1. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), 318.

2. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 186.

3. Laclau, for example, provides no theoretical account of commodification and bureaucratization, although for him they are the central causes of the “dislocations of the social.” See New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, trans. Jon Barnes (London: Verso, 1990), especially 51–54.

4. See Emile Durkheim's comments on the contract, which appears not to be subject to contract. Division of Labor, trans. George Simpson (New York: Free Press, 1933), 381–82.

5. I should mention that I omit reference here to the sophisticated “functional structuralism” of Niklas Luhmann. My assertion that Harvey's functionalism neglects the hermeneutic dimension of meaning might be obviated by Luhmann's solution. Luhmann accepts the problem of “meaning” for the social sciences, but “in such a way that it is set within, rather than setting a limit upon, the systemtheoretic perspective.” Thomas A. McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge: Polity, 1984), 226. Thus, meaning itself becomes a functionally necessary component of social systems that must deal with overcomplexity. However, to take up this reply would be both forced and too generous to Harvey, who does not deal with this matter at all.

6. From Joseph E. Vitt, Jr., “Kansas City: Problems and Successes of Downtown Development,” in Personality, Politics and Planning: How City Planners Work, ed. Anthony Catenese and W. Paul Farmer (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1978), 109, quoted in Richard Dagger, Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 171.

7. Alex Callinicos and Chris Harman, The Changing Working Class (London: Bookmarks, 1987), 2–5.

8. Edward W. Soja and Allen J. Scott, “Introduction to Los Angeles: City and Region,” in The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 16.

9. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1988), 16–17.

10. Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), 84.

11. Michael Dear, “Intentionality and Urbanism in L.A., 1781–1991,” in The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). For support of this thesis of a fundamental break in dominant Western patterns of urbanism, see, for example, Mark Gottdienier, The Social Production of Urban Space (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), and Anthony Downs, New Visions for Metropolitan America (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 1994). For critiques of the thesis, see Robert Beauregard and Anne Haila, “The Unavoidable Incompleteness of the City,” American Behavioral Scientist 41, no. 3 (November–December 1997): 327–41, and Ira Katznelson, Marxism and the City (Oxford: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1992), chapter 7.

12. Eli Zaretsky, “Identity Theory, Identity Politics: Psychoanalysis, Marxism, Post-structuralism,” in Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, ed. Craig Calhoun (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 200.

13. Laclau, New Reflections, 92.

14. Jacques Derrida, “Let Us Not Forget—Psychoanalysis,” Oxford Literary Review 12, nos. 1–2 (1990): 4. Berman, All That Is Solid, 13.

15. Cited by Prof. Michael Ebner, letter, New York Times, March 16, 1998, from William Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–32 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 239–40.

16. Richard Rorty, “On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Clifford Geertz,” in Objectivity, Relativism, Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 209.

17. See Will Kymlicka, “Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality,” in Communitarianism and Individualism, ed. Shlomo Avineri and Avner de-Shalit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

18. John Rawls develops the idea of an “overlapping consensus” in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

19. Katznelson, Marxism and the City, 303. I discuss the orthodox Marxian interpretation of our “postmodern” culture as merely symptomatic of a fundamentally unchanged structural reality, developed by writers such as Alex Callinicos, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and David Harvey in “Postmodernism, Postmarxism, and the Question of Class,” Social Scientist 19, nos. 3–4, (March–April 1991).

20. Lyn H. Lofland, A World of Strangers: Order and Action in Urban Public Space (New York: BasicBooks, 1973) and The Public Realm: Exploring the City's Quintessential Public Territory (Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1990); Claude S. Fischer, To Dwell among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 247–49.

21. Jonathan Raban, Soft City (London: Harvill Press, 1998), 3.

22. Berman, All That Is Solid, 203.

23. This of course raises the question that in the case of a split or divided self, who then is doing the integrating, who is standing in the spaces? On this conundrum, see Margo Rivera, “Linking the Psychological and the Social: Feminism, Poststructuralism, and Multiple Personality,” Dissociations 2, no. 1 (March 1989). I would like to thank Dr. Muriel Dimen for bringing this essay to my attention.

24. “Sub-cultural theory holds that urbanism produces Park's ‘mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate.’” Claude S. Fischer, The Urban Experience, 2d ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 37.

25. Robert Park, “Cultural Conflict and the Marginal Man,” in Race and Culture (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950), 373.

26. Ira Katznelson, Liberalism's Crooked Circle: Letters to Adam Michnik (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 157.

27. The intellectual history of the concept of “marginality” is an important dimension in the history of sociological thought that deserves greater analysis than I can offer here. In the work of Park, marginality and hybridity meant something closer to what I mean by an interstitial space of becoming: for Park, this borderland was productive and interesting for individuals and for society. After the 1960s, this meaning appears to have been displaced in favor of the idea of marginality as socioeconomic exclusion or cultural outcasts. On the early work, see essays in Park, Race and Culture, and for an overview, see H. F. Dickie-Clark, The Marginal Situation (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), especially chapters 1 and 2.

28. In other words, the deepening of democratic institutions can provide alternatives to the status quo described by Glazer: “The present mood of the United States does not favor a fully developed national system of social policy. It reflects the considered judgment by many Americans that despite the cost in

29. Robert Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Post-War Fate of U.S. Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).

30. For example, Iris Marion Young implies such a quantitative extension: “Empowerment [of localities] means… expanding the range of decisions that are made through the democratic process.” Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 251.

31. Claus Offe and Ulrich Preuss, “Democratic Institutions and Moral Resources,” in Political Theory Today, ed. David Held (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 156.

32. Ibid., 170.

33. The weakness of Downs's otherwise important work is that while he admits that self-interested individualism is an important cause of the problems he identifies, he explicitly rejects any alternative political or economic model that is not premised upon individual or household self-interest. New Visions, 6, 124. Indeed, he appears unaware of this contradiction.

34. For important discussions, see Gregory Weiher, The Fractured Metropolis: Political Fragmentation and Metropolitan Segregation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991); Jerry Frug, “Decentering Decentralization,” University of Chicago Law Review 60, no. 2 (spring 1993), and “The Geography of Community,” Stanford Law Review 48, no. 5 (May 1996); Downs, New Visions, chapter 9; Young, Justice, chapter 8.

35. It is important to realize that this analysis is thoroughly anti-essentialist, nominalist, and pragmatist as it relates to identity. I am not suggesting that we reform institutions (e.g., toward metropolitan governments) so as to conform better to the true identity of citizens. Rather, the justification for reforms should rest upon the three criteria of political rationality introduced above, because they might help in overcoming the impasses of urban America.

36. Since E. E. Schattscheider's The Semi-Sovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960), it has been customary to refer to the “mobilization of bias” thesis that political institutions organize some interests “in” and some “out.”

37. This conclusion of the importance of hybridity for a public sense of solidarity converges with Michael Walzer's claim that divided selves and complex democracies presuppose each other. Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), especially chapter 5, and Frug's critique of local government law in “Decentering Decentralization,” University of Chicago Law Review 60, no. 2 (spring 1994), and “The Geography of Community.”

38. Katznelson's argument that we should not overlook the fact that the development of the modern city (in the West) and modern liberalism's quest for ways to organize difference and tolerance have been mutually constitutive is relevant here. “Social Justice, Liberalism, and the City: Considerations on David Harvey, John Rawls, and Karl Polanyi,” in The Urbanization of Injustice, ed.

39. Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato develop a lifeworld/system model to include the institutional dimensions of economic and political societies that mediate between the two dimensions, something missing in Habermas's account. Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), chapter 8.

40. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Norton, 1976). See also Young, Justice.

41. On gated communities, see Edward James Blakely, Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997), and Gerald E. Frug, City Making: Building Communities without Building Walls (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999). On mixedincome housing, see Alex Schwartz and Kian Tajbakhsh, “The Feasibility of Mixed-Income Housing,” Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research 3, no. 2 (1997).

42. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in TwentiethCentury America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

43. See, for example, Elinor Ostrom, “The Social Stratification–Government Inequality Thesis Explored,” Urban Affairs Review 19, no. 1 (1983): 91–112. The importance of hybridity for a radical democratic agenda also leads me to take issue with Susan Fainstein's recent argument that equality, diversity, and democracy are mutually exclusive values promoted by different perspectives within current urban theory. See “Justice, Politics, and the Creation of Urban Space,” in Urbanization of Injustice, ed. Andy Merrifield and Erik Swyngedouw (New York: New York University Press, 1997).

44. That is how to create and strengthen “institutions which can gradually reduce the subordination of production to profit, do away with poverty, diminish inequality, remove social barriers to educational opportunities, and minimize the threat to democratic liberties from state bureaucracies.” This is Lezek Kolokowski's description of some of the key aims of a democratic socialist project, quoted in Richard Rorty, “A Spectre Haunting the Intellectuals,” review of Spectres of Marx, by Jacques Derrida, European Journal of Philosophy 3, no. 3 (December 1995): 292.