The Cities We Need explores what we lose when the spaces that anchor life in urban communities disappear. In this beautiful book, visual artist and public scholar Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani combines photography and prose to examine the significance of ordinary places—the local diner, the corner store, or the neighborhood basketball court—in shaping the identity, wellbeing, and sense of belonging of city dwellers. Central to the book is the concept of “placework,” defined as the “dynamic, reciprocal work that everyday places do for and with individuals and communities, enabling us to grow into being ourselves, and enabling us to be together” (p. 36). Yet, more than highlighting the function of these spaces, the book offers a critical and emotionally moving reflection on the personal and collective consequences of their gradual disappearance in the context of urban redevelopment and displacement.
From its opening pages, the book reveals itself as a labor of love and a compelling example of slow scholarship. Over the course of two decades, Bendiner-Viani invited residents of Prospect Heights (Brooklyn) and Mosswood (Oakland)—two neighborhoods where she herself lived for periods of time—to guide her to places that mattered to them. These excursions were later formalized through printed guidebooks and walking tours and extended into events at local libraries. This sustained engagement created a rich archive of personal stories of neighborhood change, which The Cities We Need carefully curates—presented more as collage than linear narrative—and supplemented with photography and essays across nine chapters.
The book is divided into two parts. In Becoming Yourself, Bendiner-Viani explores how places shape individual identity, highlighting residents’ stories—for example, David’s connection to Underhill Park in Prospect Heights, where playing ball with friends as a child and teenager nurtured his confidence and sense of freedom, echoing Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s (2022) insight that “freedom is a place.” Similarly, Marty’s experience of freeway construction in Oakland during the 1960s, which bulldozed thousands of homes and cut through large swaths of Mosswood, disrupted his sense of self that the neighborhood had afforded him. In Becoming Community, Bendiner-Viani shows how everyday spaces also foster collective identity through social connection: Tanya’s story about George’s Diner in Prospect Heights, for instance, highlights a place cherished for its integrative function across New York City’s racial and class divides, or Mosswood’s Golden Gate Donut Café as a hub for exiles like Tewolde, where people gathered to be among friends but which also became an important site for political organizing in Oakland’s Eritrean diaspora during the 1980s. These are just a few of the many stories that reveal how seemingly mundane neighborhood spaces shape both a sense of self and a sense of community.
When viewed narrowly as an academic text, perhaps one potential limitation of the book is a conceptual eclecticism that can feel unwieldy at times. Bendiner-Viani draws on a wide range of urban theorists, cultural geographers, philosophers, and environmental psychologists but, in the end, does not develop an integrated theoretical framework. The sheer volume of references and the many concepts they invoke, while situating the book across different academic traditions, can at times feel distracting. It is somewhat surprising that Bendiner-Viani does not engage more systematically with literatures on the kinds of spaces she foregrounds. While Ray Oldenburg’s (1989) seminal concept of “third places”—defined as “public places that host regular, voluntary, informal and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals”—is mentioned, more recent discussions on “social infrastructure” remain unacknowledged, even though the concept has been described as a “new research frontier in urban studies” (Latham and Layton 2022) and prompted a wave of publications, inspired in part by Eric Klinenberg’s (2018) widely cited Palaces for the People.
At the same time, the strength of the book lies in its prioritization of emotional history, memory, and affect over political economy, making The Cities We Need a welcome contribution to the gentrification literature. The fact that the structural factors behind gentrification remain somewhat underdeveloped is not necessarily a shortcoming. Still, one might ask whether the displacement of working-class residents was not already foreseeable in the 1970s and 1980s, when Bendiner-Viani herself lived with her parents in a converted loft building in New York’s SoHo district. After all, this was the time when progressive middle-class families, gays and lesbians, and artists moved into “brownstone Brooklyn” (Osman 2011), drawn by its not-yet-commodified authenticity and socially mixed urbanity—a process Sharon Zukin (1982, 2009) has so insightfully documented. Yet acknowledging this history does not negate the genuine sense of loss experienced by the “pioneers” of gentrification (Clay 1979), nor does it diminish their sincere desire to preserve the culture of their neighborhoods.
As a graduate of the doctoral program in environmental psychology at the City University of New York (CUNY), Bendiner-Viani is especially attuned to the emotional dimensions of placemaking and displacement, and her theoretical discussions are most compelling when connected to her own field. Here, the book perhaps even misses an opportunity: infrastructure studies have remained relatively silent on psychological issues such as attachment and loss. And while environmental psychology is itself an eclectic field, a more explicit discussion of its potential contribution to the wider “infrastructural turn” (Amin 2014) in urban studies could have further strengthened the book’s overall theoretical impact.
Because it centers on the realization that aspects of the cities we once knew and loved may have been lost forever, The Cities We Need is also a meditation on the emotional responses to absence and loss—in other words, a book about grief. The stories it tells are haunted by memories of former neighborhood vibrancy: sights and sounds that have begun to fade, perceptible only when observed across a longer time frame, and whose disappearance evokes what Rob Nixon (2013) has described as “slow violence.” Yet, by continuously attending to questions of race and racism, and by foregrounding the lives and deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and others, Bendiner-Viani reminds us that slow violence and the “casual racism of gentrification” (p. 147) can all too easily turn into immediate—often lethal—violence in the American city.
Although Bendiner-Viani insists that her work is “far from a nostalgia trip to the old neighborhood” (p. 5), The Cities We Need undeniably captures individual and collective longings for the way cities once were. Yet this nostalgia never feels sentimental or retrograde. Instead, Bendiner-Viani offers a form of nostalgia grounded in micro-histories and minor voices, a plural memory of urban life. This recalls Svetlana Boym’s (2001) idea of “reflective nostalgia,” which is not simply a retrospective longing for a lost past, but a reflection on the relationship between past, present, and future.
The Cities We Need is not a standard academic analysis of urban change, but a visually compelling, scholarly informed testimony to its emotional and affective dimensions. Bendiner-Viani never imposes herself as the expert but rather as the interlocutor, companion, and witness of her participants. In the end, she leaves her readers with pressing questions rather than definitive answers: how might memory, emotions, and affect be mobilized as resources for “placework” rather than merely documented as loss? How can emotional attachments to cherished neighborhood spaces be translated into collective political action against erasure and displacement? And what would it mean to build cities that take seriously the infrastructures of belonging and shared life that Bendiner-Viani so attentively documents—and that we so urgently need?
Bibliography
- Amin, A. 2014. “Lively infrastructure”, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 31, nos. 7–8, pp. 137–161.
- Boym, S. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books.
- Clay, G. D. 1979. Neighborhood Renewal: Middle-Class Resettlement and Incumbent Upgrading in American Neighborhoods, Lanham: Lexington Books.
- Gilmore, R. W. 2022. Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation, London: Verso Books.
- Klinenberg, E. 2018. Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life, New York: Crown.
- Latham, A. and Layton, J. 2022. “Social infrastructure: Why it matters and how urban geographers might study it”, Urban Geography, vol. 43, no. 5, pp. 677–684.
- Nixon, R. 2013. Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor, Cambridge (Massachusetts): Harvard University Press.
- Oldenburg, R. 1989. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, St. Paul: Paragon House.
- Osman, S. 2011. The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in postwar New York, New York: Oxford University Press.
- Zukin, S. 1982. Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
- Zukin, S. 2009. Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, New York: Oxford University Press.
