Joseph J. Varga, Hell’s Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space: Class Struggle and Progressive Reform in New York City, 1894-1914, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2013, 269 pages, $18.95 paperback. ISBN 9781583673485.

Human geographers often criticize the social sciences and humanities for not taking space seriously. Varga’s book Hell’s Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space stands out as a major and inspiring corrective. The book explores the transformation of the Middle West Side of Manhattan (1894-1914) through the lens of the sociospatial dialectic. In particular, it  examines how this area of the city was conceived by reformists and government officials, lived by constrained residents, and altered through the deviating perceptions and practices of different people operating in and through this space.

By taking Henri Lefebvre seriously, Varga identifies the multiple mechanisms responsible for driving the production and transformation of urban space. The production of city space is understood as the outcome of the entanglement of multiple networks and powers. Varga uses Lefebvre to carefully dissect the mechanisms involved in producing these entanglements and revealing their distinctive yet interwoven roles in producing urban space. He notes that, “following Henri Lefebvre, we can approach the production of space and its ability to generate or constitute the discourse that governs its restructuring by viewing space on three levels: lived, conceived, and perceived” (page 31). Varga emphasizes the centrality of “representational” or perceived space in Lefebvre’s analytical triad:

"Though not necessarily a liberating or emancipating concept, representational space is the location of possibility within a system of production dominated by the needs of a spatial order whose codes are produced under specific forms of social and class relations. Thus, in the triadic spatial interplay, space is lived, conceived, perceived, represented, negotiated, altered, judged, restructured, and ultimately experienced as a mode of knowledge construction produced by all these factors" (pages 33-34).

This analytical line allows the author to avoid the typical traps of urban studies by not giving too much weight to the powers of capital and the state (the traps of structuralism, governmentality, and post-political literatures), or to the agentive powers of individuals (the traps of the so-called “new ethnography literature”). This results in a book that actually shows how people make their spaces under conditions not of their own choosing. The author’s use of primary and secondary historical materials and his attention to empirical detail match his theoretical skills. This allows him to reveal how urban inhabitants interacted with one another to produce spaces that conformed to and transgressed the rules of the urban game.

Chapter 2 examines how planners and the local government conceived urban space in the late nineteenth  and early twentieth  centuries. Varga investigates  the origins of what he calls “Progressive Era epistemology of moral environmentalism” (page 50) and how spatial form and the design of the built environment assumed such great prominence in this mode of thinking and moralizing. Through a careful review and examination of historical archives, he shows how space, health, and visibility became the “holy trinity” (page 51) of this slowly emerging epistemology. Reforming progressives diagnosed new social problems by pointing to the spatial peculiarities of the late nineteenth-century city. “Improper environments”, characterized by invisibility and the concentration of unhealthy conduct, were seen as generative spaces of major social problems. Such problems did not only threaten urban life, but also bourgeois understandings of good citizenship. Reformers thus argued that the only solution was “to bring the rational judgment to these occluded spaces through the restructuring” (page 60) of urban space. By no means did this emergent epistemology seep gently into the concrete plans of local political officials and stakeholders. Rather, this was a highly contentious and uneven process of creating a new consensus informed by the thoughts and discourses of reformers.

Chapter 3 examines how the repressive powers of the police produced spatial differences in this area of the city. Varga asserts that this area was governed as an exceptional space where the police arbitrarily suspended “normal” laws protecting the rights of citizens. He employs the term “frozen zones” to describe such a state of exception. “The reality and perception of criminality led city officials to attempt to solidify the porous boundaries of the Middle West Side through the creation of ‘frozen zone’ areas in which either known criminals are arrested on site, or where crime is contained through a variety of both officially condoned practices and illegal ones, such as the collective of bribes and grafts” (page 90).  This further stigmatized the Middle West Side and created a space where local inhabitants experienced rights and citizenship as uncertain and distant concepts. Under such conditions, residents viewed police and the local government as obstacles to their survival and dignity, rather than as “public servants” acting in their interest. Consequently, residents “often relied upon shifting arrays of solidarities to defend themselves and make claims to their rights as citizens” (page 116). Thus, Varga shows how policing helped produce spatial difference in the city through the creation of these “frozen zones”. But just as importantly, he shows how these zones shaped the perceptions that residents had of local authorities and their expectations of what the role of the state should be in governing their lives and futures.

Chapter 4 discusses  housing and public space through the lens of “heterotopia”.  This concept allows the author to overcome the analytically problematic binary between abstract space and place. Varga suggests that places are sites where multiple and often incompatible space / times (real and imagined) intersect to produce important deviations from dominant norms and goals. Reformers constructed a series of shared assumptions which congealed into what the author calls a common “reformscape imagination”. These assumptions included "the need for bold action and government oversight; the importance of open space and easy movement; the integration of the local with the regional; the connection between the creation of community as place and civic price and responsibility" (page 138). The combination of these assumptions, the author argues, "framed the conceptual vision of the reformscape, creating a modern understanding of the urban, one in which the organizational logics are contained within the skyscraper and the model tenement, and within the opulent grandeur of stylized buildings and the modest improvement of the small park (ibid.).

This imaginary helped frame and order how actual reforms were put into practice, oftentimes imposing “a vision of community sometimes at odds with what already existed” (page 139).  To reveal “what already existed”, Varga describes various ways in which ties and solidarities among inhabitants were created, broken, and remade through constant and unstable interactions between multiple groups. The author provides a brief description of the formation of an Irish enclave in this area of the city; an enclave that achieves a certain level of institutional completeness with its own associations, churches, press, and political powers. As ethnic communities emerged, individuals within them interacted with co-ethnics and multiple others in countless sites throughout the neighborhood. These included swimming areas in the polluted North River, street corners and stoops, rooftops, markets, and so on. Each of these sites provided moments for residents to debate and argue over norms and moralities, but also produce a “multitude of ideas about how space would be used. Small battles were waged over churches and streets, between ethnic groups and within families; over where to shop and purchase by labor leaders; over proper behavior and social norms; and over kit flying on rooftops” (page 160). These discussions and disputes informed how residents interacted with the “reformscape imaginations” of reformers. The incompatible visions between reformers and the diverse inhabitants of Hell’s Kitchen contributed to the failure of reform efforts because the reformers’ vision of space and good community life rested on “empty spaces envisioned through utopian conceptions of the urban” (page 161).  Nethertheless, reformers did achieve limited reform and, more importantly, they laid out the epistemological foundations that would shape ideas and actions of planners for years to come.

Chapter 5 describes the economic and work life of Middle West Side. The author reminds the reader that at the turn of the nineteenth  century, New York was a major industrial powerhouse and the Middle West Side an important hub of economic activities within it. While the large Higgins Carpet factory provided 2,000 residents with some level of steady employment, the area was dominated by hundreds of small and middle-sized firms that paid workers terrible wages and provided no security of regular employment. Such conditions required residents to rely on other methods outside formal work to ensure their survival. Domestic space assumed a major role to ensure the survival of the family. “As opposed to the typical middle-class home as the bastion of domestic interiority, the uncertainty of economic conditions in Hell’s Kitchen produced the domestic interior and its surroundings as a hybrid of family life and economic production” (page 172). In addition to taking on work outside the home, women supplemented these wages through piecework sewing, assembly, engaging in childcare, taking in borders, and so on. Many women engaged in paid work inside their tenements, serving as managers and janitors of their buildings. As a consequence, the author observes, “women’s lives moved between the traditional sphere of the private home and the public space employment” (page 179). Waterfront also accounted for another important part of work life in this area of the city. The lives of these workers were affected by markets and accumulation processes, as well as by contingent interactions with their natural environments. Following from this, Varga  asserts that understanding the production of working space requires us to employ analytical frames fluid enough to capture all relations (human and non-human) that go into shaping the working spaces of people. At this juncture, the author introduces and embraces Actor Network Theory.

Chapter 6 examines urban politics.  The chapter largely reviews many of the points already discussed throughout the book but further stresses the multiple forms of citizenship that emerged from the processes of producing urban space. He argues that, “spatial restricting did not produce a monolithic block of new citizens, or … a container for socially constructed identities, but instead created a variety of contested perceptions of citizenship that produced spatial cognitions, causing some to become more mobile, some other to cling to ‘traditional ways’, and others to steer a middle path” (page 206). The chapter explores the political scene of the Middle West Side, and in particular how reformers interacted with local political machines, a tangled web of associations, community organizations, churches, and area residents.  Residents embedded within these spaces also engaged in various forms resistance that pitted them to the various elites intent on shaping the spatial life of the city. As urban projects expressed themselves in different sites, they triggered different kinds of grievances, networks of actors, and different kinds of claims and aims. Following a description of these battles, Varga concludes that “Multiple connective networks, physical as well as cognitive, produced relational spaces that, though capable of reproduction existing social relations, were also capable of altering them” (page 228). While the empirical material of this chapter fascinates the reader, the analysis could have gone further and added something new by identifying how different actors overcame inherent collective action problems to alter urban space. The author’s focus on the contingent nature of contentious networks leads him to overlook the importance of creating sufficiently strong and durable ties to produce significant changes in urban space.

The book is excellent on many fronts. However, its theoretical strengths are also a source of weakness. The author’s embrace of Lefebvre, Foucault, Latour, and many others produces some very interesting insights. However, this also results in an overflow of concepts that speak to one another but are not connected or integrated in a coherent way.  In the earlier chapters, Varga makes a robust, convincing, and sophisticated argument for the theoretical relevance of Henri Lefebvre’s theory concerning the production of space.  In a following chapter, the author then fully embraces Foucault’s concept of “heterotopia” to reveal how the incompatibility of differences produces actual space. The reader is not told why this theoretical move is made or why Lefebvre’s concept of “perceived” / “representational” space is no longer up to the task of interpreting the space-making process. In the following chapter, Varga employs ANT to show how space is produced. While the production of urban space remains the object of analysis across these different chapters, the author insists on pivoting between theories and concepts without providing the reader much insight into these rather abrupt shifts. Why does one theory cease being useful and another theory becomes more relevant? I do not suggest that the author should have chosen one theory or concept for the whole book. Instead, it may have been more effective to show how each theory makes distinctive yet complementary contributions to the general process of space making in the city. By constantly pivoting between these and other theories, the author undermines his own efforts to clearly reveal the process involved in the production of urban space.

Nevertheless, this book provides an important reminder of the centrality of upper middle class visions and cultures in shaping our cities. The middle class “epistemology of moral environmentalism” and “reformscapes” produced one hundred years ago continue to shape urban reform efforts through gentrification strategies. However, rather than focusing on ways to reform cities by “civilizing” working class inhabitants, the process of reform today is characterized by evicting working class inhabitants altogether and replacing them with an already “civilized” middle class. Then and now, the culture of the middle class has been viewed as the magic elixir to make healthier, more livable, and happier cities. But at least then, the working class was still viewed as having some kind of right and place in the city, as opposed to now when they are seen as a population that needs to be cleansed (physically, culturally, aesthetically) from the city.

Overall, this is an excellent book and an accomplished piece of scholarship that makes an important theoretical and empirical contribution to urban studies. It is an enjoyable read and it should be held up as an example of what urban studies and ethnography can do when combining strong theorizing and careful empirical research. I would strongly recommend it to advanced students in urban studies and scholars interested in cities and urban space.