as an item last seen whooping it up on the Arsenio Hall show.

Hatoyama wore the multicolored monstrosity to a recent barbecue with voters. As CNN reports, the event was a tragically misguided effort on Hatoyama’s part to connect with the ordinary voter. His approval rating has dropped 9 points since.

Japanese fashion critic Don Konishi told CNN that the fashion misfire shows that Hatoyama is way out of touch with the lives of everyday citizens. (Konishi also notes this isn’t Hatoyama’s first fashion offense—he once wore a pink blazer over a shirt emblazoned with hearts. You can see it in a Huffington Post slide show of Hatoyama fashion.)

This shirt comes from the ’80s or ’90s, said Konishi. His ideas and philosophy are old. Japan is facing a crisis, and we can’t overcome it with a prime minister like this. A fashion designer like me can wear this, but not the leader of Japan. In another interview, Konishi wondered, Is anyone able to stop him wearing such a thing?

— Yahoo News (May 13, 2010)

The effects of scenes go beyond residential and economic decisions, however; they extend into politics. We have already seen a hint at one way this can occur: indirectly, through residential sorting along party affiliation. Indeed, Bishop suggests that as lifestyle preferences sort neighborhoods by political party, polarization increases, mutual understanding decreases, and politics becomes a shouting match designed less to persuade than to induce submission. Insofar as scenes contribute to this sort of residential sorting, they may indeed be at the root of some profound changes in our political culture.

Box 1.7 A Tale of Two Cafes

Crown Point, Indiana—Most coffeehouses seem to be more of a wasteland of people who sit and listen to their iPods and look for their next friend in My-Space (Cebrzynski 2008) says Dave Beckham, owner of the Conservative Cafe. Tired of the liberal Starbucks mode, Beckham decided in 2008 to turn his moral thinking into a business, and thus was born the Conservative Cafe. With the television tuned to Fox and books by Ann Coulter lining the walls, Beckham has designed his business with two goals: good coffee and a political bent. The cafe serves Conservative Blend, its Radical Right Blend, its Moderate Blend; left wingers can try Liberal Blend (decaf, presumably). Beckham insists that he doesn’t stand at the door haranguing customers with radical ideas, but rather just advocates the good, old American values that kept this country the greatest country the world has ever seen (Cebrzynski 2008).

Poland, New York—The Revolution Cafe is a youth-led coffeehouse with a diverse and creative atmosphere promoting local and global community. Spearheaded by adult mentor Jay Starr, the cafe is organized and operated by local high school students in an effort to revitalize the rural area of upstate New York. Overtly embracing community and liberal values, the Revolution Cafe shows art, hosts performances, and works to integrate its members into the fabric of the city’s life.

— Meghan Kallman

But there are other, more direct, ways that scenes influence politics. The most central line is that matters of aesthetics, culture, lifestyle, and consumption have themselves become political issues in their own right, alongside classical political wedges like class or ethnicity. Nationally, this is evident from the 1980s culture wars to the rise of the Moral Majority in the 1990s, from the environmental to the gay marriage movements. We see this reflected also in the personal style of political leaders. No more stuffy suits; instead Bill Clinton plays the saxophone, George W. Bush bails hay, and Barack Obama shoots hoops with NBA stars.

Scene-fueled politics can also transpire at the local level, often in neighborhood and city battles over what type of scene citizens want to live in. Historian Stephen Sawyer (2012) documented one dramatic case. A Parisian arts group, Les Frigos, fought—more or less successfully—against impending development in its east Paris, historically working-class neighborhood, to maintain aesthetically fitting sight lines to the Seine, among other things. These sorts of conflicts do not occur only in Paris, however. In Chicago’s African American Bronzeville neighborhood, people fight over closing liquor stores, whether nightclubs are too conspicuous, and gospel versus hip-hop and house music. Films like The Battle for Brooklyn, novels like Telegraph Avenue, and television shows like Treme explore the tensions and complexities at stake in struggles over the cultural character of distinctive neighborhoods undergoing rapid change.

All of this suggests we need a more culturally complex approach to understanding political matters like polarization, voting, or movement activism. It is not enough to know whether somebody, or a neighborhood, or a city, is rich or poor, business or union, Irish or WASP, to determine how they will vote and what they might be fighting over. In addition to these sorts of concerns, we will want to know if they enjoy swingers clubs, hunting clubs, or country clubs, poetry groups or Bible groups, rap or gospel, organic grocers or Walmarts, nightclubs or church picnics, or all of the above. Battles over multiple consumption and lifestyle concerns—age-old ones like honor and turf, community and neighborhood, sacred and profane, and newer ones as well—need to be considered alongside desires for low taxes and other classical political issues. Chapter 6 shows just how strongly scene differences correlate with political differences, both in voting and in new social movement activity.

Where Everyday Knowledge Ends, Social Science Begins

None of what has been said so far requires much by way of specialized knowledge to grasp. These processes are intuitively accessible and familiar in our everyday lives.

Yet our everyday knowledge of scenes does run up against certain limits. We all live mostly in a few scenes with which we are intimately familiar. This makes it hard to acquire the comparative knowledge necessary to determine what, in fact, is truly unique, or truly common, about them. You may even know where every movie theater, art gallery, bowling alley, skating rink, and underground rave club in your neighborhood or city is located. But almost nobody knows how his or her local set of options compares to what other places have—not only whether somewhere else has more or less of the same things, but also whether it has different types, or perhaps the same ones, in different combinations, producing different overall scenes.

Some of us may travel more than others. But who can claim to have visited the tens of thousands of neighborhoods in countries as large and diverse as the United States or Canada, and beyond? And to remember everything in each? By allowing us to gather and classify data on hundreds of types of amenities for these local-level units, the tools of social science can in effect permit us to travel to all these places without leaving our computer screens.

Moreover, it is hard to assess the real effects of scenes just by looking at the ones around us. Suppose you see all sorts of new businesses opening in your local arts and entertainment district. Is this because of the scene? Or is it because the people who live in that district have college degrees, and wherever there are college graduates, there tends to be growth? Or maybe both in combination?

With just a few cases, we cannot say. But with, as social scientists say, a large N (number of cases), we can go beyond the specific case and ask, Is it the case that, among places with roughly similar average educational levels, changing the scene—adding some art galleries or Thai restaurants or secondhand boutiques—brings with it new business activity, rising rents, rising incomes? Or are these economic variables constant across variations in scenes but correlated with changes in education? If the former, then we have reason to believe that scenes do in fact generate independent economic effects; if the latter, that hypothesis is weakened. This is an example of the sort of multivariate analysis that populates later chapters.

For now, let us focus squarely on the question of what a social science perspective can