Making the single city: the constitutive landscape and the struggle for ‘Greater Boston,’ 1891–1911

Abstract

While historical studies of urbanisation tend to focus on the morphological and social changes of cities in transition, the very ontological status of the city itself can be historically located as an emergence dependent on specific political, cultural and technical conditions. This essay examines the attempt to create a single ‘Greater Boston’ entity at the end of the nineteenth century in response to forces which were ostensibly linking the separate communities of Massachusetts Bay together into a single whole. Using statistical methods, representational techniques, environmental transformation and appeals to community solidarity in order to make their case for the ‘real’ status of an enlarged Boston, this movement sheds light on how the limits of the ‘single’ city are historically contested. This essay argues against radical critiques of spatial boundedness and advances a theory of the ‘constitutive landscape’ which emphasises the way in which bounded, unitary geographic entities are historically made.

Keywords:

• Historical geography
• urban change
• landscape
• spatial theory
• Boston