Kenny's Feel of the City is in one of the most fascinating urban histories I have read lately. He discusses how urban dwellers in Brussels and Montreal moved from home to factory and how during these movements their senses and attitudes were triggered and shaped towards the urban environment. Bodily practices and sensorial experiences – the interaction between the mental and the physical – are to Kenny as relevant as the arts, science, politics or economics in understanding society (p. 11). Spatial sensorial experiences are not just related to sight, sound and smell, but also to haptic, tactile experiences that were the result of intense encounters between individuals and space. These senses are not studied individually, but taken together as constituent elements of complex bodily experiences in urban transformations. Kenny's discussion of experience brings him to argue that instead of elaborating whether language or experience comes first, his book ‘spans the busy crossroads of corporeal practices and their representations, arguing that the two are inextricably linked’ (p. 18).
Normally, scholars are triggered by the sense of modernity, generated by metropolises such as London, Paris or New York. Kenny, however, addresses Belgian Brussels and Canada's Montreal, two mid-sized centres which became integrated in the global economy around 1880. His time-span ends in 1914, when pre-war modernization came to a standstill. These cities are less well researched than the ‘big three’; however, their road to modernity is representative of other less big cities’ transformation on each side of the Atlantic. Kenny's impressive comparative study uses all kinds of sources, including hygiene manuals, architectural journals, besides novels and newspapers. Some of them, as for instance, institutional records produced by municipal administrations, have been researched by many scholars, but Kenny's ‘bodily reading’ sheds new insights on the multilayeredness of corporeal experiences of the city.
The first empirical chapter provides the background of Brussels and Montreal. Industrialization and urbanization constitute the ‘painted canvas placed behind a theatre stage’ (p. 38) against which the urban dwellers performed their daily businesses, on the street, at home or in the factory. Chapter 2 focuses on the urban panorama, one of the major sensual experiences. Panoramas in both Brussels and Montreal were used in a ‘pleasurable way’ (p. 44), literally overshadowing the negative effects of industrialization, pollution and overcrowded urban districts which might irritate the senses. Urban panoramas were favoured by businessmen and others promoting economic growth, highlighting successes of bourgeois rationality and engineers’ ingenuity. However, the corporeal harmony became distorted once the viewers descended into the industrial neighbourhoods, streets and labyrinths, discussed in chapters 3, 4 and 5. The factory changed the landscape, but the ‘palaces of industry’, which were welcomed by the industrialists’ idea of modernity, affected the bodies of people living nearby. Working in these new urban spaces, often in miserable conditions, had a great impact on the lives of the working forces. This is a well-known and documented story, but Kenny makes us aware ‘how corporeal concerns underlay the varying discourses through which the urban environment was constructed’ (p. 86). But even the body itself was represented through industrial metaphors, as machines of great productivity, but ‘subject to deterioration and overuse’ (p. 118). Once the work was done, the workers turned to the poorest, bleakest places. Kenny's discussion of the homes not only shows middle-class obsessions with decency, moral standards and deep-rooted fears of public disorder and vice, but also how these obsessions were ‘bolstered by the increasingly rigid distinction between spaces and activities considered public, and those understood to be of private nature’ (p. 121). Clean, tidy and well-kept houses were fundamental in enhancing families’ morality. Besides, the language the hygienists used in order to move the public authorities into action was based on bodily experiences. From a gender perspective, women bore a particular responsibility, as a comfortable home would prevent their men from getting out, protecting them from alcohol abuse. The public sphere of the city was manifested in street scenes, the final chapter of Kenny's bodily experiences. Streets underwent a significant transformation in the era of modernization, highlighted not just by the construction of major, sensory delightful boulevards of leisure and consumption, but also the side-effects of the reorganization of public spaces. The risks associated with modern traffic (automobiles, trams), massive public street gatherings and modern boulevards were that, supposedly, criminal types would be attracted, turning the modern city into a place of danger. Modern streets also induced new discussions about the body itself, manifested in sensorial debates on public toilets and the routes of funeral processions.
Kenny's ‘spatial-bodily’ journey has delivered a very rich book, written in an evocative style. It is a pity the publisher did not put more effort into increasing the visibility of the images. They are more than just illustrations of the text, as the images are vital visual sources and would help the author in advancing his arguments. This criticism aside, urban historians who are sceptical of cultural and sensorial history should read this book, as it sheds a challenging new light on the interplay between sensorial encounters and the city. The Feel of the City shows how sensual histories reveal a different understanding of modernity, confronting the rationalist, sophisticated planning and economic models with a more intuitive and bodily reading of cities.
