on happiness and the urban space

                The suspension of the Alabama vs. Florida Atlantic game owing to lightning in Tuscaloosa presented an opportunity to do another blog post. As earlier mentioned, the students visited Gorgas House this past Wednesday.  See a video postcard of their visit in this post. That’s Ben, one of the students enrolled in this class, playing piano! Our thanks to Lydia Ellington, Director of Gorgas House, for her presentation on this historic home.

                Before the visit to Gorgas, the students were asked to write a short reflection on whether the nineteenth century city Gunther Barth describes in his book on emerging urban life in nineteenth century America is a happy space.

                 Rae said “cities represented happiness and advancement” for some incoming immigrants, but they also represented despair “brought on by poverty and inequality.” She decided that Barth essentially “wants us to understand the varied states of the people” in nineteenth century cities.    

                Voni wrote that what Barth was really setting out to do was unveil the city as an “evolving place.” She noted this relation to how he describes the “Eastern European man who doesn’t recognize his wife when she gets off the boat because her appearance is country and Old World.” It wasn’t so much that she was Old World, “ Voni noted, “but that her “husband’s perspective… changed.”            
          Caroline also saw the nineteenth century city as “always changing” and moreover, a space that seems to have an “exciting atmosphere” if nothing else.

          Devon said pondering whether the urban space Barth describes is “happy” requires a “yes and no” response. For sure, “people were divided” on the basis of “their background or wealth,” she added, saying, “People living in luxury apartments had different lives from the people living next to a mill.”  Emily added that in such a space, people “were constantly surrounded by people [they] didn’t know” and yet  “this brings a certain sense of unity and interdependency.”

          Caleb said city dwellers merely “appear to be happy. “ They also appear to be “busy because…by the time people actually recognized the new urban phenomenon…the twentieth century was shaping the world.”

         Will said the city that Barth is describing is in a “developmental phase” as “so many different people come together in” one space. 

          Jeff said emphatically that cities were “not happy at all” on the basis of Barth’s description because so many people, among them “the Chinese, Jews, Romanians and Russians” were in a compact space.  Chiming in, Undre wrote, “Cities appear to be filled with stress and confusion because of the variety of culture compressed [in one space].

          Ben said “the world that Barth describes does not at first seem to be happy” because it is “crowded and noisy.” He added that “depending on your class ‘happiness’ was easier to come by.” Wayne also mentioned the crowds saying, “too many people outnumber[ed] the amount of jobs.”

          Jasmine also said emphatically that the urban space that Barth describes is not a happy and this partly because it is a “divided” space. She mentioned how Jane Addams, a founder of Chicago’s Hull House, a haven for some newly arrived, turn of the century immigrants, saw such a phenomenon as being a “modern” one  as evident in how streets lined with “slums” that intersected with fancier living on Broadway.

         Jess said “while there may be enclaves of happy people," but many city people are just there to  “succeed or survive.”