ABOUT THIS BOOK
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.
REVIEWS
“Scenescapes proposes new tools for measuring social facts and new ways to analyze this data. The result is an excellent book—masterfully executed, clearly written, and peppered with interesting and convincing anecdotes and examples.”
— Howard S. Becker, author of Becoming a Marihuana User
“We all know that places have different ‘feels,’ but until now quantitative analysis has not been able to represent these differences very well, and has focused on larger units like cities or counties rather than neighborhoods. By using data from the Census to the Yellow Pages, Silver and Clark have been able to characterize individual neighborhoods down to the ZIP code level. This is a real breakthrough. Scenescapes deserves wide attention.”
— David Weakliem, University of Connecticut
“Combining wide-ranging erudition, soaring theoretical ambition, and rigorous empirical investigation, Scenescapes is a dazzling explication of a powerful but elusive concept: the aesthetic meaning of place. Thoroughly engaging throughout, it shows that local character is far from a tertiary concern even in this age of globalization, with surprising consequences not only for cultural geography but also for economic and political sociology. This is a remarkable book!”
— Richard Douglas Lloyd, Vanderbilt University
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Setting the Scene - Daniel Aaron Silver, Terry Nichols Clark
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226357041.003.0001
[scenes;amenities;aesthetics]
This chapter introduces the general orientation of the book and lays out its major themes. Beginning from intuitive examples of scenes, it builds toward deeper reflection on how: 1) scenes are possible at all, that we can coordinate our behavior based on them; 2) we can recognize and differentiate among them; 3) they matter for things we care a lot about, like why some people and places are more economically successful than others. The chapter also introduces the book’s overall analytical direction, elaborating how to deconstruct global processes by focusing on small units like postal codes. These sharpen analysis of how jobs are created, public spaces can be redefined, and people choose to engage with neighbours or withdraw. Its adds new building blocks to social science and policy by joining aesthetic and emotional with cognitive components. (pages 1 - 28)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
A Theory of Scenes - Daniel Aaron Silver, Terry Nichols Clark
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226357041.003.0002
[scenes;theory;theatricality;legitimacy;authenticity;multidimensionality;holism]
This chapter articulates a theory of scenes. More specifically, it develops concepts for answering the question: “what kind of a scene is this?” It comes in four sections. The first argues that any answer to the question has to be multi-dimensional, that is, any specific scene is a complex of many dimensions, like tradition, transgression, or self-expression. The second lays out a paradigm for organizing 15 such dimensions into three major types of meaning: authenticity, theatricality, and authenticity. The third shows how to combine these dimensions into complex wholes. The fourth discusses how we have measured and analysed these concepts to permit contrasting scenes from around the globe. (pages 29 - 69)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Qualitative Flânerie
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226357041.003.0003
[flâneur;scenes;amenities]
This chapter illustrates methods for measuring scenes by describing key aspects of the scenescape. We compare specific scenes of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and show how relationships between key dimensions, such as charisma and self-expression, shift across the three cities. The figure of the self-reflective walker, the flâneur, integrates the chapter, as we take a digital tour around the scenescape. The reader encounters our main methodological decisions and innovations as ways of dealing with puzzles that arise naturally from trying to understand the scenes we meet. For instance, we explain how we compute quantitative measures of scene dimensions as a response to the analytical challenges that anybody faces when trying to turn bits of information about places (such as census or yellow pages organizational directory information) into a picture of a whole scene.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Back to the Land, On to the Scene: How Scenes Drive Economic Development - Daniel Aaron Silver, Terry Nichols Clark
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226357041.003.0004
[scenes;economic development;Adam Smith;David Ricardo;Karl Marx;Talcott Parsons;Max Weber;Bohemia]
This chapter shows how scenes are factors of production; they are key determinants of economic success or failure. The chapter comes in three major sections. The first, on historical concepts and theory, traces an intellectual movement from “land” as the physical gifts of nature to “scene” as the cultural and aesthetic characteristics of a locale. The second articulates several propositions about how variations in scenes should bring variations in economic growth. And the third tests these propositions by joining the scenes measures we surveyed in Chapter 3 with data on jobs, wages, rents, population, patents, human capital, and more. (pages 121 - 161)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Home, Home on the Scene: How Scenes Shape Residential Patterns - Daniel Aaron Silver, Terry Nichols Clark
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226357041.003.0005
[scenes;residential patterns;urban development;pluralism;yoga;martial arts;religion]
This chapter examines links between scenes and residential patterns. It is guided by a few main questions, such as which types of scenes attract which types of people; how do scenes distinguish within and transcend powerful social cleavages, like race, religion, and education. What emerges is a far more cross-cutting and pluralistic picture of American and generally post-industrial life than many popular accounts, which stress black and white “fragmentation” without showing potential commonalities and opportunities for meeting “the other” in shared pursuits and activities, thus building trust and collaboration. Throughout, the chapter stresses the general importance of the scene to where people move and live and how these shift urban development. Cities grow and change not only because they have beaches or jobs, but also because they offer distinct scenes that attract different types of people. (pages 162 - 220)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Scene Power: How Scenes Influence Voting, Energize New Social Movements, and Generate Political Resources - Christopher M. Graziul
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226357041.003.0006
[scenes;politics;power;voting]
The chapter connects scenes and politics. Section one discusses how scenes provide distinctive resources for political mobilization for civic groups and parties, including anarchist and counter cultural movements. Section two illustrates how scenes and their buzz drive local politics via case studies from Toronto. Section three compares all US zip codes, identifying scenes where New Social Movements (NSMs) thrive. Section four shifts to national politics, showing strong links between scenes and Presidential voting patterns in the US and how individuals’ political attitudes vary along with their surrounding scenes in Canada. Finally, we show how financial contributions to U.S. Presidential candidates track “blue blood” amenities – golf clubs, yacht clubs, private tennis courts, and the like. What emerges is a complex and wide-ranging account of political cultural fault lines. Joining multiple intellectual traditions while moving from case studies to national statistics, we show how scenes can illuminate deeply embedded elements in our local and national politics. (pages 221 - 279)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Making a Scene: How to Integrate the Scenescape into Public Policy Thinking - Daniel Aaron Silver, Terry Nichols Clark
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226357041.003.0007
[scenes;policy;Toronto;Chicago]
Policy is the topic of Chapter 7. The target audience is local and national policy makers. We provide a general overview of how the idea of scenes fits into broader urban and community policy challenges, before turning to specific advice about how to integrate scene ideas into such policy, such as wandering through your city, chatting with citizens, or incorporating the arts to heighten emotional commitment. Boxes provide examples of many cases where scenes have been key policy levers. We draw on our own policy experiences in Toronto and Chicago. A concluding case more specifically details scenes-oriented policy work in Toronto, linking it to general principles of a scenes-based urban policy. (pages 280 - 317)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
The Science of Scenes - Christopher M. Graziul
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226357041.003.0008
[scenes;methodology;context;causality]
This chapter describes and explicates methods for quantifying the presence of scenes and how they relate to urban development. It starts with an overview of the national database of local amenities we compiled, and shows how we transform these data into scenes measures. Then comes a discussion of our methodological approach for analysing how scenes can join other factors related to urban development, detailed through applying multiple methods for modelling context, extending spatial contiguity work. Other key topics include causality and the implications of employing scenes as an outcome rather than a predictor. The chapter ends with a review of on-going international scenes research, which reviews how to incorporate and interpret cross-national variations from Paris, Seoul, Spain, and China, and to outline possible directions for future research extending the scenes paradigm. (pages 318 - 384)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
